Because PSU-AAUP members spoke out at the Board of Trustees, in the Faculty Senate, and in letters to Governor Kotek, the Cudd administration offered yesterday to partner with PSU-AAUP on attempting to win education stability and other funding to save the Child Welfare Training Partnership from severe cuts and layoffs. This collaboration is a positive step forward, but there’s a lot of room to grow our work together on restoring funding for all of PSU. It’s important to point out that this shift happened because of your strength and your impact. It’s due to everyone who has signed up to be a unit rep and staged regular department meetings, every member who’s joined a committee, and everyone who has in so many ways helped to build power to push the administration to fight for funding instead of managed decline. We have the highest number of members in statewide academic labor, and when we stand together, we can accomplish so much.
It’s crucial to see this opening to collaboration expanded, and I’m working with Government Relations on plans to bring our voice into university meetings with city and state leaders. A real partnership could have the most significant effect on the outcome of the present crisis. Working together, we can be more effective in making clear that the failure to address the university’s budget crisis will result in real short- and long-term catastrophe for the city and the state. Unless PSU can reinvest in growth, the university’s cuts will not situate it on an easy path to solvency. From retention to recruitment to marketing to admissions to partnerships, we could, with the proper support, commit to a wide array of potential investments that would pay real dividends for the university and for downtown and metro Portland. PSU-AAUP’s presence with university leaders-- in legislative offices, City Hall, the capitol, and beyond-- would add academic labor’s power to the message that so much in this city’s and state’s future depends on PSU’s growth and success.
As I told the Board of Trustees on Friday:
Among the top 50 metro areas in the US, Portland is a shocking outlier in the percentage of its population enrolled in public 4-year institutions. When we enrolled 28,000 students in 2014, that was a number far more representative of our real capacity and the real demand we could access in this city. But we could be bigger than that-- other cities show us the way to do it, and the comparator numbers support it. Other universities have chosen thorough and intentional recruitment and enrollment strategies that have engineered success. We have chosen a path of inactivity and decline, almost as if decline is what we wanted all along.
The extent of operational negligence is shocking. In 2026, we still lack comprehensive recruiting and advising agreements with Portland Public Schools and Portland Community College. How could we lack a fully rationalized arrangement with the largest public school and community college systems in the metro and the state? We have no direct billing agreements with the metro’s largest employers, no direct admissions program, and our marketing reaches people in Dallas, TX, while in the Portland metro, our name doesn’t even appear in the materials high school students receive when they are being wooed for matriculation.
As the legislative session begins in Salem, imagine how much further we can push the Cudd administration to secure some of the over $1B in Oregon’s Education Stability Funds and grow PSU if all 1,100+ PSU-AAUP represented workers do these things:
- Attend tomorrow’s 2/5 Statehouse rally to demand Kotek use stability funds and direct the legislature to grow, not cut PSU. The rally begins tomorrow at 12pm at the Oregon State Capitol Park, 725 Summer St NE, Salem.
- Attend the 2/10 on-campus community hour City Council panel where councilors will describe how they will help stop the cuts and push for stabilization funds. In Person RSVP, Online RSVP
- After classes or appointments, recruit your students to organize to defend PSU from cuts and push for stability funds.
- Submit testimony against cuts to Oregon’s budget through this form.
- And yes, email the governor and top 23 statehouse education leaders. Bolster the letter’s text with your stories of the impacts from a decade of PSU austerity, what’s at stake for your department, students, and PSU in this moment, and change the subject line so it isn’t filtered by statehouse inboxes.
In solidarity,
Bill Knight
PSU-AAUP President