22 June 2023. PSU. Board of Trustees
Buenos días. Good morning.
Thank you for the opportunity to address you today.
My name is Dr. Óscar Fernández. I am a faculty member in University Studies. I started working at Portland State University in 2003; I have had the honor to work at PSU for about 20 springs. 20 springs! Veinte primaveras.
Also, I have been a faculty member at Portland Community College-Rock Creek and a visiting associate professor at Reed College.
I currently serve as VP of Membership and Organizing for PSU-AAUP.
I self-identify as a bilingual, queer immigrant scholar from the beautiful country of Costa Rica. And although I celebrate “Happy Pride” this June 22nd, I am painfully aware that our national LGBTQI lives and futures are at risk.
However, my remarks today concern students’ academic lives and futures at our Portland State University.
While I am Latinx person and a member of the LGBTQI community, I cannot claim to speak for everyone in those communities. No one person can, of course. But I am in contact with many members of those communities on this campus. I’d like to tell you what I am seeing and what I am hearing about the severe, negative impacts of the recently implemented budget cuts.
These budget cuts are the most recent incident in the years-long practice at PSU, over the course of multiple University presidents, to TREAT faculty, staff, and academic professionals as disposable and unnecessary to the success of our students.
There is no PSU without our people–our faculty, staff, and academic professionals.
¡Sin NUESTROS TRABAJADORES ACADÉMICOS, no existe PSU!
When front-line people, the people who work most directly with students, are treated poorly and their jobs are cut, who suffers most?
Our students suffer, along with the community programs and outreach we support and the crucial research we perform.
When I speak of “treating staff, academic professionals, and faculty poorly,” one of the most obvious things we can point to is caseloads and workloads that are so high that we cannot adequately serve the students we are committed to serving.
This understaffing is a direct result of the failure to follow the Huron report’s recommendations to streamline upper administrative structures and the concurrent failure to invest in student-facing jobs - a move that would improve both our student retention rates, our student enrollment levels, and students’ perceptions of belonging at PSU.
While the current budget cuts negatively impact every student at PSU, it has an especially large and negative impact on BIPOC and first-generation students.
For example, Latinx and White student support staff tell us that their current workloads in key student support positions, such as academic advising, financial aid, CARE team, and mental health services, significantly exceed national standards.
Let’s look at academic advising, a key element in student retention and success.
The national recommendation for optimal academic advising caseloads in order to close the graduation gap between BIPOC and White students is 150 students per advisor at public, four-year universities. (Source: Driving Toward a Degree: Closing Outcome Gaps through Support Supports (2022) by Tyton Partners.)
At Portland State University, academic professionals have disclosed to us that their caseloads range from triple to FIVE TIMES that recommendation.
Specifically:
- In the School of Business Pathway, academic advisors now carry a caseload of 400-500 students - triple the recommendation. TRIPLE la recomendación a nivel nacional (Spanish)
- For the Language, Culture, and Meaning Pathway, caseloads range from 550-600 students: quadruple the recommendation. QUADRUPLE la recomendación a nivel nacional (Spanish)
- And for the Engineering, Computer Science, and Math Pathway, caseloads range from 700-770: five times the recommendation., QUINTUPLE la recomendación a nivel nacional (Spanish)
Such caseloads are both unsustainable for our workers and an institutional abandonment of our obligation to support and care for our students.
This recent round of budget cuts has gone beyond the years-long habit of short-changing students on the ground. We are now losing programs and classes students NEED to graduate and be marketable in their career pathways.
In response to academic program reduction fears in recent months, a group of PSU students has now organized a Committee to Save Language and Cultural Studies at Portland State University. These are students whose academic programs have been impacted - and in some cases, eliminated - in this latest round of cuts.
I’d like to read you a heartbreaking line from their public statement, one that was shared in writing on June 5th to PSU’s Faculty Senate:
AND I QUOTE:
“We have not been given any kind of opportunity to voice our objections or experiences. These are decisions that have been made for us, that severely impact our courses of study, made by people who do not know us at all. This process has left us feeling ignored, abandoned, forgotten, and devalued by our institution. We have been rendered voiceless.”
END QUOTE.
I urge you to speak directly to these students. I can provide you with their names and contact information.
There is a better way for PSU. ¡Hay una mejor vía para PSU!
We urge you to reconsider the path of random cuts and instead reduce unnecessary costs, inefficiency, and redundancy at the highest levels of the university while investing in on-the-ground faculty, staff, and academic professional positions that serve our core mission and lead to better enrollment and retention of students through graduation.
Thank you very much. Muchas gracias.