This post argues that PSU’s current restructuring — the Article 22 retrenchment, the eight-to-six college consolidation, and the centralization of administrative functions under Operational Excellence — operationalizes a specific reform ideology: the New American University model developed at Arizona State by Michael Crow, exported through the Crow-affiliated University Innovation Alliance, and carried to PSU by a president whose entire prior career inside that network has been at institutions of a very different kind. The financial premise being offered for the cuts is contradicted by the administration’s own data. The model being applied was built for conditions PSU does not share. The decisions being made are choices and ideological commitments, and they can still be reversed.
On Thursday, PSU’s administration will release its provisional retrenchment plan. The document will name specific academic departments for reduction or elimination, specific tenured and tenure-track positions for layoff, specific programs that will no longer exist at Portland State. Up to 216 faculty and academic professional positions are at risk. Nineteen departments have been identified as candidates for reduction or closure. Three — University Studies, Conflict Resolution, and the Portland Center — have been named for full elimination. President Ann Cudd has begun scheduling interviews with journalists to proudly announce the release.
This post asks a question the administration’s framing in the plan won’t invite: who chose this for Portland State, and on what basis?
The Financial Premise Is Contested
By every measure the administration uses to track financial health, FY2025 was the strongest year of improvement at PSU in more than a decade. It was the first year since FY2010 in which PSU’s cost per student credit hour declined. The Composite Financial Index, a standard measure of institutional financial health, rose from 1.28 to 1.89. The Net Operating Revenue Ratio improved from -6.04 percent to -2.11 percent. All-funds revenue grew by $25.6 million against expense growth of $13.3 million — a net improvement of $12.3 million in a single year. These are not PSU-AAUP’s numbers. They are the administration’s, drawn from the FY25 Year-End RCAT and the FY25 Financial Profile.
The longer record is consistent with the FY25 turnaround. Across the most recent six-year window for which complete data are available, PSU’s total E&G expenses grew at 0.96 percent compound annual growth rate. Salaries and wages grew at 1.06 percent. Services and supplies actually declined by 0.47 percent. Cumulative inflation over the same period was 23.5 percent. PSU has spent more than a decade running expense growth far below inflation. The administration’s March 2026 budget presentation acknowledged this directly in a footnote: “Actual CAGR of 2.4% is lower than expected cost increases due to reduction strategies employed at PSU over this period.” The institution has been describing its own cost discipline as the explanation for why expenses have stayed flat. That description is correct.
Faculty capacity in particular has contracted faster than student demand. From FY19 to FY25, student full-time equivalent enrollment declined by 11.6 percent. Faculty full-time equivalent capacity declined by 17.1 percent. The academic workforce at Portland State has already been absorbing the contraction the institution faces.
The $35 million deficit figure presented as the warrant for further cuts is a projection, not a measurement. It is assembled from administrative assumptions about future enrollment, future costs, and future revenue. PSU-AAUP’s April 14 Counter-Analysis of the Financial Condition of Portland State University identified specific assumptions in that projection that warrant scrutiny — including the FY26 budget’s choice to project a $10 million deficit, nearly twice the $5.4 million the institution actually posted in FY25. The administration is budgeting a deterioration its own results don’t show, and then citing the budgeted deterioration as evidence of crisis. The figure does argumentative work the underlying analysis can’t support.
Meanwhile, the leading indicators for Fall 2026 are positive across the board. First-year applications are up 13.6 percent over Fall 2025. Admits are up 14.6 percent. Direct-admit applications are up 24 percent. Transfer confirmations are up 43 percent. Portland Community College, PSU’s largest transfer pipeline, is reporting its highest enrollment since 2014. The administration’s multi-year scenarios that drive the retrenchment timeline still assume continued enrollment decline through 2026-27. The actual data point the other direction.
There is one more piece of the financial picture worth naming. The Board’s reserve policy has been cited throughout this process as a binding constraint forcing the institution toward layoffs. In her April 22 administrative briefing, Vice President Andria Johnson admitted that PSU will breach the Board’s 25 percent reserve floor anyway, with further reserve use already approved through FY27 — the sixth consecutive year of using reserves to cover operating costs. The Board’s own Reserves Management Policy, at Section II.A.4, explicitly contemplates sub-floor reserve use with Board approval. The policy the administration cited as the wall it cannot pass is one the administration has already chosen to pass, on its own terms, for purposes other than the bridge the union has proposed.
None of this means PSU faces no financial pressure. The institution is genuinely under strain, state funding is inadequate, and there are real budget gaps to address. What the administration’s own documents show is an institution that has run extraordinary cost discipline for more than a decade, posted a meaningful turnaround in FY25, and is now seeing leading enrollment signals consistent with continued recovery. The case for retrenchment now, on the scale and on the timeline being proposed, has to be made against that record, not in spite of it.
So the question becomes more clearly defined: if the financial premise doesn’t fully justify what’s being proposed, what does?
The Reform Model Has a Name
In 2014, the leaders of eleven large public research universities formed the University Innovation Alliance. The UIA’s stated mission is increasing college graduation rates, particularly for low-income, first-generation, and underrepresented students — aims that are widely shared and genuinely important. Over the past decade, the alliance has grown to nineteen member institutions: all public research universities, most of them R1, many of them AAU members, all of them operating at a scale of enrollment, endowment, and research capacity that Portland State can’t approach. The UIA’s work has been underwritten by a recognizable network of philanthropic funders — the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Lumina Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the ECMC Foundation, Strada Education, and others — whose theory of higher education reform has reshaped policy conversations across the sector for the better part of two decades.
The UIA’s theory of institutional change rests on a set of identifiable assumptions: that transformation requires centralized administrative authority; that academic programs should be evaluated primarily through data analytics and labor-market alignment metrics; that student success is best measured by retention rates, time-to-degree, and completion; and that faculty resistance to change is friction to be managed rather than a governing signal to be heeded. The alliance’s January 2026 scaling toolkit, published at theuia.org, states the underlying diagnosis plainly: “There’s an institutional tendency to evolve away from the original mission of educating students toward a culture of siloed, self-sustaining departments and systems that benefit faculty and staff.” In this framework, faculty-led academic departments aren’t the heart of the university but evidence of institutional drift, organized around the wrong center of gravity.
The founding chair of the UIA is Arizona State University president Michael Crow, the architect of what he calls the New American University model. Crow has described the model in extensive public writing and speaking since 2002. His central claim is that traditional research universities are unfit for the twenty-first century and must be aggressively redesigned through entrepreneurial leadership, centralized authority, online expansion at scale, commercial partnerships, and the dismantling of departmental structures that he treats as obstacles to interdisciplinary innovation. The model has produced outcomes both celebrated and criticized. ASU has grown to 160,000 students through aggressive online expansion. Inside Higher Ed has written that “Arizona State is indistinguishable from Amazon.” The model has also been criticized for devaluing academic positions, including tenure, in favor of adjunct and part-time instruction.
A 2018 Ithaka S+R study of ASU’s governance under Crow described the mechanism by which the model produces internal alignment. “Faculty and administrators who disagreed with the approach at the outset left the institution or adapted to it. Faculty and administrators at other institutions who admired the approach flocked to ASU. Eventually, there developed a critical mass of ‘buy-in’ — interviewees consistently estimated the current buy-in rate at about 80 percent.” The Ithaka description is worth reading slowly. The model produces consent by selecting for it, not by earning it. Those who disagreed left. Those who admired the approach arrived. The 80 percent buy-in simply describes the people who remained after the sorting process was finished. It’s important to understand the structural link between the UIA and ASU. The University Innovation Alliance does not file its own Form 990. Every UIA grant flows through ASU Foundation project number ASUF 30005764. The UIA’s registered address is a P.O. Box at the ASU Foundation. Bridget Burns, the UIA’s founding CEO, holds an ASU teaching appointment in the Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation alongside her UIA role. Crow has been the UIA’s board chair since founding, the same period during which he has been ASU’s president — now twenty-three years, a tenure roughly four times the national average for university presidents. Burns has described the UIA’s origins directly: it was Crow’s idea, he had already gathered the founding presidents, and she was, in her words, “free labor” during her 2013–14 ACE Fellowship at ASU under his mentorship. The UIA presents publicly as a multi-institution consortium of equals. But in reality, it’s an ASU-anchored project, designed to spread Crow’s New American University philosophy across a nineteen-institution network, with Burns as the operational lead Crow developed.
Portland State is not a member of the University Innovation Alliance. It has never been. What it has is a president who has been intellectually and professionally embedded in the UIA network since the alliance’s founding.
The President Came From Inside the Network
Ann Cudd’s official curriculum vitae, published on PSU’s own website, lists among her responsibilities as Vice Provost and Dean at the University of Kansas from 2013 to 2015: “University Liaison, University Innovation Alliance.” Kansas was a founding UIA member. Cudd was in the room from the beginning, helping operationalize the alliance’s data-driven, transformation-oriented approach to institutional change from its inception. Her CV also lists a Department of Education grant co-managed with Georgia State University, the UIA’s most celebrated member and the source of the student success analytics model PSU has since adopted through its partnership with Georgia State’s National Institute for Student Success.
Cudd has acknowledged the divergence between her prior career and Portland State directly. On the July 2025 podcast with UIA CEO Bridget Burns and Inside Higher Ed editor Sara Custer, she described herself as an “odd fit” for PSU, noting that her prior administrative experience had been at “all R1, AAU, elite institutions” rather than at an urban regional university with an access mission. That admission is consequential. PSU is not a UIA-scale institution. Cudd’s preparation, by her own account, was for a different kind of university. The framework she has brought to PSU is the framework she developed at the institutions her career has actually been built around — none of which look like Portland State.
In a July 2025 podcast hosted by UIA CEO Bridget Burns and Inside Higher Ed editor Sara Custer, Cudd identified her two most formative leadership mentors: Michael Crow and Kim Wilcox, a founding UIA board member and Cudd’s mentor during her years at Kansas. She named what she most admires about Crow in her own words on that podcast:
“Over the years, I have watched [Michael Crow] make bold decisions that are innovative and transformative. There are many skeptics who push back, but he really believes in his vision, and he pushes through and doesn’t let the naysayers keep him from doing what he knows has to be done. And I just admire that a lot.”
That sentence is the operating principle at PSU now visible in plain view, in Cudd’s own voice, on the public record. The “naysayers” it describes are the faculty members, academic professionals, students, and shared governance bodies whose concerns the administration has chosen to push through rather than engage. The “vision” it invokes doesn’t arise from deliberation with the community the vision will reshape. It is held in advance by the leader, and the leader’s job, in Cudd’s framing, is to push through against the people who disagree. At a June 2025 meeting of the Board of Trustees Finance and Administration Committee, Cudd applied Crow’s broader framework directly to PSU, telling trustees that higher education institutions must transform or face institutional death.
The connection to Bridget Burns deserves attention as well. Burns, the UIA’s founding CEO, is Portland-based and has spent two decades placing and advising university presidents from inside the UIA network, including in hirings and firings — by her own count, more than forty-five presidents and chancellors over the period. She co-hosted the podcast in which Cudd discussed her path to PSU. By Cudd’s own account on that podcast, no executive search firm recruited her for the position. She saw an advertisement in Inside Higher Ed and reached out to a member of her professional network for background on Portland and the university. That person was Burns. The professional network through which Cudd arrived at Portland State is the same network whose theory of institutional change she has brought here.
Burns’s footprint in Oregon higher education predates the UIA. From 2011 to 2013, she served as Chief of Staff and Senior Policy Advisor for the Oregon University System, where she was credited with architecting the 2013 legislative reform that gave Oregon’s seven public universities independent governance and separated them from state agency status. Portland State and the University of Oregon were the two institutions that specifically requested institutional boards under that reform. The Board of Trustees that hired Cudd, approved PIVOT, ratified the move into retrenchment, and will receive Thursday’s provisional plan exists in its current form because of the governance reform Burns helped engineer before she founded the UIA at ASU. Burns also interviewed PSU’s previous president, Stephen Percy, on her Weekly Wisdom platform in September 2022, before interviewing Cudd in 2025. Her engagement with PSU’s presidency is not new with this administration. What is new with this administration is the depth of the alignment between PSU’s leadership and the UIA framework Burns has spent a decade developing.
That is part of the answer to the question this post asks. Rather than deliberate its way to the UIA model, PSU hired a president from inside the network that produced it, and that president has named in her own words the leadership posture she admires and intends to practice: push through the naysayers.
The Model Does Not Fit Portland State
The UIA’s student success work has produced measurable results at the institutions for which it was designed. Graduation rates have improved. Completion gaps have narrowed. Those outcomes matter and the work that produced them is real. The question for PSU is different: whether the governing philosophy developed in that context fits an institution whose conditions diverge from UIA conditions in nearly every material way. The UIA institutions are large, well-resourced, and in most cases growing. Arizona State enrolls 160,000 students across multiple campuses and holds a $1.4 billion endowment. Georgia State, with 53,000 students, built its nationally recognized student success infrastructure over more than a decade of sustained investment. Even the smallest UIA members operate at endowment levels and enrollment scales that give them financial resilience PSU can’t match. Portland State has approximately 20,000 students, a $130 million endowment, and derives roughly 51 percent of its operating revenue from tuition. Enrollment declines at PSU hit immediately and hard, and there’s no comparable research portfolio or online enrollment platform to absorb the impact.
The deeper problem is conditions of application. UIA strategies were developed in environments of institutional expansion, where transformation meant building new capacity. PSU is in contraction. The PIVOT framework — PSU’s Plan for Institutional Vitality and Organizational Transformation — describes itself in language that reveals the underlying ideology with unusual clarity. “Rebuilding restores what was lost; retaining holds on regardless of utility; reinventing creates what is needed. PSU’s future depends on our willingness to choose the latter.” In an expansion context, the choice between rebuilding and reinventing carries real meaning. Applied to a financially stressed institution already losing students, “reinventing” becomes a vocabulary for elimination, and the dichotomy between “holding on regardless of utility” and “reinventing” forecloses the possibility that the existing programs serve students and the city in ways the metrics don’t capture.
The UIA scaling toolkit, in its own published language, treats institutional complexity of the kind PSU’s shared governance produces as friction. The toolkit frames faculty-centered departments as evidence of drift away from the institution’s mission. But at PSU, faculty have not been the drift. Faculty have been the discipline. Faculty capacity has contracted faster than enrollment. Faculty wages have grown below inflation for more than a decade. Faculty has, in measurable terms, been carrying the institutional adjustment the administration now claims requires its further reduction. Framing faculty as a design flaw in those conditions is ideology with the word “analysis” attached to it.
The Pattern Is Visible Across Three Reorganizations at Once
The UIA framework at PSU is not confined to Article 22. Three simultaneous reorganizations are operating in parallel, each one following the same recognizable pattern: centralized administrative authority, a vision announced in advance, a consultation process that follows the vision rather than producing it, and a treatment of dissent as friction.
The first is Article 22 retrenchment itself: nineteen departments named, layoff numbers projected, a provisional plan now days from release. The Faculty Senate’s own Elimination of an Academic Unit procedure, incorporated into Article 22 by reference, requires departmental documentation prior to elimination. PSU-AAUP’s May 1 response under Section 3(e) documented that the required documentation does not exist for most affected units. The administration’s response, transmitted by Vice Provost Chris Monsere on May 4, conceded on its face that seven categories of required information are absent from the materials offered as substitutes. The procedural foundation for the cuts is, by the administration’s own admission, incomplete.
The second is the planned consolidation of PSU’s eight colleges into six. Cudd announced both the vision and the timeline in April — Faculty Senate vote in January 2027, implementation in July 2027 — before any process had been established to determine what the new structure would actually be. Her own words on the briefing transcript: “the precise form the restructuring will take is still conceptual and open to input.” The pattern is the same as Article 22. The decision arrives first and the process to ratify it follows.
The third is Operational Excellence, the administrative-restructuring track narrated in the same April briefing by Vice President Nathan Klinkhammer and Director Susan Klees. The centralization of HR and Finance functions will, in the administration’s own description, redistribute or eliminate roles across hundreds of administrative staff positions. The Q&A made the staff impact explicit. A questioner asked whether centralization will produce redundancies. The answer was that “those conversations are still ongoing” and that the administration wants to make sure displaced staff are “supported in whatever their next step is.” Internal-only postings will manage the optics of the redistribution. This is a parallel cuts track, smaller and quieter than Article 22, running on a similar logic: centralization, vision-first decision-making, the management of staff resistance as a communications problem.
The three tracks share a single architecture: the UIA model translated into PSU’s institutional vocabulary. Vice President Andria Johnson described their combined horizon in the same briefing as a Bridge to the Future 2.0 process running from July 2025 to June 2027, with structural realignments continuing through July 2027. That is twenty-four months of administrative reorganization. Article 22, the most urgent of the three, sits inside that twenty-four-month window. The administration has explained that it can’t afford twelve months to test an enrollment recovery before laying off faculty. It hasn’t explained why it can afford twenty-four months to redesign the administrative and academic structure of the university through three parallel processes. The asymmetry of urgency between the cuts track and the reorganization track is its own answer to the question of what’s being prioritized.
There Is a Another Bridge on the Table
Alongside this critique, PSU-AAUP has put forward a concrete alternative. On April 14, the union formally submitted to President Cudd, the Faculty Senate, and all Article 22 participants a one-year Academic Stability and Enrollment Recovery Plan. The proposal is concrete and practical. It pauses retrenchment for one year. It draws on available cash and reserves within the Board of Trustees’ own established policy — the same policy the administration has already chosen to operate below for purposes other than this one. It makes a modest investment in enrollment-related activity. It uses the year to test whether the Fall 2026 enrollment signals that are already positive translate into the recovery they suggest. It uses the year to make a real political case in Salem for the state investment Oregon’s public universities have been denied for a generation. It preserves the PIVOT planning process and the underlying analytical work the administration has done, but it removes the contractual basis for forced layoffs while the recovery is tested.
The proposal is reversible, but mass faculty layoffs are not. If the year produces the recovery the leading indicators point toward, the institution avoids a generation of damage to its academic core. If the year does not produce that recovery, the administration retains every option available to it now, on a record substantially better documented than the one it currently has.
The administration hasn’t engaged the bridge proposal on its merits. It has moved forward with the timeline that produces Thursday’s plan. That refusal is itself a choice — a position the administration has taken, and which the Board has so far ratified by approving the steps that produce it.
The Board Made These Choices
In February 2023, before Cudd’s hiring, the Faculty Senate Steering Committee, PSU-AAUP, and PSUFA jointly wrote to the Board of Trustees expressing specific concerns about her candidacy. They noted that her entire prior administrative career had been at resource-rich, elite institutions, and they worried that the possibilities and constraints of an institution like PSU would represent a steep learning curve. They wrote that they were “less confident” she would engage with faculty in ways that built transparency and trust. Three years later, those concerns have proven accurate. The Board’s response at the time was to hire her anyway.
The Board approved Bridge to the Future 2.0. The Board approved PIVOT. The Board ratified the move into retrenchment. The Board will receive the provisional plan on Thursday and will ultimately be asked to approve the layoffs that follow from it. In April, faculty, academic professionals, and students gathered in Urban Plaza to deliver a vote of no confidence in the President supported by 85 percent of voting members of PSU-AAUP, with 67 percent of total membership participating. The Board has not yet responded to that vote in any substantive way. The Board will be asked, on Thursday and in the weeks that follow, to either ratify the plan that Cudd’s framework produces or to require the genuine deliberation the institution has been denied.
PSU-AAUP will continue meeting our obligations under the contract, pursuing every procedural protection available to our members, pressing the bridge proposal as the analytically grounded alternative it is, and challenging the procedural violations of Article 22 that the administration’s own mapping document concedes. We will continue building the political case for Oregon’s public universities in Salem, at City Hall, at HECC, and with the public. And we will continue to insist that the question this post asks be answered.
When Thursday’s plan arrives, please read it with this in mind. Read the news coverage with this in mind. The specific units named for elimination, the specific people identified for layoff, the specific programs that will no longer exist at Portland State — these are the visible expression of an ideology of institutional transformation imported from elsewhere, operationalized in three parallel reorganizations at once, and pursued by a president whose own stated leadership principle is to push through the naysayers rather than to consider the substance of what they say. The arithmetic doesn’t require these particular changes and these projections of indefinite flat enrollment. The budget shortfall is more contested than the administration’s framing admits. The choices being made are commitments to a sweeping ideological transformation of PSU that will implement changes swiftly, pivoting the university to a model similar to UIA exemplars, a New American University with structural austerity and casualized faculty labor as its fundamental features.
Portland State finds itself on this path because the people authorized to choose have chosen it. But the Board of Trustees can choose otherwise. President Cudd can choose otherwise. The Higher Education Coordinating Commission and the Legislature can choose otherwise. This path can still be reversed, and PSU-AAUP will continue making the case for reversing it and committing to building this university — with members, students, colleagues across the university, the city, and every public body that has a role in what happens next. We will hold the people in a position to act accountable for whether they do, and we will continue to work for a growing and flourishing PSU.
— Bill Knight, President, PSU-AAUP
Sources referenced in this post include: PSU’s FY25 Year-End RCAT, FY25 Financial Profile, FY26 Adopted Budget RCAT, FY26 E&G Revenue-Expense History, and March 2026 budget presentation materials; the transcript of President Cudd’s April 22 administrative briefing; Cudd’s curriculum vitae, published on Portland State’s website; the UIA’s “Innovating Together” podcast and Inside Higher Ed’s “Weekly Wisdom” episode featuring Cudd (July–August 2025), available at theuia.org/blog/leading-empathy-and-purpose; the UIA’s January 2026 scaling toolkit at theuia.org; the 2018 Ithaka S+R study of governance at Arizona State University; the ASU Foundation’s public financial disclosures and ASU Pure research database records documenting UIA’s fiscal sponsorship arrangement under project number ASUF 30005764; the 2012 Edward Crawford Award documentation regarding Bridget Burns’s role in Oregon University System governance reform; PSU’s student success partnership page documenting the NISS engagement; PIVOT documentation published by PSU; the PSU-AAUP April 14 Counter-Analysis of the Financial Condition of Portland State University; PSU-AAUP’s May 1, 2026 response under Article 22 Section 3(e); and the February 2023 PSU Faculty Leadership letter to the Board of Trustees.