This winter, the cumulative emotional effects of town halls and administrative briefings were ratified by the sudden arrival of the long-delayed Campus Climate Survey. In response to that data, the administration was forced to note the significant chasm of trust faculty and staff have been peering into. It’s hard to say anything has happened to significantly close that gap. We’re all still on edge, still unsure of what’s happening, and desperately hopeful that the worst of the narratives we’ve heard from administrative town halls will never come to pass. I’m writing today to give a little more structure to a different kind of hope, which is the potential embodied in our organizing power. While the administration hasn’t clearly indicated how much longer the unknowns of PIVOT and the Bridge plan will persist, what will follow any new clarifications is a chance for us to commit to each other and to the mission that animates us. The plan itself has never asked us to believe in each other or to feel animated by the collective agency that shared governance and union solidarity make possible. The plan has never told us to believe in our own agency at all. PIVOT has represented a pale ghost of that agency at best. But we can all fend off the fear and futility the plan has asked us to internalize. Everything we do in what comes next will matter. Every way we build organizing power, practical collegiality, and shared governance from here to the end of the academic year will rebuild a capacity we’ve been told to relinquish. That’s the antidote to the fear and pain that paralyze us, and it’s also the best way to push back against a plan that banks on faculty and staff feeling disempowered, afraid, and disconnected from each other.
The rumors have been swirling about a potential announcement from the PSU administration setting in motion Article 22 retrenchment processes. While the administration hasn’t informed me or the PSU-AAUP membership about the timing of that announcement, we do know that there will be movement “soon.” I have heard second hand (rather than from the university) that President Cudd is planning an online press conference for Monday morning at 11am. That means that we will soon see the beginning of a process in which the entire PIVOT framework will be translated into a series of proposals for program closures, unit reductions, and faculty and staff layoffs. The declaration of Article 22 begins that process. But it will take some time to unfold, and as it does, we all have significant roles to play in making sure the administration makes good decisions and does as little harm as possible to the future of the university, our mission, and our community.
Under Article 22, President Cudd must first declare that the financial condition of the university merits the use of Article 22. This requires a presentation to PSU-AAUP about the university’s financial condition, followed by a presentation to the Faculty Senate. In the process that ensues, President Cudd is to provide 30 days for comment and engagement with the financial condition arguments she presents. This first phase is a crucial period in which PSU-AAUP, the Faculty Senate, and the university community can address the financial analysis of the university, produce counter-analyses, and organize around the university’s representation of its finances and our counter-proposals and counter-narratives.
When that first 30 day period draws to a close, President Cudd will announce a provisional plan, which opens another 30-day comment period. The plan will include tentative information about program closures, program reductions, and proposed layoffs. This too, is not the end of the process, but an opening to new activity and intervention. The departments and programs named in the proposal-- and the PSU-AAUP-- will be able to respond to the provisional plan with counter-analyses and alternative plans. We can all use this work as the basis of (and opening to) a host of organizing possibilities, whether at the level of campus organizing, multiple levels of media publicity, wider disciplinary conversations, or political outreach and work.
Throughout these two stages, PSU-AAUP will constantly review the university’s compliance with the contract’s procedures, gather facts and information, file grievances, help to coordinate responses, and our Article 22 and leadership teams will communicate regularly with members (and encourage us all toward communication with each other). Unit reps, co-reps, committee members are the front line of that work, connecting units to the larger defense of appropriate resources and appropriate rights for our labor and our mission. This departmental organizing brings member stories and action forward to the larger collective project of pushing back on a compromised process that only seems to want these life-altering cuts. The union is all of us. If the 1100+ of us in this bargaining unit bring our creativity and talent to bear, we will represent a substantial force and an irrepressible voice in this situation. The more each unit is well represented in this work, the more we can articulate counternarratives inside the 30-day comment periods, and the more the specialized work of PSU-AAUP’s grievance team will be positioned to use the power of the contract to push back against retrenchment.
This is a situation in which PSU-AAUP’s position has consistently been that the administration can choose a path of growth rather than decline. The recent shift in administrative rhetoric toward hope, futurity, growth, and recruitment indicates that the administration has heard our persistent criticisms and taken notice of our extensive political work throughout this academic year. But the turn toward growth isn’t served by retrenchment. Through layoffs and program closures, we only dig ourselves deeper into decline and build more barriers to our success. The administration has shifted from a no-growth plan of managed decline to a growth-anxious plan of managed decline. But we need to see real investment in growth now and a corresponding pause on retrenchment in order to prevent further harm to Portland State’s future. I call on President Cudd to take seriously the responsibilities these decisions generate-- to our students, our faculty and staff, our community, the city, and the state. I will be making this case over and over again in the exchanges to come: we can choose a path of real commitment to growth rather than implementing decline in the name of unfunded mandates that only recycle the austerity trap that has held us for a decade. Throughout this Article 22 process, that path will be possible if President Cudd wants to take it. Taking that path together, and committing together to a sincere project of growth, will be a better choice of responsibility in relation to all the constituencies touched by all the work we do together here at Portland State University.
We have recently seen what we can do collectively to push back against austerity at the state level. Ben Cannon of HECC noted that PSU’s members and community were instrumental in the passage of SB 1507, a bill ensuring that HECC’s cuts will be minimized. While I and other PSU-AAUP members were lobbying legislators in Salem, asking for emergency intervention and a greater recognition of responsibility, I saw no similar asks from PSU itself. The university did not push for an alternative to its cuts, and did not ask for Education Stability Fund use to prevent the harm these cuts will mean to PSU and its community. While PSU-AAUP members have shown their commitment to a real intervention with real commitment to growth and a positive future, the university has acted as though its plan for cuts were a foregone conclusion. While Southern Oregon University is poised to receive $15 million in emergency funding from Salem, PSU has not asked for similar intervention and has been happy to move forward unaided, ready to cut.
There’s nothing I’d want more than to hear we can pause these layoffs and partner in establishing a robust solution for growth. There’s nothing I’d want more than to partner in lobbying Salem to shift away from austerity, to change the narrative for public universities in Oregon, to move the needle on the funding formula that short-changes Portland State, and to see this university given the chance it deserves to be a flourishing part of this city’s and state’s social and cultural life and economy. The administration has immense access to lawmakers, city leaders, business leaders, and the Governor. We have hoped all year we could see that access result in something better than more austerity. I’d love to hear on Monday morning that instead of Article 22, we will be thoughtfully forestalling this irreversible and untimely harm and choosing a future built out of something other than cuts.
However Monday greets us, it’s crucial that we all lend our energies toward building our collective agency and fighting back the fear and hopelessness that have fueled the present process. Our actions will not be wasted. Every time we feel those anxieties and feelings of futility, we should remember that those are precisely the terms of the plan we received in the fall: a no-growth plan that puts faculty and academic staff in a position of powerlessness and inaction-- except in the PIVOT process that has involved us by reinforcing the inexorable logic of cuts. We know there’s so much more here for us than despair and managed decline. We’ve known that all along, and we can make that clear in our actions now.
Committing ourselves to action and to the defense of this special place, our precious mission, our community, our students, and to each other-- these are the antidotes to all no-growth, no-hope plans. What happens next depends on all of us:
- Attend the all members meeting Wednesday, March 11th at 5:30pm (email aaup@psuaaup.net for the link)
- Become a unit rep (or co-rep)
- Join the grievance, organizing, or comms committee
- Turn out your coworkers and community to the 4/3 Board of Trustees
- Ask questions of administration inside 4/6 and 5/4 Faculty Senate
- Call President Ann Cudd (503-725-4419) and Governor Tina Kotek (503-378-4582) and demand partnering on growth, not managed decline
In solidarity,
Bill Knight
President, PSU-AAUP