Hi All,
It's the end of the year, grades will soon be in, and while this week we are headed into mediation and the Administration is demanding a plan from Departments to cut 1/5th of the Summer Session budget without reducing SCH, it's a good time to take a - short - break from thinking about everything that should be better at PSU than it is, and think about what we collectively are managing to accomplish, despite everything.
I am consistently impressed with what a strong, dedicated, interesting, smart, hardworking, positive, mission-driven group the PSU faculty & APs are, and I hear the same assessment frequently from my colleagues. We work with little support or recognition, but we make a big difference.
We provide access, opportunity and the chance to engage intellectually to a student body that often doesn't have many alternatives. An immigrant ex-student of mine, whose family are all making beds in downtown hotels, has two masters degrees and is working for the New York Federal Reserve to regulate Wall Street. Another, from a long-time Portland family, whose single mother cleaned houses to support her and her sister, earned two majors and two minors in Economics, International Relations, Spanish and Music, and went off to work for the Inter-American Development Bank in DC, with the hope of facilitating prosperity in Latin America.
I'm sure that each of you who works with students has many stories of your own, and have contributed to the work of other PSU colleagues. Remember Lola Lawson, who ran Student Parent Services? I can't be the only person that she used to corner in the stairwells to let me know that $50 would keep a student parent in school, and any part of that I could donate would make a difference! She helped an awful lot of students earn a degree, find work that they valued, and raise their family's standard of living.
We conduct high quality, policy-relevant research, despite high teaching loads and limited research infrastructure. We're the only public source of upper-division & graduate education in the city, and - with OHSU - the only source of academic research in the 28th largest city in the U.S.
We're leading the country in putting the academy at the service of the community, creating place-based pedagogy, knowledge and capacity.
We're supporting students whose families can't help them navigate higher education.
And, yes, we're also supporting an excessively large group of Executive Administrators, sometimes pushing rather odd priorities and leaving it to us to defend academic programs that we've worked way too hard to build and maintain through years of cuts to let go easily.
We're headed into mediation this week, so the Bargaining Team (Ron Narode, with David Hansen, Bob Liebman, Anh Ly and Leanne Serbulo - with Phil Lesch and myself ex officio) will be engaged all day Weds. and Thurs, pushing for the prioritization of academics and faculty control.
If you're on campus, swing by the 6th floor of the MCB in a red shirt or lanyard to say hi to us, and remind the Admin negotiating team who does the work around here.
If you're not part of the PSU-AAUP face-2-face network to help each other push to prioritize academics, please let me know; we need to be talking to everyone on this campus!
But mostly, just for a moment, stop to appreciate what you and our colleagues have accomplished this year. We can be proud!
Best,
Mary King
President, PSU-AAUP