Non-tenure faculty and staff have brought concerns to the Portland State University Board of Trustees over job security after the Board proposed recent budget cuts. These cuts have resulted in classes being canceled and jobs potentially being cut—specifically regarding non-tenure faculty.
The meeting on Friday, Sept. 27 began with an opportunity for community members to speak. Speakers from unions such as Portland State University’s American Association of University Professors (PSU-AAUP), the Graduate Employees Union (GEU) and Portland State University’s Faculty Association (PSUFA) highlighted the apparent differences in priorities between the Board of Trustees, PSU community and union members.
Teaching Associate Professor of History and Representative of PSU-AAUP, Jennifer Kerns has been a faculty member at PSU since 2000.
Kerns—who spoke at the Board of Trustees meeting on Sept. 27—is concerned about cuts to non-tenure faculty members at PSU.
“We’re not widgets that you just can take away and then assume that there’s a tenure track faculty member, who had better contractual protections, to teach those courses,” Kerns said.
Faculty are the employees of PSU that students interact with the most during their time at the university. Cuts to faculty not only impact the lives of faculty members but also the lives of students.
According to Kerns, some Board members seem to be purely focusing on the business aspects of the university during these calls to eliminate jobs and salaries in the name of addressing a budget problem.
“I feel like our Deans and our Provost and our President values us,” Kerns said. “I don’t know what the Board thinks and that is upsetting to me because these people cycle off and on the Board. They think they’re doing their due diligence and their fiduciary responsibilities, but do they have a real long term care for the PSU community?”
Adjunct Professor for Chicanx/Latinx studies Hector Hernandez teaches a variety of courses at PSU. According to Hernandez, he was notified by the Director of the Chicanx/Latinx studies program, Cristina Herrera, on Aug. 8 that one of his classes was canceled due to low enrollment and lack of interest.
“To see that the reasons [for its cancellation was] lack of interest and low enrollment, were not valid… because we are in the position of becoming a Hispanic serving institution,” Hernandez said.
He had been teaching the class for almost 10 years before the cancellation.
According to Hernandez, he consistently had an average of 25 students enrolling in his class. He went on to express his concerns about Portland State University potentially losing its chance to achieve a permanent status of being a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI).
“You have to have numbers [to be an HSI] and you have to provide also relevant content to those [Chicanx/Latinx] students,” Hernandez said. “We’ve been working on that… How can you say that you are committed to the Hispanic Latino community when you are canceling courses?”
“What they are not considering is the needs of these local communities,” Hernandez said. “They have no connections with our community.”
Emily Ford is the President of PSU-AAUP and the Urban and Public Affairs Librarian. Ford has worked at PSU’s library for over 14 years and represents 1,200 full time workers at PSU-AAUP.
According to Ford, when PSU President Ann Cudd was hired she was given an “on-ramp” period of three to five years of being able to get to work without making any cuts. Instead, the Board was demanding that cuts be made last year.
Ford explained that the cuts did not go into effect because it could not go through with making those cuts without violating labor contracts.
“I have concerns that the Board isn’t fully listening when faculty try to tell them what is happening and the obstacles that are being put in front of us from providing the best to students,” Ford said. “Teaching and learning is the direct mission of the university. That’s what we do. We are here for our students, right? We don’t see that being translated from the Board.”
With such a large emphasis from the University administration on revitalizing downtown, Ford worried that support for university workers has been deemphasized in the Board’s priorities.
“Why has the Cudd administration felt that they need to use all of their political capital in Salem over the past year, advocating for money and to the Portland City Council for a Fine and Performing Arts building over settling a contract with the 1,200 workers, full time faculty workers, graduate employees and the adjunct union that’s about to start bargaining?” Ford said.
Currently, PSU and PSU-AAUP are at the bargaining table to negotiate a contract which has a deadline set for this November. Potential budget cuts and layoffs lie at the heart of these sessions.
“We’re facing these cuts and narratives of layoff and we keep trying to negotiate a contract that has strong layoff protections, but the administration is coming back to us unwilling to bargain layoff protections for the contract,” Ford said.
According to Ford, PSU’s bargaining team has proposed negotiating layoffs on a case by case basis which would not be put into the contract. This raises concerns about inequitable and unequal treatment between different university employees.
“I know that several of the Board members in their private lives are commercial real estate owners,” Ford said. “And so I really question where the priorities [of] the Board are.”
One speaker at the Board meeting on Sept. 27 was Katie Cagle, a Program Assistant for the School of Social Work and long time Disarm PSU activist. She held a moment of silence in honor of Jason Washington—a man who was shot by PSU campus police in 2018—before she spoke on the issue of over-policing on campus.
Cagle also took that moment to point out a plainclothes, undercover officer sitting amongst the crowd.
“They’re continually hearing from faculty and staff and students that, ‘Hey, your choices are affecting me directly in really negative and impactful ways,’” Cagle said. “And so I think it’s like any ruling body that doesn’t feel secure in its own power, [they feel] like they have to bring in armed power.”
With the tension in the Board meeting continuing into this bargaining period, faculty and Board members’ conceptions of what Portland State University’s present and future should look like create varying portraits.
“The board seems to be trying to run a school like a business, [but] students aren’t customers. Students are students,” Cagle said. “I think you have some board members who understand the higher [educational] experience, but not everyone on the board shares that view. “So it makes these conversations really challenging.”
PSU International Student Advisor Jonna Lynn Bransford, speaking as a member of PSU-AAUP at the meeting, asked how PSU employees could “dream big”—referencing a speech given by President Cudd—when their budgets were being slashed and they were forced to work long hours with fewer resources.
Bransford was not the only one who shared this view on employee’s inability to “dream big” in the current climate on campus.
“[When] President Cudd asked us during convocation to ‘dream big,’ it’s very hard to dream big when we’re being told that we need to do things now,” Ford said. “It’s very hard to be thoughtful… to consider unintended consequences. I believe that that pressure is coming from the Board of Trustees that is not being true to what they promised the president.”
