Tuition will continue to increase. Programs and positions will still likely face cuts at some institutions. This amount does not represent true additional investment.
— From the Coalition of Oregon Public Universities’ May 6 testimony to the HECC Funding and Achievement Subcommittee, signed by Coalition chair and PSU President Ann Cudd
There is a slide in tomorrow’s HECC testimony that’s chilling, given our circumstances at PSU.
Tomorrow morning, on behalf of all seven of Oregon’s public universities, PSU President Ann Cudd will testify in her role as chair of the Coalition of Oregon Public Universities before HECC’s Funding and Achievement Subcommittee. The slides are already posted on HECC’s site. The headline number is a $1.159 billion request for the Public University Support Fund, which is the primary state vehicle for operating support across the seven public universities. The submission also asks for $66.7 million in state programs, $213.3 million for OSU’s three statewide public service programs, and a list of capital projects that includes $79.5 million for the renovation of PSU’s Millar Library.
The slide that explains the PUSF ask says this:
This amount will contribute to continued operations at Oregon’s public universities — but will still involve a difficult road ahead. Tuition will continue to increase. Programs and positions will still likely face cuts at some institutions. This amount does not represent true additional investment. Oregon needs a long-term investment strategy to meet the needs of the state.
The coalition is writing this into the official record: more tuition increases, more program cuts, no real new investment. The submission opens by claiming that every dollar Oregon spends on its public universities yields ten dollars in economic impact. The request that follows, the coalition tells HECC in its own words, will not produce the investment that would yield it. The coalition’s own slides note that personnel costs are already rising faster than inflation and faster than revenue — which means the proposed increase above current funding will be substantially consumed by cost growth before it reaches a student or a classroom.
In the 2025–27 cycle, the same coalition asked the Legislature for $1.275 billion. The Legislature approved $1.068 billion. The universities themselves described that approved figure as falling more than $40 million short of what was required to maintain existing programs. Two years later, the coalition’s request for the next biennium is $1.159 billion. The new ask is smaller, in nominal dollars, than the request the universities already called inadequate. Oregon ranks 46th in the nation in per-student state funding for public universities. The coalition’s ask, even if the Legislature funds it in full, will not move that ranking. Oregon has been near the bottom for years, and the pattern of baseline-maintenance requests helps explain why.
This is the framework Cudd will deliver to HECC tomorrow, and the framework she will bring back to PSU when the Board and the administration plan the next round of cuts. There is an unusual quality to her position here. She is the person currently executing mass layoffs at PSU and the person presenting the state ask her own testimony accepts will not stop them. As OPU chair, she speaks for all seven universities; as PSU president, she is already acting on the trajectory the coalition concedes will continue.
PSU has declared retrenchment under Article 22, named nineteen academic departments for reduction or elimination, and projected up to 216 FTE in possible layoffs, all to address a deficit the administration says has grown from $35 million to roughly $40 million. The coalition’s testimony to HECC accepts in advance that nothing in this request will alter that trajectory at PSU. Tuition will keep climbing, programs will keep closing, and the people who hold this university together — faculty, academic professionals, and the students who depend on them — will keep losing ground.
Cudd will close her testimony with a line that reads, “This moment calls for commitment, not retreat.” The body of the testimony describes a retreat. A real commitment to Oregon’s public universities at the moment of their greatest pressure would scale the request to the harm being done. It would join the coalition of public-sector unions that has been organizing in Salem for an Education Stability Fund infusion to stop the bleeding at PSU. Southern Oregon University’s leadership won a $15 million emergency appropriation by asking for it directly. PSU’s leadership has not asked.
PSU has chosen otherwise. The administration has come to define successful advocacy as accepting cuts and low-balling its own prior funding requests. The standard that explains tomorrow’s submission is the same standard that has led the state to radically disenfranchise public universities for over a decade. The coalition is asking the state to hold a line that PSU has already said is too low, and is asserting that this is advocacy.
There is political work to do to address tomorrow’s testimony in the days and weeks that follow. The HECC subcommittee can press the coalition for an honest accounting of the gap between the request and the need. Oregon legislators have grounds to ask the chair of the OPU why, in absolute terms, she is requesting less than the coalition requested two years ago. PSU’s Board of Trustees should ask its president why, in the middle of an active retrenchment she is directing at PSU, she is presenting HECC a funding request that accepts further layoffs as inevitable. PSU faculty, staff, students, and community partners will keep doing what we have been doing in Salem, at City Hall, and at HECC: building the political case for a real public investment in Oregon’s universities.
Tomorrow’s testimony is a record of choices being made now, by Cudd, the Board, and the administration. PSU-AAUP will keep measuring those choices against what they will actually do — to faculty, to students, to programs, and to the city Portland State exists to serve. We will not pretend they are the only choices available.
— Bill Knight, President, PSU-AAUP
The full Coalition of Oregon Public Universities testimony is available on HECC’s website. The Funding and Achievement Subcommittee meets May 6, 2026.