Finance Division Fall 2025 Update

As the new academic year is well underway, I’d like to share a brief update on what we accomplished over the summer. I truly value receiving these updates from departments and having the chance to share them, making our contributions more visible to the campus community.

Thank you for everything you do, both in your daily responsibilities and in the many special projects that make a lasting difference.

Best,

Andrea Dooley, Chief Financial Officer and Vice President for Operations 

Facilities

The Facilities team is celebrating another amazing summer of hard work and accomplishment. The team completed several thousand work orders this summer. Reactive work orders are down 25 percent, and scheduled preventive maintenance work is up 700 percent. This statistic is an important and fundamental change in maintenance service delivery, strong evidence that our targeted program to shift how Facilities does maintenance is working, and that software strategies continue to assist with this transition. We’ve made tremendous gains with asset inventorying and equipment condition assessments that support both this preventive work planning and data driven capital planning.

In addition to great improvements through maintenance services, we have begun to coordinate the multiple service lines provided by the Facilities department (mechanical, buildings, paint, fleet, locksmith, grounds, custodial, capital construction, conference and events). We are now weaving them all together in a choreographed manner through a Smartsheets master schedule we ran in beta format this last summer. This effort allowed for a big improvement in our standard of care and delivery of services that offered better customer satisfaction, and reduced internal friction. This software tool will be advanced to a higher level of incorporating our work next summer, and we are hopeful our college community will notice the difference!

Employee Comings and Goings

We introduce new Groundskeepers: Chloe Flora and Chris Larsen. We are thankful to have them on the team and are excited for their contribution, energy, and collaboration in the grounds team. The Mechanical team has lost Brian Gardner and found an exceptional new person in Tyler Schelot. Tyler is a great mechanic, team player, and eager learner, who we are confident will help us achieve goals in advancing our preventive maintenance program. Richard Austin, our longtime painter, has retired. We’re pleased to welcome Wesley Smith, who joins us from Walsh Construction. Wesley brings extensive commercial experience and multiple trade specialty certifications that will add tremendous value to our team

Capital Projects

• Manor House: Final design efforts for the patio wall water intrusion are underway, and we’re excited to get this installed and solved. You’ll also see scaffolding go up as we replace the gutters and continue to improve storm water management for the building. It’s a race to beat the rain, and all is targeted to be complete by the end of the calendar year.
• Elevator Modernizations: Olin elevator modernization is complete, and our elevator capital plan is moving along well. Fowler service elevator, while behind the scenes, is super important and is next in line. We’re glad to improve accessibility and reliability in our spaces.
• Roof Projects at Olin: Phase 2 nears completion, with decades of new service, and upgraded insulation. We begin looking to FY27 for our next round of roof replacement planning.
• Bike Parking Improvements: Watzek will be complete in winter break, with a beautiful new and secure door design for the bike parking area. All exterior bike parking completes this fall, and by January we’ll have completed all required zoning conformance requirements for bike parking.
• Lower Estate Garden Phase 2: This exciting project started in early July, and will be complete by early November. An incredible improvement that will create a whole new space for event programming.
• Corbett: Second floor renovation has just been completed, and provides many new administrative offices, to include the Dean’s office. This work set up Rogers Hall to add instructional space that the administration had occupied.
• Olin Lab 116: Project is complete, with a new organic chem lab teaching space. The extensive renovation includes new fume hoods, prep area, cabinetry, and AV.
• Olin VAV Replacement: Work is complete, with larger coils that allow for more efficient operation, new piping and valving to allow for maintenance, and a complete replacement of the ceilings and lighting.
• Akin Exterior Paint: You may have noticed a new look at Akin, with a great new grey color around its foundation and brown upper to match Stewart and Odell. New windows for the restrooms cap this work, and this exterior improvement will help the building house students for the coming decade. More work is on the way for this res hall, so stay tuned for more improvement in the coming year.

Sustainability

Education and Community Engagement

The Sustainability Office had a productive summer working with our students and community partners! In May, with the help of several on-campus and off-campus partners, we submitted an ambitious Portland Clean Energy Benefits Fund grant focused on several of our key strengths as identified by the Strategic Initiatives process, including advancing programming around climate, equity, and community. A big thank you to all those who supported this grant proposal! We’ll hear the results this fall.

May also brought the fifth year of the Bates Center Sustainability Internship course, supporting 12 students in internship placements throughout the Portland area and beyond. Five of the 12 students were asked by their internships to continue in their roles beyond the course.

In June, we piloted a new training course in collaboration with the Energy Trust of Oregon to prepare students from Lewis & Clark and across the region to work with local organizations on energy efficiency and climate issues. Energy Trust funding supports these internships and graduating students have had great success moving into careers in the energy field. A more in-depth story with feedback from our own L&C participants can be found in our Newsroom.

Operations

This semester, expect to hear from the Sustainability Office and our energy intern on a new engagement campaign aimed at hearing your ideas around energy efficiency opportunities, as well as sharing some of our own. Through this work, we hope to help reduce costs while improving our shared experiences in our buildings.

Business Office and Student Accounts

Employee Comings and Goings

Amanda Aldridge left Student Accounts in early July for an administrative coordinator position at the Graduate School. Hiring for the vacated student account specialist position is currently on hold as part of the broader institutional hiring freeze.

Operations

The Business Office completed final audit fieldwork during July and has closed the GL for FY25. Annual financial statements are being finalized for acceptance by the College’s Audit Committee in October. The annual audit of the College’s 403(b) plan was also completed in September.

Over the summer, the Business Office worked with IT and Pacific Office Automation to replace the leased copiers throughout campus. The process has allowed for color machines to be broadly deployed while helping reduce the overall lease costs of the campus fleet. The replacement process is nearing completion, and more guidance on using the new fleet will be shared with campus once the remaining configuration items are finalized.

Financial Planning and Analysis

Summer is a time to review last year’s results and refresh forward-looking models with the latest data. Despite significant challenges, the College’s operating results for 2024-2025 outperformed expectations at the institutional level. While the Board had approved a modest $0.4 million operating deficit, the College concluded the year with a smaller-than-anticipated $0.2 million shortfall. The delayed rollout of the updated FAFSA in the fall of 2023 had a substantial impact on last year’s College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) enrollment and financial results. Undergraduate enrollment of 2120 was more than 100 students below budget and resulted in an estimated $5 million revenue shortfall for CAS. However, good expense controls in both CAS and Common Services, strong returns on short-term investments, and a higher endowment draw helped to significantly mitigate these revenue challenges.

As President Holmes-Sullivan has communicated this fall, CAS continues to experience enrollment pressures. This year’s projected undergraduate enrollment of 1,970 as of census is 70 below budget and 150 fewer than last year. In addition, year-over-year declines in net tuition revenue per incoming student have further strained the operating budget. The College is actively working to stabilize undergraduate enrollment and align revenues and expenses to support long-term sustainability.

Information Technology

Employee Comings and Goings

New Employees: We are excited to welcome alumni Cole McCorkendale to our vacant Technology Support Specialist position and Sarah Berry to the vacant Educational Technologist position.

Departure: Steven McCurry retired.

Critical Update for Windows Users

In a joint effort by IT Operations and IT Security, we have embarked on a campus-wide effort to update all L&C-owned devices from Windows 10 to 11. If you have not already, please sign up for this mandatory effort to ensure it happens when convenient for you. Please see the website for details.

Educational Technologies

In March, members of the EdTech, Operations, Service Desk, and Enterprise Applications teams presented at the national ACM SIGUCCS conference, highlighting cross-team collaborations that strengthen student engagement and support services. In partnership with Enterprise Applications, we continued to lead campus efforts around generative AI through a March Teaching Excellence Program workshop and an April presentation at the Graduate School. These events set the stage for a robust GenAI track at the May Faculty Technology Institute and its summer extension, with hands-on workshops with tools like Google Gemini and discussions on key issues such as AI detection and classroom policies. Innovation also continued through our summer build project, where Resource Lab student employees developed a prototype digital projection table inspired by LAVA’s CREATE(X) lab. Now in pilot, this project supports immersive data visualization.

Accessibility remained a priority throughout the spring and summer. The Faculty Technology Institute included hands-on workshops focused on creating accessible course materials. Over the summer, we made minor adjustments to a Live Captioning system developed by the Law IT team to run a low-cost pilot using repurposed GSEC equipment in South Campus Chapel, a space known for its challenging acoustics. The pilot showed strong potential and received favorable reviews from attendees at GSEC start-of-term events. The team greatly appreciates the foundational system and collaboration provided by the Law IT team, which made it possible to simplify and adapt this solution to work using limited GSEC resources. Further adjustments are planned. In particular, Law IT’s system increases awareness of free OS-based live captioning technology available to anyone with a Windows 11 or silicon-based Mac computer. The team is excited to increase LC community awareness of this important and free accessibility feature built into computers they use every day as part of our ongoing work to expand inclusive technology practices across campus.

Enterprise Applications 

The Enterprise Applications team has taken a leading role in training community members on AI tools and in co-leading the institutional AI Advisory group. We are partnering with the Watzek and Boley Libraries to offer an AI book club discussion in November. In addition, our team led the effort to convert student organization Google accounts to Google Groups in order to reduce password sharing and strengthen security. Enterprise Applications continues to partner with the Committee on Student Success, and has recently worked with committee members and the Information Systems team to make The Hive Portal accessible to everyone on campus. Our work with the Grad School continues to mature in their use of Salesforce, with several members of the GSEC staff being mentored by our team to be ready to take their Salesforce Associate Certification.

Operations

Institutional Operations developed a current Windows 11 PC image and began the deployment process to over 300 workstations. The Service Desk students worked hard over the summer assisting incoming CAS and GSEC students and staff with pairing their devices to the multi-factor authentication application.

The Academic Operations team was hard at work this summer enhancing the classroom experience across campus. A number of aging audio/visual equipment were replaced, including projectors and monitors, to ensure more reliable presentation of class content.

Several classrooms were upgraded with a new, streamlined A/V system design. BioPsych 004 and 005 and Fields 104A and 304 now feature a single connection point—an improvement aimed at reducing potential points of failure and minimizing classroom downtime. The AOps team will be documenting the faculty and student experience in these rooms to determine whether to move forward with this new classroom system design in other spaces on campus.

Information Security

We continue to strengthen and tune our tool sets to assist with keeping our network and data safe. This is a team effort and thank all of you who ask first before clicking on those suspicious looking emails. Remember to also be vigilant against other campaigns such as vishing (phone), smishing (texting or SMS), and quishing (QR codes). It is more than just phishing (email) campaigns.

IT Security introduced a new endpoint security tool that was pushed out to all L&C owned devices to monitor for malicious activity.

Information Systems

In cooperation with the Enterprise Apps team and the Committee on Student Success, Information Systems launched a new digital portal which we call The Hive. In line with the Student Digital Experience initiative, the system is designed to help students stay connected and engaged with the college, offering a single entry point for essential information.

The portal was introduced to incoming CAS students in May, and is available to all students for Fall 2025 to access important links and resources, check their student accounts, find housing information, and much more! As of August, faculty and staff now have access to the student content to support collaboration and help them become familiar with the tool. Many thanks to Lauren Timzen for her significant development and collaborative efforts!