17 termination notices were sent out to non-tenure track faculty (NTTF) members on Dec. 13—a step that the Portland State University (PSU) administration took in order to address the University’s $18 million budget deficit. The effects of these layoffs have yet to be fully realized, but for the 17 NTTF who received notices, this means that their academic careers at PSU will end this June. This comes as PSU-AAUP and the PSU administration have entered mediation to continue bargaining for a new contract. The previous contract expired Nov. 30 of last year.
Decades of teaching experience are being lost in these layoffs, a point which Emily Ford—the President of Portland State University American Association of University Professor (PSU-AAUP)—noted has impacts that go beyond individual faculty members.
“There are 17 people, a lot of whom have been working here for over 20 years, who are losing their livelihood and their ability to pay for their children’s college education,” Ford said. “People are losing health insurance. People who are the primary wage earners in their families [and] people who are highly dedicated to undergraduate education at PSU and who are core instructional faculty for a lot of students.”
On Dec. 13, PSU President Ann Cudd held a press conference to provide comments on the wave of termination notices. In this conference, she explained the administration’s reasoning behind the cuts.
“In order to make necessary investments in key programs and ensure the ongoing success of our institution, PSU must achieve financial stability,” Cudd said. “We are working hard to close an $18 million budget gap that’s resulted from several years of declining enrollment and really an unrelenting increase in expenses. And closing a budget gap like this requires difficult decisions.”
This framing of the budget by the administration has been contested by an alternative analysis conducted by Howard Bunsis—an Accounting Professor at Eastern Michigan University—for PSU-AAUP.
“Members of the Board of Trustees have pointed out that they wouldn’t listen to Professor Bunsis because he wasn’t an expert with evidence,” Ford said. “When a full professor of accounting with a law degree and whose expertise as a faculty member is higher education budgeting is not considered an expert, I don’t know who is considered an expert anymore.”
Cudd remarked in the press conference that the administration stands by their audited statements and that a comparison of his report to the administration’s will be released later in winter.
The administration has also offered an early retirement incentive to eligible faculty. According to a PSU-AAUP press conference on Jan. 16, 32 faculty members had accepted the offer.
Some of the NTTF were under a contract known as continuous appointment, which according to PSU-AAUP’s website means they “become permanent faculty members with meaningful job security.”
According to Ford, these positions are subject to termination under the circumstances of programmatic or curricular changes or for financial issues.
Where much of the contention regarding the layoffs are coming from is PSU-AAUP’s claim that the administration is violating NTTF member’s contracts by asserting these are due to curricular changes rather than financial ones.
“We haven’t seen any curricular or programmatic changes occur,” Ford said. “The entire narrative around these supposed layoffs are about money, so the university is using the wrong portions of the contract to affect these terminations.”
PSU-AAUP is filing multiple grievances for what is seen as violations of the collective bargaining agreement. This includes not honoring shared governance processes, particularly regarding the role of the Faculty Senate in deciding curricular changes.
According to the Faculty Senate’s Constitution, “The Faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter, and methods of instruction, research, faculty status and those aspects of student life that relate to the education process.”
The notices of termination were sent out before any curricular changes were presented to the Faculty Senate. PSU-AAUP sees the layoffs preceding any formal action regarding curricular and programmatic changes as violations by the administration.
“That’s not our understanding of the contract that we have to have gone through these processes before we can make those notices, so [on] that I would disagree,” Cudd said. “There are discussions going on at sort of the middle level [of] deans and associate deans and department chairs [that] are certainly discussing all of this data …, so final decisions have not been made … All I can say is that there are certainly many members of the faculty union who would be involved in some of these discussions. It’s not as though they have no information whatsoever.”
At the Faculty Senate meeting on Jan. 6, a resolution was approved that commented upon the University’s “Bridge to the Future” plan and the Academic Program Revitalization Work. The resolution criticizes the Board of Trustees’ decision to shorten the timeline originally given to the Cudd administration of achieving financial stability within three years down to only two years. The resolution states that no justification has been given for the shortened timeline even after repeated inquiries.
“The current Academic Revitalization work underway has not engaged the Faculty Senate Curriculum Committees, the Educational Policy Committee, and most importantly, the Faculty Senate Budget Committee in any meaningful, direct, or explicit way,” the resolution states. “Thus, decisions regarding programmatic and curricular needs have not been made with critical input from the main bodies which determine the programmatic and curricular needs on campus, per widely accepted definitions, principles and practices of shared governance.”
The PSU Philosophy Department sent a letter to the administration calling for the reversal of three terminations of NTTF philosophy members. According to the letter, the elimination of their positions would end many of the department’s current offerings. Along with specialized courses, this includes no longer offering an online philosophy degree, being unable to host the Oregon High School Ethics Bowl, the Oregon Middle School Ethics Bowl and the Philosophy Summer Camp.
In the letter, Cudd’s criteria for the layoffs – alignment with the strategic plan, academic results, market data and financial stability – are seen as not being consistent with the layoffs impacting the department.
“As far as we can ascertain, none of these criteria has been used to guide decision-making,” stated the letter. “We strongly urge a reconsideration of these devastating cuts to the PSU Philosophy Department.”
NTTF and union members also have noted that many of these layoffs terminate faculty who are teaching full classes with waitlists.
“We have more faculty than are really needed for the total number of students that need to be served in a particular program,” Cudd said. “The way that faculty workload assignments have been made in the past might mean that somebody with a large class is on the layoff list, [but] those student credit hours could be taught by somebody else in their program or in their department.”
Jan Just is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the department of biology who received a termination notice. She had been in this position for four years and recently received the Dean’s Award for Teaching Innovation and Excellence.
“I was being honored as an example of teaching excellence because I had 100% retention for the first FRINQ biology cohort,” Just stated in an emailed statement. “At the start of Fall term I wrote a narrative for my promotion review. I felt proud of my accomplishments with student retention, my work with the FRINQ Student Success Pilot, my antiracist pedagogy faculty development grant, and work with the [Higher Education in Prison] program.”
“In the second week of the term I was given notice of notice,” Just’s statement continued. “On the last day of October I signed a recommendation from my department for promotion to associate teaching professor. Then I received notice of termination. The whiplash of these experiences has been unbelievable.”
Just had also developed the first science class offered in the PSU Higher Education in Prison program, which made it possible for the first person to graduate from the program since they could now fulfill their science credit.
The student’s graduation was celebrated on the official PSU Instagram account as well in a press release on the University’s website.
“PSU is lauding this new Higher Education in Prison program, which has graduated its first student, and yet one of the people who’s pivotal to that program [had] their position terminated,” Ford said. “So what is coming out of [PSU’s] official administrative mouth is not matching with its actions.”
There are also concerns that these layoffs will increase the workloads of existing faculty members. The positions being vacated through the early retirement incentive will also not be replaced, according to Ford.
“PSU’s leaders have been working with PSU faculty and staff for months to ensure the process is inclusive and transparent,” Cudd said. “This includes sharing the data being used to support the decisions, sharing the decision criteria and working closely with union partners to keep them informed of all the processes and abiding by the collective bargaining agreements… I want to make clear that involuntary layoffs are always our last resort.”
With the first round of mediation occurring on Jan. 15, progress has been limited according to PSU-AAUP. There will be a second round of mediation on Jan. 22, with the earliest call of impasse being Jan. 30. If bargaining continues to stall, PSU-AAUP could potentially strike in early March.
“We hope and expect a fair contract will be negotiated, and we value our union partners,” Cudd said. “We value our faculty members who are members of the union very much. So we hope for a good outcome. We’ve had good outcomes in the past and we expect that that will continue into the future.”
