This Friday at 9am, join us outside the Board of Trustees meeting with City Councilors and statewide union leaders to demand a pause to the PIVOT and Bridge to the Future cuts and to call on the Board and President Cudd to partner with us to prevent permanent harm to PSU. The more members who RSVP, the more we can turn out local and national media and plan logistics for the day.
This is the last Board meeting before layoff notices are expected to be issued. It is a vital inflection point. A strong turnout will help us bring media, show the depth of opposition to these cuts, and demonstrate that members, students, and the broader community are demanding a different path.
The administration is asking us to accept layoffs, closures, and contraction while offering no clear, funded pathway to growth. The administration keeps speaking the language of growth. It still has not shown how growth will be built. There is no funded plan for recruitment, no serious expansion of enrollment work, no clear investment of resources in transfer pathways, and no visible staffing model for the recovery it describes. More cuts will push PSU further into the cycle we are already living through. We can make that clear as we call on the Board to pause these cuts and to fight for PSU’s future and growth in substantial and effective ways.
In the first round of President Cudd’s cuts, 19 programs are facing layoffs, including three which would be eliminated entirely. These cuts target the heart and soul of Oregon’s leading access institution: general education, humanities, student recruitment and retention, international recruitment, and more. The cuts arrive as part of a “pragmatic scenario” that has promised as many as 216 full-time layoffs as a result of the PIVOT processes, a massive change to PSU’s faculty and academic staff workforce. Provocatively, we’ve learned from administration that their pricey, AI-driven PIVOT process for assessing programs won’t “correlate directly to impacted departments,” and it is increasingly clear that the version of shared governance the process has offered is one for which the outcomes were decided in advance.
We discovered at last week’s administrative town hall that President Cudd plans to move towards a “PSU that would have six degree-granting colleges instead of eight,” won’t seek additional state support to stop cuts, and we also found that PSU administration hasn’t even modeled the impacts of the layoffs on students and student retention, mirroring the failure to project or model the institutional impacts of the first round of Bridge cuts last year that eliminated 104 FTE. President Cudd has cited “strings attached” to new state support as the reason to not pursue the duties of fundraising and lobbying. But the “strings” that would come with state money primarily have to do with limiting administrative excess and bureaucratic expansion. State money is necessary to preserve and grow the access and opportunity PSU provides for first gen, BIPOC, working class, and immigrant students. As a state institution, our relation to the state is already one of “strings attached,” and in our lobbying this year there were many signs that Salem is open to a legislative and administrative solution to the crisis faced by Oregon’s public universities. While the Cudd administration may wish to be unencumbered in any new funding, anyone concerned with the fate of Portland State and its educational mission ought to be tirelessly advocating for a pause to these cuts and an all-out campaign to prevent these harms by revising state funding models and allocating the resources that would allow Portland State to invest in growth.
State solutions are still possible. That’s why these cuts should be paused, not rushed through heedless of our concerns and indifferent to the harm they’ll do. Friday matters because the Board still has a choice. It can accept more damage to PSU’s academic core, or it can insist on a different course, working with all of us to grow PSU into the flourishing urban university the people of this city and state need it to be.
Please RSVP and bring colleagues, coworkers, students, and friends. A large turnout will show that this university is worth fighting for and convince the Board to pursue a plan that will embody that commitment.
In solidarity,
Bill Knight
President, PSU-AAUP