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Portland State University announced on Thursday morning its intent to lay off 52 faculty and staff members—and eliminate two of its academic departments—as part of a broader financial sustainability plan.
The proposed layoffs come under university president Ann Cudd’s provisional plan, and appear to affect nine departments total. That’s much fewer than the first iteration of the restructuring plan Cudd presented in March, when she forecast 19 departments could be affected by reductions or closures. PSU must reduce expenditures by $35 million over the next two fiscal years to close a budget deficit by fiscal year 2028, Cudd said. The estimated savings of eliminating the 52 positions is $16 million.
Under the provisional plan, University Studies and Conflict Resolution are the two departments slated for elimination.
University Studies offers a liberal arts spin on general education, teaching general critical thinking and communication skills to most students who pass through PSU. Unlike most departments, it does not provide any sort of degree program, and Cudd says the university has a new general education program.
Conflict Resolution, on the other hand, does offer degrees that teach students deescalation and peace-building strategies. Cudd said students currently enrolled will be allowed to complete their coursework.
“Our vision is to really double down on our motto of ‘Let knowledge serve the city,’ to be that kind of university that really takes up urban issues and is an urban research university for Oregon,” Cudd said at a Thursday morning press conference. “To the faculty who have spent, in some cases, many years or an entire career here, my heart goes out to those faculty, and I wish the best for all of them. I understand that this is a very difficult time and a difficult decision to hear about.”
Seven departments would be affected by proposed layoffs. They are the Portland Center (one layoff); educator licensure (five); leadership, learning and counseling (four); history (three); philosophy (four); School of Earth, Environment and Society (three); and world languages and literature (six). Katy Swordfisk, a spokeswoman for the university, said that although layoff notices were shared Thursday with a 12-month notice, they are still preliminary and are subject to change.
Cudd says she narrowed the list from 19 affected departments to nine following feedback from more than 270 university community comments, and she does not anticipate the 10 departments no longer affected in the provisional plan will see layoffs.
The proposed layoffs accompany a host of other measures that Cudd says the university is using to bridge the deficit. These include savings from vacancies and retirements (estimated at roughly 48 employees and $7.2 million in savings) and eliminating cost-of-living increases for unclassified unrepresented staff and university administrators. Notably, the university is also raising tuition—Cudd said the university’s board had approved a roughly 5% increase at its last meeting.
PSU’s American Association of University Professors issued its own statement in the wake of the announcement, calling it the “day of deepest layoffs in Portland State history.” The statement expresses discontent with the Cudd administration’s decision not to fight harder for state funding streams like the Education Stability Fund, a pool of state reserves funded by lottery dollars, for relief.
The union said that of the 52 affected positions, 38 belong to non-tenure track faculty, 12 to tenured faculty, and two to academic professionals. Union leaders said the layoffs to tenured professionals was in line with nationwide attacks on tenure, and largely unprecedented at PSU.
“The Cudd administration has opposed securing new state funding, signaling an intent to raise tuition at Oregon’s premier access institution and fire a significant number of mission critical faculty and staff,” PSU-AAUP’s Thursday statement reads. “The President and the Board have decided to balance the budget on the backs of students, faculty, and staff.”
PSU-AAUP president Bill Knight previously told WW that the university was not focusing its energy on growing, instead racing toward cuts when there were other solutions available. In March, Knight said it was easy for the university to turn to cuts instead of establishing a more solid foundation for recruitment and retention.
Knight reiterated those sentiments at a Thursday afternoon press conference. He said that the university was seeing positive trends in admissions, seeing improvements in the number of applications it received and the number of students it admitted. He said the university’s recruitment marketing budget is about a third of the size of other comparable ones, and that PSU has not adequately tapped into all the bases of students it can reach.
Jessica Rodriguez-Jenkins, the union’s vice president for grievances and academic freedom, added the union does not share Cudd’s vision for PSU. (More than 85% of PSU-AAUP members recently cast no-confidence votes in PSU’s administration.)
“This is part of a much bigger backlash against the humanities,” Knight added. “It’s a further development of this sort of vocational demand in higher ed...and it is part of that growth of the casualization of labor in higher ed.”
Cudd said at Thursday’s press conference she was not comfortable with the idea of tapping the ESF at this time, noting she did not see using one-time funds to plug an operational hole as a request that state officials would receive kindly. She also noted that Southern Oregon University, which received a financial bailout from the state, has now lost a lot of autonomy as an institution, and that PSU is not in that dire of a position.
PSU, like other universities across Oregon, has struggled in recent years with declining enrollment and rising costs for labor and public pension obligations. Cudd says there’s some optimism that as community colleges see increased enrollment and Portland continues to recover from the pandemic, the university might have better prospects in coming years. Simultaneously, she says, international student enrollment has faltered with changing U.S. immigration policy, and that she is concerned about the loss of graduate students.
The provisional plan might still be adjusted with departments and other feedback received during a public comment period. Cudd said she anticipates a final plan will be issued in June.
This article will be updated as more information becomes available.
