The following is a vision for the transformation of Southern Oregon University (SOU) in response to the Deloitte plan of April 2026.
While institutional planning often focuses on managing decline through specialization and fiscal constraint, the true opportunity for SOU lies in a radical reframe: becoming a place-rooted hub for humane community leadership and lifelong collaborative inquiry.
Diving Into The Foundational Rabbit Hole
The White Rabbit proposal is compelling and fairly complete. My thoughts on the entire proposal would be too much for this post, so I will suggest some modifications to their Lines for the Room on their page 18, later in this post.
But first, I believe there are more foundational questions to be asked in the board’s conversation.
How does learning fit into our community? Not just for 20 something seeking a better earning potential, but what is learning in our whole community? How do we revitalize it? How do we share it? How do we accelerate it towards the challenges that we are currently facing?
SOU has suffered from thinking of itself as an independent institution rather than as a node in a vital network.
Structuring our lines of inquiry and our programs of study (majors) around relevant UN Sustainable Development Goals would align our efforts with people and projects around the world.
There are a huge number of questions we must wrestle with in community.
- What do we do with human intelligence in the face of artificial intelligence?
- How do we face the mistakes we’ve made in terms of pumping carbon into the atmosphere, rewarding the financialization of America and speculation in almost every asset class, etc?
- How do we face the mistakes we’ve made in terms of pumping carbon into the atmosphere, rewarding the financialization of America and speculation in almost every asset class, etc?
- What do we do with those 20% of people who can’t, or refuse to, play the game of America? Do we let them live in tents by the side of the highway? Does that make us great? Is the wealth of the few an excuse for the poverty of so many?
These are questions we need to discuss. And we can’t do it without starting with our neighbors, having honest conversations about what’s worth doing and what’s possible.
SOU is the natural post for informed , civil community conversations.
With our new tool sets, far more is possible than we imagined even a few years ago.
So, now what? In the face of these opportunities, does SOU rationally manage its decline or shepherd it’s resources as it steps into conversations around bold reimaginings?
Forget Institutional Survival
The real key in this moment is for SOU leadership to stop thinking about institutional survival and start thinking about how to be a valuable host of learning in a community.
The board of directors is responsible for continuity, but with the radical changes in the PESTLE environment, it would be irresponsible to not look at the foundational value proposition of SOU.
Enrollment and state funding are declining because SOU’s value proposition is not. Immediately clear. But this community is in deep need of learning how to prepare young people for work, how to have civil discourse, how to understand what the challenges and opportunities of government are at the local level. We need to rethink what we need from our federal government; how to build local living economies.
SOU has wrestled with these questions around the edges, but not in deeply engaged collaboration with the immediate community. Ashland is a unique small town in that it is connected to the world by the people who have chosen to live here. We already have these community value proposition experiments going on.
The Institute for Applied Sustainability is deeply engaged in the issues and the organizations that make up this places in this moment. That’s why Lithia funded it. That’s why the department of energy has added their grant fuel to the fire.
SOU leadership needs to stop thinking about institutional survival, and look at completely re-engineering its value creation process. But doing that, not in isolation, but in deep conversation and engagement with this community and similar communities and organizations across the country.
These ideas are a riff on a very thoughtful white paper by the AI experts at White Rabbit and several years of personal experience in this process.
A Deeper Transformation: Blending Enterprise and Creativity
To move forward effectively, SOU should blend White Rabbit’s Anchor 02 Applied Enterprise and Anchor 04 Applied Creative Economy. This is not merely an administrative adjustment but an invitation to embrace social entrepreneurship that addresses the immediate needs of our local learning community. This transformation rests on four pillars:
Intellectual Engagement and Rigor: Moving beyond credentialing toward deep, shared inquiry in community, not just a community of students but the whole community of our region.
Creative Collaboration Across Silos:
Breaking down institutional walls to address multifaceted community problems.
Civil Discourse on Civic Opportunities: Using the campus as a forum for the big questions that define our shared future.
Humanities as a Basis for Empathetic Innovation: Ensuring that technological advancement is grounded in humanist experience and values.
The St. John’s Model of Co-Investigation
We should look to the model of St. John’s College for the power of true shared learning. At St John’s, tutors are not distant experts but co-investigators. They wrestle with the same texts and questions as the students. SOU should pivot away from specialization solely in search of income and toward collaborative intellection in pursuit of a sustainable community we can all be proud to inhabit.
Ashland as a Regional Learning Hub
SOU must become relevant to the community through daily engagement. The walls between the “campus” and the “town” must be dismantled. Ashland should become the learning hub of Southern Oregon—a place where 20-somethings, non-traditional students, OLLI participants, and anyone interested gather to discuss what matters and apply the tools of AI, technology, and self to leadership skills to real-world challenges. This is Humane Leadership in action.
Choosing the Hard Path of Transformation
Every issue can be seen as a leadership issue. To avoid failing more slowly, SOU must embrace “risk inversion.” As Professor Anderson suggests, we must choose “the rock”—the hard path of transformation—every time.
All small colleges are being called to transform; many will fail. SOU can be different only if it engages the full power and commitment of its community, acting as a host for a modern Chautauqua movement that draws culture and learning into the heart of the region. Our town town was an early adopter of the Chautauqua movement, it lives on in our beloved Shakespeare festival, but it is time for a new Chautauqua. Right here and right now. We can take ownership of our own culture, our own creativity, and our own burgeoning community.
This does not mean cutting our way to the future. It means reintegrating what really matters.
The Necessity of Political Economy
From my perspective as a student of economic history, SOU should introduce a major or minor in Political Economy. We cannot pretend that economic decisions are independent of the values and moral judgments required for political work. SOU has a unique opportunity to lead the healing of this false dissection between economics and ethics.
Totally Ashland: Know It All After The Fact
Of course, these grand ideas can easily be dismissed by anyone with experience in the rogue valley community. We are a town of experts who in their retirement love to opine about what others should do.
Fortunately, that cynical view doesn’t hold in this case.
SOU: Innovation Lab
SOU has been working with these ideas since the summer of 2020 when it launched transformational learning experience internships to support community wildfire recovery after the Labor Day Fires via the Local Innovation Lab (video) and created a Values-based Leadership micro credential.
Innovative, Scrappy Neighbors
Another place-based hidden gem is The Oregon Extension, a radical experiment in deep, intellectual, spiritual, and practical learning just miles from SOU’s campus. The possibilities for creative collaboration to the benefits of the students and community abound.
The Oregon extension is a 50-Year experiment in deeply rooted alternative approaches to learning.
- Wrestling with big ideas; reading 100 pages a day and talking every morning with your team over coffee in your professor’s home.
- Felling trees, milling lumber, and making furniture.
- Gardening
- Raising goats, chickens and turkeys
- Making cheese and bread
- Chopping wood to heat your cabin
- Living in community intentionally, no devices Monday through Friday, just humans
- Studying native grasses and wildlife in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument
- Hiking to the top of Mount McLaughlin and deep into lava tubes with your peers.
Deep mental and physical work develops relationships, intellectual, and physical skills that last a lifetime. Young people want this shared experience in physical, social reality.
The transformation of higher education has begun right here, the question now is will SOU continue to be an incubator of practical, applied wisdom practices and practitioners?
Amended White Rabbit Visions
To reflect this mission, we propose the following amendments to their Lines for the Room:
| Original Vision | Proposed Vision |
| SOU becomes the first regional university in America deliberately organized around what places need to thrive in the AI and climate century. | SOU becomes the first regional University in America deliberately organized around what people need to learn to rebuild meaningful, humane lives in community in a time of opportunity and challenge from AI, media technologies, societal change, and climate impacts. |
| Every region in America is being asked, right now, to do exactly the kind of place-rooted work this methodology produces. Almost no university teaches it. SOU becomes the first. | Every region in America is being asked, right now, to do exactly the kind of place-rooted work this methodology produces. Almost no university teaches it, but SOU has been innovating in applied community climate resilience since 2020 through the Local Innovation Lab and the climate resilience and leadership fellowship program. |
Next Steps
For more information on SOU’s ongoing work in this field, visit the Community Resilience and Leadership Fellowship page.
Start with what Deloitte recommends, extend into the White rabbit ideas, but don’t stop there. Transform this moment by leading in community, face into the rock, the hard place will lead us towards something we can’t even imagine today.
I look forward to continuing the conversation online and in person with anyone interested.
Stephen Bárczay Sloan
Author, Humane Leadership
Co-founder, Local Innovation Lab
President of the Board, The Oregon Extension