Welcome to winter term, colleagues and fellow AAUP members. Here’s to weathering it well.
As we all know from the two Bridges we’ve recently found ourselves crossing, this is a moment of imminent change that threatens to transform PSU forever. We’ve been assured that Portland State will make the largest labor cuts in its history and dismantle programs and departments in a sweeping revision of the university’s structure. We’ve been assured that there is no alternative, and this one-track rhetoric has had a severe impact on the atmosphere of our work as we kick off winter 2026. I want to tell you, in spite of all the ways we’re being told to feel defeated, that we can keep our spirits up through the camaraderie found in fighting for our students, this special campus community, and a better outcome. Everything we do to build an alternative together is real and impactful, even if the changes we build aren’t immediate or the final word on Portland State’s identity. This Bridge to the Future may not lead where we think it does, and the future in question is still very much within our power to shape.
It’s not hard to see all the layers, all the failures of responsibility at so many levels that have led us to what we face this winter and spring. We’re in a situation that was never a matter of “there is no alternative.” We could have done things quite differently, and there’s still room to do that now. Oregon is poised to fall to the very bottom of the US in public university funding with the slated cuts to the PUSF this budget cycle (we’re 46th now). But our problems and missed opportunities go far beyond funding. We have underrecruited our city, state, and region, even as we’ve also backed away from international recruiting, and comparative figures tell a stark story. Oregon is in the bottom 10 states in the US in the proportion of our population enrolled at public universities. As a proportion of population, the Portland metro area enrolls students in metro universities at a far lower rate than other metro areas. We have not even come close to finding the right balance of PSU enrollment to our market, and the Bridge to the Future 2.0 plan’s projection of zero growth seems ludicrous when we look at actual numbers in every other major metro area in the country.
Compared to the rate of enrollment in other metros, Portland State is missing at least 10,000 students, just as, to match average national rates, the entire Oregon public university system is missing about 40,000 students. PSU’s missing 10,000 isn’t the result of demographics, political pressures, or the cost of living. It’s the result of the fact that we have not yet done adequate work to recruit regional (and international) students, to promote the university clearly and positively, to connect employers with educators in internship and workforce programs, and to connect students in real ways with the possibilities a degree from Portland State offers them. All of this takes infrastructural investment, vision, and a more persistent, organized effort. There’s still time for us to invest in this version of the future rather than hastily cutting our way into a death spiral.
There’s also still time for this university’s administration to back away from its refusal to recognize the reinstatement of our NTTF colleagues who were laid off in violation of the CBA. We should all take note: the university’s position is that it can violate the contract with rogue layoffs and it will never have to reinstate a single person. It could violate notice requirements, rights of due process, rights of progressive sanctions, or the numerous other job protections offered by the CBA and none of these violations would require it to reverse its decisions. What the university is arguing is that tenure and continuous appointment do not actually provide any protection at all beyond the prospect of (at most) paying back-pay up to the time of an arbitration ruling. The university’s position effectively does away with the protections of tenure and continuous appointment for everyone covered by the Collective Bargaining Agreement.
There is still time for the university to change its course. There’s still time for the Board of Trustees to change its course. There’s still time for the governor, the Ways and Means committee, the Emergency Board, and HECC to change their course. None of the dismal, one-track outcomes modeled by any of the levels of government and administration lead us to the necessity of dismantling an institution that has, in effect, already been dismantledby failures of funding and management. In the short term, the money is there for us to build our future, whether at the level of the state’s over $1B Education Stability Fund or the university’s reserves. It’s also there in the form of the prospective students waiting to be invited more effectively and clearly into our campus community. If we are to change course and realize our potential as an economic and opportunity engine for Portland and Oregon, the last thing we should do is back ourselves into the corner of hasty cuts and a no-future scenario that can’t imagine a pathway to growth. There’s still time to turn toward growing PSU, but we will all have to speak up and make that demand now, in every way we can.
This means turning up to the Faculty Senate, to the Board of Trustees meeting on the 30th, to the AFT-OR and PSU lobby days on Feb. 5th and 12th. It means speaking out, explaining the stakes to students after classes and appointments, writing leaders at every level, from the Faculty Senate to City Hall to the governor’s office. It means turning up at January’s and February PSU-AAUP events and meetings and making yourself heard, and working with colleagues to organize ways we can all be heard. It means working together on a response to PIVOT’s “sunset” decisions and Program Vitality Reports, meeting as departments and programs and as union members to organize and work together to push back on the coming cuts.
We have just 14 business days until February, and announcements of cuts and program change will come soon after. If all 1,111 PSU-AAUP represented workers and a significant number of students, alums, chairs, and on-campus union siblings all push together to guide PSU to the most promising and least damaging outcomes, we stand the best possible chance at doing what UO did, the best chance of staving off program elimination and finding a better way forward. Feel free to reach out directly to me and let me know how you’d like to plug into this camaraderie and this work and into fighting for the PSU our students, colleagues, and community deserve.
In solidarity, |
|
