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Portland State University issued layoff notices to 17 members of its non-tenure track faculty on Friday.
Most non-tenure track faculty is teaching faculty, meaning members don’t typically engage in research. Affected faculty members will lose their jobs on June 15, 2025.
The layoffs come as PSU faces an $18 million budget deficit in the upcoming fiscal year, caused in part by consistently declining enrollment at the university.
The consolidation is part of PSU’s four-part financial adjustment plan to help address the deficit. Its most hefty focus is on program revitalization (adjusting or eliminating less popular programs) and streamlining curricular stewardship (adjusting content to match student learning with employer demand, among other things). The university projects this part of the plan will save between $8 million and $12 million.
A university message to faculty and staff, sent at noon on Friday, called the layoffs a “difficult milestone” and referred to terminated faculty as “valued colleagues and friends.”
“These layoffs, as difficult as they are, are steps we must take to move toward a more financially sustainable future for PSU,” the message read. “We are making every effort to minimize the number of layoffs by advancing other initiatives as part of our Bridge to the Future plan.”
Because of a contract with PSU’s American Association of University Professors, which represents about 350 non-tenure track faculty members at the university, PSU sent notices of layoffs to 94 members on Oct. 15. Most of those did not ultimately receive notice of termination, an outcome PSU president Ann Cudd told OPB she anticipated in October.
That’s because the university is contractually obligated to send notices ahead of a formal layoff notice to any potentially affected faculty. Cudd could not share how many positions she anticipated cutting at the time, but said the university sent out a “much larger number of layoff notices because we are so uncertain about which ones we’re going to lay off.”
Still, an AAUP email to union representatives called the 17 layoffs “unnecessary and heartbreaking.” The same email outlined next steps to protesting the layoffs and preparing for a possible strike in March, which the union has threatened to take if it cannot reach a contract agreement with university administration. (The current contract expires at the end of this month.)
AAUP president Emily Ford says many of the non-tenure track faculty members perform front-facing work, meaning they interact with students and concentrate on teaching.
All 22 of PSU’s university studies faculty members received tentative layoff notices Oct. 15, which Ford says would impact courses meant to teach critical thinking and writing skills to incoming first-year students and transfers at the university. It’s not immediately clear how many faculty members from that department received official termination notices.
“You cannot cut your way to financial sustainability,” Ford says. “Instead of doing the mission-critical work, the university president and the board of trustees are spending their time and energy on investments in infrastructure instead of investments in workers and students.”