On a Friday afternoon in May, more than fifty people gathered at White Rabbit to talk about the future of Southern Oregon University. Faculty, staff, students, alumni, community partners, business owners, a candidate for state senate, a union president, a literacy professor, an outdoor adventure leader, a healthcare veteran. People who teach there. People who learn there. People whose lives are interlaced with the place whether they think about it that way or not.
The conversation took place inside a particular moment: SOU's Board of Trustees voted on May 8 to chart its own plan rather than adopt the Deloitte report wholesale. That plan is due to the state by mid-June. It will determine which programs continue, which faculty stay, and what kind of institution emerges on the other side. The University of Oregon just cut $65 million. Portland State eliminated more than fifty positions. SOU is not an outlier. It is part of a national reckoning with what higher education is, what it costs, and what it is for.
The Trustees have a hard job, time-boxed as it is, and the room at White Rabbit was not trying to replace their work. It was trying to add something to it: a community voice about what we want our public university to be.
What follows is a synthesis of that conversation.
Further reading: A bioregional university for the AI century and The Compression Dividend. Download these notes (PDF) →
The question underneath the question.
The conversation started with a simple prompt: What is a university for in 2026?
The room moved through the conventional answers first. A place to find knowledge that used to be scarce. A path to credentialed jobs. A place to meet people and build a social life. Each answer carried a wound. Knowledge isn't scarce anymore. Credentials only still work cleanly in a few fields. SOU has long been called a commuter school, and the broader collapse of clubs, Greek life, and civic participation means social formation can't be taken for granted just because there's a campus.
Then Benjamin Durham reframed the prompt.
The question isn't what a university is for. It's what a public university is for. The problems we are having in higher education are problems of privatization.
— Benjamin Durham, at the town hall
This reframe sits underneath everything else in this document. Phil Knight can sponsor the University of Oregon. Stanford can absorb a generation of Silicon Valley wealth. Private universities can shed obligations to place. A regional public university cannot. Its obligation to a state, a watershed, a working population, an Indigenous history, a particular ecology, is the thing that makes it what it is. To defend SOU is to defend something the private system structurally cannot replace.
Everything that follows is shaped by that frame.
What a public university is for, sorted.
The room generated a long inventory of purposes. Sorted, they fall into three layers that are not coequal. The first is constitutive, what the institution fundamentally exists to do. The second is functional, the specific things it produces. The third is communal, the way it knits itself into a place. The constitutive layer is the foundation. The other two grow out of it.
The obligations that make it what it is.
The specific things it makes.
The texture it brings to a place.
We need to raise a generation who can critically look at the answers they're getting and ask: what does this mean for the Earth, and for us as humans?
— From the room
A bioregional, applied lens.
Into this inventory, a frame: a bioregional, applied lens. Five anchors that don't replace departments but recombine them. They are not silos. Every meaningful role draws from multiple anchors at once. At their center sits the obligation the Durham reframe named: to a public, in a place.
01 — Applied Enterprise
Capital formation, specialty manufacturing, regional economic development, the operations that make a place functional and prosperous.
02 — Applied Technology
Applied AI, civic technology, regional governance capability, the infrastructure of regional intelligence.
03 — Applied Bioregional Ecology
Klamath-Siskiyou restoration, wildfire resilience, food systems, water and watershed sovereignty, distributed energy.
04 — Applied Creative Economy
Performing arts, music, film and media production, food and wine as cultural production, the regional culture industry.
05 — Applied Human Services
Health, education, the longevity transition, community wellbeing, the social infrastructure of a place.
A bioregion is not just a region. It is a biocultural area defined by geophysical features: watersheds, mountain ranges, and the cultures that inhabit them. Our bioregion may more accurately be called Cascadia, or the Klamath-Siskiyou, than "Southern Oregon."
The argument for applied is that theory and application are two sides of one coin. Sometimes theory precedes application, as in physics. Sometimes application leads, as in large language models, which work even though nobody fully understands why. In a moment of fast change, we learn what works by running experiments. By doing the work and getting feedback. A bioregional applied university is one that organizes itself around that loop.
This is not application at the exclusion of theory. It is recognizing that in a time of great change, doing the work is how you discover what the disciplines of the future actually are.
Two cautions belong here. First, applied is not anti-intellectual. Cherstin Lyon, who has spent twenty-five years building applied programs and has directed SOU's Honors College, made the point sharply. The Local Innovation Lab student who reorganized the City of Phoenix's water billing system did so because she had first spent a year in the Honors College building writing skills, leadership, and philosophical foundations. The applied success rested on the theoretical preparation.
Second, there are two distinct kinds of applied work, with different operational shapes. Embedded applied places students in community partner organizations: high faculty touch, smaller classes, paid community partners, grant infrastructure. Immersive applied dedicates blocks of time to integrated cohort experience: Chad Thatcher's Outdoor Adventure Leadership students living in the field for ten days, learning across disciplines that would normally be siloed. Both are essential. They cost differently. Conflating them under one word lets critics pick whichever is more expensive and dismiss the whole.
What's already here.
The most useful thing the town hall surfaced is that the room was full of evidence. People were not arguing for what SOU could be. They were describing what they were already doing, often with little institutional support, sometimes against the grain of the current structure.
What follows is not a wish list. It is an inventory of work already underway.
Cherstin M. Lyon
Director, Honors College Applied prof. of History
Has spent her career creating cross-major applied opportunities, including international travel programs studying democracy on the ground. The Honors College is currently being dismantled due to budget cuts.
25 years applied · International
Chad Thatcher
Prof., Outdoor Adventure Leadership
Has led forty-nine expeditions of a month or longer to sixty-eight countries. His program owns students for entire quarters at a time, breaking the conventional class schedule to teach emotional intelligence and field skills together. Outdoor recreation is larger than oil and gas.
49 expeditions · 68 countries
Stephen Sloan
Co-founder, Local Innovation Lab
Co-founded the Local Innovation Lab with SOU after COVID. In the wake of the wildfires, helped create the Humane Leadership course. SOU students were paid to do real civic work in towns rebuilding from disaster. One student rebuilt the City of Phoenix's water accounting system.
Civic technology · Wildfire recovery
Fawn Canady
Literacy professor Faculty fellow, IAS
Runs the Collective Cartography project. Geographers, teachers, and community members work together to teach reading and writing as part of a living regional system. The Institute for Applied Sustainability just launched a cohort of eighteen students from eighteen majors.
Literacy · Living systems
Clayton Austin
Center for the Advancement of Teaching & Learning
Gathering twenty faculty for CIAO's June 4 visit — part of an NSF planning grant bringing computing infrastructure and AI training to regional universities. OSU received $1.6M to develop experiential-learning-and-AI-literacy curriculum that, by law, must be shared with the regionals.
AI literacy · NSF · CIAO
Renee Owen
Assistant Professor School of Education
Transforms human services through living-systems organizational forms — sociocracy, social ecology, structures that have actual feedback loops between the people doing the work and the people setting the direction.
Living-systems governance
Sage TeBeest
CREATIVE ARTS PROGRAM COORDINATOR
SEIU LOCAL PRESIDENT
Thinking about how creative arts curriculum can integrate ethical AI use without becoming a tech school, and how to protect workers whose jobs are being automated by preparing them for what comes next.
Creative arts · Labor
Denise Krause
25 yrs OHSU State senate candidate
Proposes extending SOU's existing OHSU nursing partnership into a full medical training program. Ashland has a healthcare provider shortage; the hospital is being dismantled; five hours either direction to OHSU or San Francisco for serious care. A medical anchor brings physicians, faculty, residencies, money, and families.
OHSU · Asante · Providence
Ray Boyle
Transdisciplinary Innovation Specialist
Raised the question the room most needed to hear: who is educating whom? The digital natives have things to teach continuing-ed students that no professor currently knows. The people on the cultural edge are not in this room. A bioregional applied university has to be designed with its constituents, not for them.
Co-design · Constituency
Amy Lee
Somatic facilitator & energy coach
Named an audience the current institution serves badly: the mid-career professional, often coming out of a tech-sector layoff, who wants short-form, affordable, applied retraining and currently cannot find it between an undergraduate degree and an Olli course.
Mid-career · Continuous learning
And the room was bigger than this.
Faculty · partners · students Many more not named here
More than fifty people in the room on May 15. The work above is a partial inventory of those who spoke. The committee charged with designing SOU's next chapter has a deep bench to draw from. It is already at the table.
If you are doing this work too.
An open invitation
This list will grow. If you are a faculty member, a partner, or a constituent doing this work and you are not on it, reach out. The synthesis is ongoing.
We cannot cut our way to prosperity. We have tried it twice. It is not going to work. This is an all-in moment.
— TOWN-HALL PARTICIPANT
Six concrete anchors the room generated.
If the five-anchor framework is the architecture, the room generated specific buildings to put inside it. Each of these is named, has identifiable institutional partners, and could begin within months rather than years.
The Klamath dam removal as living curriculum.
The largest dam removal project on the planet happened in our watershed. SOU should be central to it. Biology students measuring salmon return. Native American Studies and tribal partners shaping the work. Digital Cinema producing documentation. A signature regional story SOU is not yet telling.
An OHSU-partnered medical program.
Extends the existing OHSU nursing partnership into physician training. Converts Ashland Hospital into a teaching hospital. Solves a regional healthcare crisis. Brings faculty, students, residencies, families, and durable economic activity.
A teacher residency partnership with regional districts.
Year-long embedded preparation alongside mentor teachers, with stipends or forgivable loans tied to commitments to teach in the communities that trained the candidates. More than twenty states already support this model. Outcomes consistently better than online or restricted-license alternatives.
A mid-career pivot academy.
Short-form, affordable, applied programs for working adults navigating career transitions. The audience exists. The institution that builds for it first owns a generation of learners between undergraduate education and Olli.
State-level applied technology infrastructure.
Through CIAO, ORCA, and the OSU $1.6M experiential-learning-and-AI-literacy curriculum mandate. The funding and infrastructure for regional applied technology already exists at the state level. The June 4 CIAO visit at White Rabbit is the date to leverage it.
Outdoor adventure as regional infrastructure.
SOU's existing OAL program is already a national-grade asset. The regional industry it serves is larger than oil and gas. Compression and integration (e.g., Chad's block-scheduled, multi-disciplinary immersive model) could make this a defining program.
The form has to match the function.
Renee Owen made a structurally important point: she asked to pull up a slide of a typical organizational chart, the kind any university has, and pointed out that it has zero feedback loops. Information at the bottom has no natural pathway upward. The form is dead. Things cycle in nature; everything that ends becomes part of what comes next. The conventional org chart prevents that cycle.
The conventional hierarchy.
Information travels up through reports and channels, but decisions travel down. The work and the deciding sit far apart.
A living-systems form.
Information cycles between the people doing the work and the people setting direction. The form is alive.
A bioregional applied university cannot run on a Taylorist organizational chart. The structural form has to mirror the pedagogical form. If we are asking students to learn through feedback loops, faculty to teach across silos, and community partners to participate in the design of the work, the governance form has to support those flows. This is a quietly radical implication of the entire frame, and it cannot be skipped.
What this costs, honestly.
Cherstin Lyon offered the operational reality check the conversation needed. Applied education, done well, requires smaller classes than the conventional model, not larger. More faculty time, not less. Paid community partners, currently often functioning as unpaid instructors. Grant infrastructure, faculty reward systems, and visible credit for work that is currently invisible. In the current model, this is 2 to 3 times the labor of conventional pedagogy.
That is not a reason to back away. It is a reason to be honest about the design.
The honesty cuts two ways. The embedded-applied model is expensive per student. The immersive-applied model (e.g., Chad Thatcher's quarter-long blocks) changes the cost structure of the entire program by eliminating duplicated infrastructure across departments and compressing what currently takes years into focused immersions. The proposal needs both modalities, and it needs to name which lever it is pulling where.
This isn't going to make the university more efficient or cost less. We have to figure that out in the process of being creative, because it's what works.
— Cherstin M. Lyon
There is also a frame, distinct from cutting, that the room kept returning to: compression. Cutting is what scarcity does. Compression is what changes the possibility space. The example: traditional photogaphy required scarce, careful, expensive shots; digital photography compressed the workflow and produced universal documentary capacity. The compression of cost and time produced a new possibility space, not just a cheaper version of the old one.
A bioregional applied university has to find the compressions: in scheduling, in cross-departmental integration, in administrative overhead, in the relationship between credit hour and lived experience. These change what the institution can do, not just what it costs.
What we are asking.
The community at White Rabbit is not asking the trustees or the president to do something other than what they are doing. The stabilization plan due in June is necessary work, and the people doing it are doing it under serious constraints.
We are asking three things.
That the stabilization plan be understood as stabilization.
A bridge to a longer conversation about what SOU becomes, not the conversation itself. No long-term institutional vision can be authored in thirty days. The decisions made by mid-June are about getting through the next year. The conversation about what SOU is becomes its own work, alongside and after.
That the community-led process running alongside be recognized as part of the institutional design.
SOU is putting together a Transformation Committee that will include community members. We ask that those seats be filled with people who have been doing the work: the faculty, partners, and constituents named here, and many more. The community is more than a stakeholder to be informed. It can be a co-designer of the institution.
That the bioregional applied frame be taken seriously as one available vision.
Not the only one, but one that has the virtue of being grounded in what already works here, what already exists in the room, and what the place itself uniquely makes possible.
The ecosystem already exists. We are here to concentrate it, and direct it."
— THOR MULLER, WHITE RABBIT
What happens next.
Over the coming weeks, White Rabbit will host follow-on conversations: fireside chats with faculty doing the work, sessions with community partners, focused gatherings around specific anchor proposals. We will publish the synthesis as it develops.
If you are a faculty member, a student, a community partner, an alum, a funder, a state representative, or a neighbor who cares about what kind of public university serves this bioregion, we want to hear from you. The conversation is not finished. The decisions being made in June are not the end of the work. They are the beginning.
White Rabbit, 5 North Main Street, Ashland. Reach Thor Muller directly. Watch for additional gatherings in the lead-up to the trustees' June plan.
