Oregon State University President Ed Ray announced Friday he will retire in 2020 after 17 years in office.
Ray’s five-year contract expires that year and he will be 75.
Oregon State is the largest university in the state with more than 32,000 students. Enrollment stood at less than 19,000 when Ray started at OSU in 2003.
Ray has pushed the university toward geographic diversification. It opened a satellite campus in Bend, built up its marine science center in Newport and recently opened an office in Portland. He led a capital campaign that raised more than $1.1 billion.
It’s a difficult era of financial constraints at Oregon’s public colleges. They were “flat-funded” in Gov. Kate Brown’s proposed 2019-2021 budget. That would be effectively a significant budget cut given increasing public employee pension costs and other expenses.
University leaders say that means they will likely have to look to its students and donors to make up the difference.
In a stirring, sometimes fiery speech at an OSU alumni lunch in Portland in February, Ray blasted what he called the chronic underfunding of higher education in Oregon and the endless tuition hikes that result. Students and their families face unrelenting financial pressure. Worse, a whole segment of the American population is priced out of higher education, he said, which threatens to create a permanent underclass.
Ray also rang the alarm bell over students’ mental health, which he said should be considered a major public health issue. In a 2016 survey of OSU students, 25 percent reported feeling significant anxiety and 32 percent reported some symptoms of depression.
Even more alarming, 11 percent said they had experienced suicidal thoughts, 4 percent reported having a suicide plan and 1 percent had tried to kill themselves.
Ray’s 17 years will make him the longest-tenured public university president in the state. None of Ray’s peers in Oregon have been in office longer than four years. He oversees more than 7,000 employees.
“Ed is just a steady, capable guy,” said Duncan Wyse, president of the Oregon Business Council and commissioner of the Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Committee. “In the midst of a lot of change and turmoil, he recognized his job was to run that university and make it better. Ed has been one of the great college presidents in my lifetime.”
“I have had the great honor and joy to serve as Oregon State University’s president,” Ray said in a statement. “The timing for this transition is excellent. We have just adopted a new chapter in our strategic plan that will guide the university for the next five years.”