PSUFA Picket flyer
Stand with PSUFA on the picket line. This fight is for job security, equal pay, and dignity at work, but it doesn’t stop there! It’s about resisting austerity, confronting the administration’s attacks on workers and programs, and building toward wall-to-wall union solidarity across campus!
"We can grow, but we have to put the resources into it and we have to do with work at the administrative level with strategy and with the commitments that requires."
—Bill Knight, President of Portland State University AAUP
@psuaaup.bsky.social
PSU-AAUP members are voting no confidence due to a lack of "real investment in growth, real investment in recruitment, real investment in connections to employers that allow students legible pathways to employment and internships. We can do that work but we have to have the resources"
KOIN coverage of our rally which began a confidence vote in President Cudd's leadership.
"Faculty leaders argue the administration is relying on artificial intelligence to assess departments. while failing to model how these cuts will impact students."
Portland State University is threatening to cut the entire Gen Ed program in addition to laying off 200 faculty & raising tuition by 5%.
“We are asking trustees to pause these cuts & to work with us this year in the long session to create solutions."
—Bill Knight, PSU AAUP
@psuaaup.bsky.social
Ben Cushing, @pccffap.bsky.social President and PCC strike leader, explaining how from PSU to PCC managed decline by administrators making $300,000-$700,000 per year is unacceptable. Calls for statewide academic labor to undertake a combined campaign to remake higher education.
City Councilors Candace Avalos, Tiffany Koyama Lane, and Mitch Green calling on the Cudd administration to stop the cuts and fight for funding outside PSU's Board of Trustees earlier
City Councilors Candace Avalos, Tiffany Koyama Lane, and Mitch Green calling on the Cudd administration to stop the cuts and fight for funding outside PSU's Board of Trustees earlier
City Councilors Candace Avalos, Tiffany Koyama Lane, and Mitch Green calling on the Cudd administration to stop the cuts and fight for funding outside PSU's Board of Trustees earlier
City Councilors Candace Avalos, Tiffany Koyama Lane, and Mitch Green calling on the Cudd administration to stop the worst layoffs in PSU history and fight for funding outside PSU's Board of Trustees
City Councilors Mitch Green, Tiffany Koyama Lane, and Candace Avalos calling on the Cudd administration to stop the worst layoffs in PSU history and fight for funding outside PSU's Board of Trustees
PSU working conditions are PSU learning conditions. The Cudd administration's layoffs, program eliminations, and institutional contraction threaten teaching, advising, student pathways, and the broader educational mission of the university.
“There is a better way, a more collaborative way, a more humane way to address our current challenges & the deficit. We need to work together with faculty, unions & the whole community as genuine partners"
—Isabel Jaén, Portland State University AAUP
@psuaaup.bsky.social
Today, outside of the Board of Trustees meeting, PSU-AAUP members began a vote of no confidence in President Cudd’s leadership.
Today, outside of the Board of Trustees meeting, PSU-AAUP members began a vote of no confidence in PSU President Cudd’s leadership.
Rebuilding recruitment and enrollment capacity, protecting the university’s teaching and learning mission, and pursuing legislative, gubernatorial, and HECC solutions for PSU’s future.
We further call on university leadership to join PSU-AAUP, Faculty Senate leadership, and community allies in a year of coordinated recovery work:
We call on the Board of Trustees to pause the present retrenchment cycle, halt Article 22 layoffs and program eliminations, and adopt a one-year Academic Stability and Enrollment Recovery Plan.
The administration’s processes have not earned confidence. Members have been asked to participate in compromised and demoralizing exercises while outcomes appear increasingly settled in advance. Shared governance has been weakened rather than strengthened.
The administration has not pursued public and legislative solutions with the urgency this moment requires. State-level avenues remain open. A serious university leadership would be in Salem, in HECC, and in the public sphere all year, pressing for stabilization and a different future for PSU.
Members have no confidence in leadership that asks the university to absorb damage before it has seriously invested in concrete steps toward future renewal and recovery.
The administration has failed to present a funded path to growth. The university continues to speak the language of retention, transfer, civic partnership, and strategic investment, while moving concretely toward layoffs and program cuts. Those are not the same thing.
Contraction is being proposed as the answer to a problem of
underfunding. Austerity is being offered as the only antidote to previous cuts and divestments.
Administration is pursuing irreversible academic harm without first building and funding the work of recovery. PSU has an enrollment and tuition problem. The university’s own materials acknowledge thinly funded and underbuilt recruitment, marketing, transfer, and student enrollment infrastructure.
Today, outside of the Board of Trustees meeting, PSU-AAUP members began a vote of no confidence in President Cudd’s leadership.
Today, outside of the Board of Trustees meeting, PSU-AAUP members began a vote of no confidence in PSU President Cudd’s leadership.
PSU working conditions are PSU learning conditions. The Cudd administration's layoffs, program eliminations, and institutional contraction threaten teaching, advising, student pathways, and the broader educational mission of the university.
Ben Cushing, @pccffap.bsky.social President and PCC strike leader, explaining how from PSU to PCC managed decline by administrators making $300,000-$700,000 per year is unacceptable. Calls for statewide academic labor to undertake a combined campaign to remake higher education.
City Councilors Candace Avalos, Tiffany Koyama Lane, and Mitch Green calling on the Cudd administration to stop the cuts and fight for funding outside PSU's Board of Trustees earlier
City Councilors Candace Avalos, Tiffany Koyama Lane, and Mitch Green calling on the Cudd administration to stop the cuts and fight for funding outside PSU's Board of Trustees earlier
City Councilors Candace Avalos, Tiffany Koyama Lane, and Mitch Green calling on the Cudd administration to stop the cuts and fight for funding outside PSU's Board of Trustees earlier
City Councilors Candace Avalos, Tiffany Koyama Lane, and Mitch Green calling on the Cudd administration to stop the worst layoffs in PSU history and fight for funding outside PSU's Board of Trustees
City Councilors Mitch Green, Tiffany Koyama Lane, and Candace Avalos calling on the Cudd administration to stop the worst layoffs in PSU history and fight for funding outside PSU's Board of Trustees
RIGHT NOW: PSU AAUP members are rallying outside final board of trustees meeting before the worst layoffs in PSU history. The cuts are expected to target 200 workers, decimate 19 programs, & severely impact hundreds of students
This could all be avoided.
It’s time to fight.
@psuaaup.bsky.social
NEW:
“While the PSU board & administrators point to a "structural deficit," these cuts are not a financial necessity; they are a political choice that prioritizes administrative bloat & capital projects over the livelihoods of dedicated public servants.”
— Todd Wolfson & Randi Weingarten @aft.org
We stand with @psuaaup.bsky.social and the students, faculty and staff at Portland State. @aaup.org @aft.org @rweingarten.bsky.social
"Today, AAUP President Todd Wolfson and AFT President Randi Weingarten issued the following statement calling on Portland State University President Ann Cudd and PSU’s Board of Trustees to halt their rushed and ill-conceived plan to impose deep cuts to academic programs and the academic workforce."
"Today, AAUP President Todd Wolfson and AFT President Randi Weingarten issued the following statement calling on Portland State University President Ann Cudd and PSU’s Board of Trustees to halt their rushed and ill-conceived plan to impose deep cuts to academic programs and the academic workforce."
We won!!!! Our strike won!!! This tentative agreement is a sea change from all the offers we received prior to yesterday. I'm exhausted (since the tentative agreement came past my bedtime and then I was way too excited to sleep), but so happy to be going back to work today. I wonder if it had...
@psuaaup.bsky.social's David Kinsella writes in #Academe about the spread of AI-enabled tools in higher education consulting: “The experience at PSU suggests that what is being sold as decision intelligence is better understood as a new frontier in academic austerity.”
"The structural challenges facing public universities are real, and administrators will continue to turn to data and AI-enabled tools from firms like Gray DI to rationalize program reductions and eliminations. The question is not whether administrations will use consultant-built systems but whether the faculty will allow those systems to operate without clear standards, validation, or limits. We already devote considerable attention to articulating norms for generative AI in classrooms and research; the stakes are at least as high when AI-enabled analytics help decide which of our academic programs survive. Because this era of austerity is increasingly mediated through decision-intelligence platforms, faculty senates and unions must press for concrete safeguards: requirements that models be locally tested against institutional experience, that methods and data sources be open to scrutiny, and that governance bodies—not vendors—define how far algorithmic “advice” can reach into decisions about academic programming and curriculum."
"Because this era of austerity is increasingly mediated through decision-intelligence platforms, faculty senates and unions must press for concrete safeguards," PSU-AAUP VP for Collective Bargaining David Kinsella in Academe
www.aaup.org/color-coded-...
