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by Kevin Foster

Amid an $18 million budget deficit, Portland State University is laying off 17 non-tenure track faculty, citing “changes in programmatic and curricular needs.” The university issued layoff notices on Dec. 13.

While the current layoff plans are less severe than the 94 notices sent to staff a few months ago, the faculty union, PSU-American Association of University Professors, (AAUP), disputes the necessity of these layoffs, accusing university administration of failing to negotiate meaningfully.

PSU hopes to address the $18 million shortfall, including through layoffs, by July 1, 2025.

“The layoff notices issued this week to instructional faculty reflect comprehensive analyses of our academic programs’ performance and growth potential carried out in each of our schools and colleges in consultation with the provost’s office, faculty, and staff,” PSU’s Office of Academic Affairs says.

The layoffs come at a tense time when labor contract negotiations between PSU administration and AAUP have failed. The recent series of events lays the groundwork for a potential strike that could occur in 2025. 

On November 15th, PSU-AAUP called for bargaining mediation—a process by which a third party assists in reaching a collective bargaining agreement—because the PSU administration refused to bargain related to “economics.”

PSU’s Office of Academic Affairs says there were still eight topics brought by AAUP that were supposed to be handled before moving to the “economic summit” portion of negotiations. AAUP counters that the economic portion of negotiations had already been delayed twice, and they were ready to move on.

“We opened everything we wanted to open, but so many things have economic aspects, and we had already planned on the days to discuss economics and they kept stalling, stalling, stalling,” Emily Ford, president of PSU-AAUP, told the Mercury. “There is no point in sitting across a table trying to have a productive conversation and trying to productively troubleshoot, when one side of the table is unwilling or has no interest in discussing economics.”

One of the greatest sticking points in negotiations is a financial report from Howard Bunsis, a professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan University and a certified public accountant. The Bunsis Report claims PSU is in a much better financial position than their own internal analysis suggests, due to increasing state support, solid bond ratings, and an accounting change that lists over $149 million in pension liabilities when the state of Oregon is responsible for paying these. 

The report suggests the layoffs are unnecessary, and asserts administrative roles and salaries are increasing much faster than faculty, while pay for PSU faculty fails to keep up with inflation, and the salaries of peers.

Andria Johnson, PSU’s vice president of finance and administration, said in an interview with the PSU Vanguard that the Bunsis Report uses different accounting standards than that of public universities. In essence, she suggests that certain funds at PSU are segmented and can’t always be used the way the Bunsis Report claims.

“PSU’s Board of Trustees has asked the finance team to review and provide a comparison of the university’s analysis with the Bunsis report,” Johnson told the Mercury. “That comparison will focus on key takeaways and assumptions and will be shared with the campus community in the Winter term.”

Faculty cite administrative bloat and subsidized programs like athletics as examples of misplaced priorities, especially amid a 21 percent total enrollment decline since 2019.

“We view budgets as moral documents and if you have the money to be funding things that are not mission critical to the university, but you don’t have the money to fund mission-critical, then it’s just a matter of your priorities and your spending is just happening in the wrong place,” Ford says.

In October, notices of potential layoff were sent to a majority of the University Studies department—the general education program at PSU. Ford says somewhere around 90 percent of general education at PSU is done by University Studies, which helps students acquire essential writing and critical thinking skills needed to succeed in their coursework. 

“We’re governed by a Board of Trustees,” Ford says. “To a large extent, those trustees don’t fully understand higher education… Some of them do come from higher education, but those with the most power on that board of trustees have pointed to unions and workers as ‘operational complexities’ that they have to overcome in order to balance their budget.”

News of the potential cuts to 94 staff members in October led students and faculty to speak before the university’s Board of Trustees on November 21, with many questioning PSU’s ability to forecast for the future.

Faculty Trustee Vicki Reitenauer questioned specifically how PSU plans to handle what she considers likely revenue losses from faculty layoffs and reputational damages. Reitenauer’s questions couldn’t immediately be answered by university staff.

“The austerity narrative is that there is an administration and a Board of Trustees that wants to run the university like a corporation,” Ford says. “A university is a public good. People go there to learn, people work there to teach and to expand their knowledge and learn alongside their students. That’s not an environment that lends itself to being run like a corporation where you react to every year’s budget with cutbacks or investments. It’s a longer term strategy than that.”

On top of the negotiation troubles, PSU faces grievances from both PSU-AAUP and the PSU Faculty Association for potential violations of their collective bargaining agreements, but PSU denies the claims made in the grievances. 

Without a labor agreement in the coming months, PSU-AAUP could strike as early as March.