She introduced herself as an activist and a bureaucrat. The credentials: organizer of Portland’s first Pride march, in 1976 with six other activists and an audience of 200; the drafter of the city’s civil rights ordinance with co-author Keeston Lowery; service as the State of Oregon’s affirmative action office; and trainer for four decades in diversity, equity, and inclusion.

When the woman who helped write your civil rights ordinance takes a number to discuss your behavior, the hearing is already over. She cut her biography short in her introduction: “That’s enough. I only have three minutes.”

In those minutes, she delivered a conduct review. To describe its format, let us turn to a published rubric the Seattle Public Schools use, because it tracks Saadat’s commentary well.

Rule One: “Treat others with respect and fairness.”

“I am angry,” Saadat began. “I am frustrated. I am confused.” What angers her is the name-calling, the slights, the disrespect.

She declined to name any individual councilor as the source. This was not mercy. “I consider each and every one of you to be responsible for the overall functioning of this council,” she explained, which means the entire class stays after the bell.

Rule Two: “Do classroom assignments and homework neatly, on time, and to the best of your ability.”

The homework standard she assigned: policy developed from relevant data, documented need, available resources, the opinions of the people affected, and the values of the city. One would assume none of this needed to be read aloud to a seated government. She read it anyway, at testimony pace, the way a teacher handles a class that has fallen behind.

Rule Three: “No spitting, swearing, or name calling.”

The school files this rule under recess. “I don’t want to see you paid to bicker,” Saadat said. “I don’t want to pay you to call one another names or disparage one another.”

Rule Four: “Try to solve a problem before going to an adult.”

The school recommends discussion, voting, or rock, paper, scissors. Two weeks before Saadat testified, the council faced a budget dispute, tried voting, and tied. It then summoned the mayor, who is not a member of the body, and conducted a floor dispute over whether he is anyone’s daddy. Rock, paper, scissors remains available.

Rule Five: “Leave things at home that are not needed for school.”

The school’s list: candy, gum, junk food, toys, and radios. Saadat’s addition came with storage instructions: “know when your ego is in the way of progress,” she told the councilors, “and put it in your desk drawer.” Whether drawers engineered for pens and staples can hold what she is asking them to hold is a question of capacity, not compliance.

The class has been warned before.

In 2022, when Portland voted to redesign its entire government, Saadat opposed the measure, warning that sending more people into a dysfunctional room does not make the room functional. The voters thanked her for her service and approved the measure anyway.

On August 5, she delivered the grade in person. The test is the rest of the term.

Readers of this newsletter know it as a place for higher education, politics, and culture. Today's essay is none of those, and all of them: it is about a member of my household who has been diagnosed with three months to live. Regular programming will return soon.

For most of his eleven years, Zuki has believed he could catch a squirrel. It is not a casual belief but an article of faith, held against all evidence. Lately he has brought that same faith to the wild rabbits at the Portland Rose Garden, the cows and the goats behind the fence at a farm, and the fat campus squirrels who sit on the benches at Portland State and let him come as close as they please.

Between him and each of them lies a distance—a length of grass, a stretch of chain-link, a few yards of wet pavement—that the other animal has measured and Zuki has not agreed to. He stands at its edge, his whole body leaning in, quivering. What he means to do when he gets there depends on the animal: he would run a squirrel down, but he only wants to mingle with the cows and the goats. It has never mattered which; either way, what he cannot bear is the distance.

The goats and the cows, and the whole field between.

Before the diagnosis, we drove out every morning to watch the rabbits. They would graze the low greenery, wild and unhurried, until they caught his outline against the light and went still. After a while they would decide the morning was over, fold themselves back into the hedges, and we would drive home. It was hardly an outing at all, but he treated it like the whole day’s work.

Then one July morning, while we were vacationing overseas, a call came from our Portland home. Our sitter had noticed Zuki chewing at his left side and favoring it. Worried, she took him to the vet. The X-rays showed a mass the size of a marble and nothing more; only a biopsy could determine whether it was benign.

He was eleven. Only the December before, he had been diagnosed with hip dysplasia and arthritis in the leg, and across a spring and summer of our comings and goings, the sitter had watched him slow down.

We came home. They aspirated the lump, but the results were inconclusive, so they surgically removed it from his mouth, where it had been troubling him, and sent it to the lab. A week later the answer came in the shortest form it could take: melanoma, the aggressive kind, three months.

What I want said first is that he has had a wonderful life.

It began in 2015, when we drove him home from Talent, a town down in southern Oregon, a black-and-white puppy small enough to sleep the length of the drive. He grew into the house, and the household grew around him.

The drive home from Talent.

His first year.

He took formal swimming lessons and never learned to swim. The water was no more moved by his faith than the squirrels were.

Swimming lessons, which never took.

The coast, though, is another matter. He walked the long gray beaches of the Oregon shore, tongue out and wet to the elbows, following Laurie down the tideline with the surf unspooling behind them.

The Oregon coast.

He knows the city’s parks in every weather, snow one winter and wet leaves the next fall, and he runs when the ground allows it, flat out down the side yard with his ears streaming, in a blur no camera ever quite catches.

Snow one winter, leaves the next.

He is, it should be said, a much-celebrated dog. There are barkdays with his name spelled in glitter, a Fair Isle sweater for the coldest week of the year, and a paisley bow tie for special occasions, and he wears all of it with the ease of an animal who has always understood he is the reason for the evening.

Barkdays, holidays, Santa, and bow ties.

And he is a house dog in the deepest sense: a creature of rugs and window seats and a cot bed set against a wall of books, where he sleeps through the long afternoons while the household reads and works around him. The framed painting above his favorite rug is a bowl of flowers; he never looks at it, and it presides over him anyway.

Afternoons, among the books.

The contortionist at rest.

He belongs to the people in that house, and they to him. At the holidays the circle widens—the table crowded, the chairs full, the dog somewhere in the middle of it.

His people.

A full table, and Zuki in the thick of it.

He has never thought much of being boarded. At the dog hotel, the webcam caught him with his paws up on the gate, taking the measure of it.

The webcam at the dog hotel. Plans were being made.

His favorite park is Council Crest, the high green crown of the city. A century ago it was an amusement park, the Dreamland of the Northwest, with a roller coaster and a Ferris wheel and a streetcar that climbed to the summit. The rides are long gone, but no one told Zuki. He takes the hill tree to tree in a flurry of hope, certain that this squirrel, this one, is finally the one. He has never caught one. But the parks are full of them, up in the branches and out on the benches, and he keeps his vigil at every one. Once, he got his proof: a squirrel on a branch right where he had sworn one would be.

The proof, circled in yellow.

Three months is not a long way off. You can see clear across to the end of it. He cannot, and so we still drive out in the mornings, and the rabbits still keep their length of grass between us, and Zuki still leans toward them with his whole body, wanting only to close it.

In 2017, I was searching the Center for Jewish History’s online archive of the HIAS Vienna office, looking for my own file. It turned up misspelled, beside a case number and an arrival date. In the same records, I came upon a black-and-white photograph of a man in his forties. On the back, someone had written his name. By then, of the people who had helped me escape, all I had left was a number in a worn address book and a face I could not remember. Here, at last, was one of them.

He had devoted his life to the rescue of the displaced, and he had done it nearly everywhere. Vienna came first: he directed the Central European office of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and later oversaw the U.S. State Department’s refugee-processing office in the same city. Nairobi came next, where he was a senior resettlement expert for the UN refugee agency. He taught along the way — at Oberlin, Occidental, Indiana, and the American University in Paris — and lectured as far afield as Astrakhan and Ulaanbaatar. He lived in four apartments, in Venice, Vienna, Paris, and New York, and seemed at home in all of them, like a man who had decided early that the world was one place.

When we met in Venice, he was teaching immigration law at Ca’ Foscari University. I was going to be nearby, at a conference in Pula — on the Croatian coast just across the Adriatic — so I wrote to him on Facebook, explained the book I was writing, and asked to meet. He chose the restaurant and arrived early to claim a table on the Grand Canal, under an umbrella, in the September sun.

We talked for more than two hours over Venetian spritzers and fried olives. I am, by habit, the quiet one. That afternoon I was not: I pressed him with question after question, and he filled every gap in a story I had known only in fragments for three decades. He explained the operation that got young Iranian Jews out of the country, most of them men, before they could be conscripted as cannon fodder into the Iran-Iraq war. Setting up the program had required arrangements with the Austrian government, the International Red Cross, and the U.S. State Department. He was a natural raconteur, moving from the daily work of resettlement to the palace intrigue of Cold War Vienna, naming names and laughing at the vanities of the powerful. What he gave back across the table, with the patience of a man who had spent his career explaining bureaucracies to the bewildered, was everything I had lost: the work, the people, the office at Brahmsplatz.

Bruce still remembered the names I had forgotten. Leon Hendler, the Polish commercial attaché who disappeared from Vienna in 1954, reportedly seized by Soviet police and flown to Warsaw. Duňa Slavíková, exiled from Czechoslovakia for her Charter 77 activism. Eddy Demm, who arranged transport and lodging for Iranian and Russian refugees and then dropped out of the record. To Bruce, they were the ordinary staff of an ordinary office that happened to stand at the seam between captivity and freedom. He recalled Jerry Stuchiner as well, the immigration officer who interviewed me in 1985 and stamped the paper that became my American life.

The following summer we met again, this time in Paris. After dinner we walked up to his apartment for a nightcap, and he mixed the spritzers himself: one part Prosecco, one part Aperol, one part soda. He wanted to come to Portland, and he asked me to arrange it. What had begun as research for my book had become a friendship. The rescuer and the rescued had turned into two men trading gossip over drinks, one of them promising to visit the other’s city.

Across two decades in Vienna, he opened doors for thousands of people. He spoke of it the way another man might speak of a long stretch at a trusted firm. The heroism was in the steadiness of it: the office opened each morning, and every application received an answer.

A gay, Jewish scholar of migration, he taught a history that was also his own. His paternal family had lived near Lviv for three centuries, until Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators burned relatives alive in their synagogue. Their names are now fixed to a plaque on the ruins.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, he sided with Kyiv without romanticizing the moment, naming both the statues raised to Nazi collaborators and the wartime ban on military-age men leaving the country. He cut ties with the Russian migration ministry the day it asked him to circulate a lie about the origins of a virus. He never let his own injuries harden into a simple verdict.

Bruce died in Venice in April 2023, at 80, before the visit to Portland he had planned. The funeral was held in the Ghetto, and he was buried in the Jewish cemetery on the Lido, in the city where he had spent his last decade teaching immigration law to a continent steadily forgetting why the law exists. When he died, I wrote that he had been a humanitarian, a scholar, and a friend. I meant all three.

I still have the photograph. The man in it is no longer a stranger in an archive but a friend I outlived. I owe him a true account of what he did, and this essay is the first installment.

Bruce Liemsidor and author, Venice, 2018

A university does not ordinarily launch a $750 million capital campaign in the same year it books a $31 million deficit, cuts $20 million from its budget, lays off 40 staff members, and freezes hiring for three years. In October 2025, the University of Tulsa did. Campaign materials called the moment an “inflection point.” Megan Zahneis’s reporting in The Chronicle of Higher Education makes clear what the phrase leaves unsaid.¹

In this context, “inflection point” is a euphemism for a transaction. The institution asks a new set of donors to underwrite recovery from self-inflicted damage. Tulsa arrived there by a route Portland State has now entered, and the record is already public.

Zahneis follows a string of presidents, each of whom left the next one with a crisis to manage. Steadman Upham pursued expansion through construction. Gerard Clancy answered the resulting strain with a plan that cut academic programs, branded True Commitment, which reduced offerings by 40 percent and drew no-confidence votes and national criticism. Brad Carson reversed much of that austerity and staked his presidency on an ascent to R1 research status, funded by ambitious spending. Rick Dickson, the interim president who followed, returned the institution to austerity and a narrower mission. Four presidents, one recurring pattern. Each administration spent or cut the university into a condition its successor was left to undo.

The first of those crises traces back to a construction boom. During the expansion under Upham, branded Embrace the Future, the campus grew by more than one million square feet, including a 70,000-square-foot performing-arts center. The campaign exceeded its fundraising goal. The buildings cost more than the campaign raised for them.

According to a 2022 presentation that Carson later gave to members of the Board of Trustees, a document the university disputed, Tulsa spent $370 million on capital expansion while raising only $280 million for construction, and borrowed from its restricted funds to cover the difference. The gap became a nearly $62 million unfunded liability.¹ In 2016, as deficits mounted, Upham suspended the university’s contributions to employees’ retirement accounts and cut 43 staff positions. The people who worked at the university helped pay down the cost of the buildings raised while the money was flowing. The hall goes up in the boom. The faculty pay for it in the bust.

Portland State University has reversed the order. In June 2025, the Oregon Legislature authorized $137.5 million in state bonds for Portland State’s Performing Arts and Culture Center through Senate Bill 5505, and the university advanced the project.² A market feasibility study commissioned by the city concluded in January 2026 that Portland could not support two large venues capable of hosting touring Broadway, and it recommended the PSU site.³ The university pressed forward. Nine months after the bond authorization, Portland State announced formal retrenchment under President Ann Cudd to close a budget deficit. Its final plan, released in July 2026, confirmed 36 faculty layoffs. The promise was downtown revival; the result was a monument advanced and a faculty reduced.

Tulsa expanded during the boom and cut during the bust. Portland State proposes to cut first and build anyway, into an economy that offers no boom to build into.

Oregon’s unemployment rate was 5.2 percent in June 2026, close to a full point above the national rate of 4.2 percent, and it has held at that level for a full year. Total nonfarm payroll employment fell by 8,500 jobs over the year, a decline of 0.4 percent, with losses in both the private sector and government.⁴ Manufacturing shed 10,000 jobs, a contraction of 5.6 percent and the steepest of any major industry. Health care and social assistance added 14,000, the one substantial gain, and that gain reflects an aging population rather than a widening market for discretionary tickets.

The state's own forecast promises no rescue. The Office of Economic Analysis called its June outlook one of slower growth and revised anticipated job creation downward. Oregon grows more slowly than the nation, and the state projects population growth averaging 0.4 percent a year through 2035.⁵ The audience base for a landmark venue is not expanding; it is close to flat.

Oregon now closes more businesses than it opens. Figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, first reported by The Oregonian, show business closures outrunning openings by 1,700 in 2024 and by roughly 6,000 through the first three quarters of 2025.⁶⁷ The imbalance is the longest the state has sustained since the Great Recession.⁸ Bingjie Kong of the Oregon Employment Department attributed the pattern to a cooling labor market and to conditions that make new businesses reluctant to enter. A state that shutters more establishments than it opens is shrinking the tax base and consumer spending that a new venue would require.

Portland exhibits the starker version of the decline. The Portland Metro Chamber reported that the region lost 8,800 jobs in 2025, the fourth-worst performance among the nation’s metropolitan regions, and that Portland has fallen to second from last in national real estate outlooks.⁹ Intel, the region’s largest private employer, has carried out repeated rounds of layoffs at its Washington County operations.

Downtown, the district on which a new center would depend, has not recovered its weekday economy. Even after two quarters of slight improvement, downtown office vacancy stood at 36.5 percent in the second quarter of 2026, more than triple its level at the end of 2019,¹⁰ and the Chamber’s own analysis found that even a full return to pre-pandemic office attendance would raise downtown foot traffic only to about half its former level. Hybrid work is a lasting condition, not a temporary one. A 3,000-seat touring hall depends on discretionary spending, tourism, and downtown recovery accelerating, and every current indicator points the other way.

The would-be owner of the hall just laid off 100 people. The city closed a record general-fund shortfall of $170 million for the 2026-27 fiscal year, discontinuing about 140 positions in the budget it adopted in June.¹¹ Oregon ArtsWatch has reported that the city faces more than $1 billion in arts, culture, and entertainment infrastructure needs on which it has yet to hold a full public hearing.¹² Metro has moved to return management of the Portland’5 venues to the city by mid-2027. The proposal would add a capital obligation of several hundred million dollars to a portfolio the city cannot presently maintain, in a budget cut to the bone.

Supporters appeal to necessity. The Keller Auditorium, which opened in 1917, does not meet current seismic standards, and a prolonged closure would strip Portland of its only stage able to host touring Broadway and the revenue those shows return to the smaller halls. The seismic hazard is real. It establishes that the region needs a working large venue. But it does not show that the region needs a new city-owned hall, estimated at up to $447 million, rather than a renovated Keller at about $290 million.¹³¹⁴ The feasibility study the university welcomed found no market for two large halls at all. Necessity is being enlisted to justify the price, and the two are not the same claim.

The proposal should be seen in full context. The Performing Arts and Culture Center would occupy four acres at the southern edge of downtown, the largest developable parcel in the central city, two blocks from the Keller: a 3,000-seat Broadway house owned by the city, a smaller academic venue for the university, a hotel, and parking, with supporters projecting activation of seven surrounding blocks.

On July 28, Portland State asked the council’s City Life Committee to commit by December 1 to a project agreement and an initial city investment of $44 million toward a 2030 opening, citing $12.6 million in early private pledges. Testimony against the resolution put the missing numbers on the record: a combined cost for the new complex and a renovated Keller approaching $1 billion, no identified funding source for the city’s share, and a feasibility study that weighed one large hall against the other but never analyzed the two-venue plan the council is being asked to approve.¹⁴

A constructive alternative exists, and it comes from the administration itself. In her December 2023 report for the governor’s Central City Task Force, President Cudd outlined what Portland State could contribute to downtown: educational spaces redesigned to better connect with the community, upgraded existing buildings, expanded childcare in the central city, and affordable student housing in the core.¹⁵

The university’s $137.5 million in state bonds could support that agenda. An academic hall of 800 to 900 seats, the size the university’s own programs require, along with renovation of its existing teaching spaces, would give students and faculty the facilities they now lack. Meanwhile, the city could fund the least expensive repair of the auditorium it already owns, estimated at $236 million, to keep the Keller at full capacity.¹⁴

The same crews that raise a theater can raise a dormitory or renovate a classroom, and the workforce agreement the university has already signed would cover that work as well.¹⁴ The remaining objection is continuity, the question of where touring Broadway performs while the Keller is repaired, and it has remedies far cheaper than a new hall: phased construction or a temporary stage, possibilities the committee testimony said the feasibility study set aside without serious analysis.¹⁴

Redirecting the bonds would require new legislation. The proposal on the table asks for more: a public university entering the commercial theater business amid shrinking enrollment, and a city assuming an obligation of several hundred million dollars for which it cannot name a funding source.

The comparison to Tulsa raises one fair objection, and it deserves a full answer. Tulsa is a private university that spent its endowment and borrowed against its restricted funds. The Performing Arts and Culture Center is a joint project: the large hall would belong to the city, and Portland State’s share is financed by state bonds authorized through Senate Bill 5505 rather than endowment draws. The financing instruments differ, and the difference is not cosmetic.

The difference ends there. Capital ambition creates a hidden liability; austerity covers it; a new campaign begins in the middle of the damage and rebrands that moment an inflection point. That sequence holds whether the money is endowment or bond, private draw or public authorization. What Portland State changes is the order, and that makes the problem worse. Tulsa at least completed the boom before the bill came due. Portland State has begun eliminating faculty before the complex is built, in a state forecasting slower growth and a metropolitan economy shedding jobs. The university reaches the austerity stage first and proposes to stack the capital ambition on top of it.

A genuine budget emergency suspends discretionary ambition until the crisis passes. When an administration invokes emergency language to eliminate departments while advancing a monumental building, the emergency is not forcing the cuts; it is excusing them. The administration will reply that the hall is an investment rather than an ambition, a bet on enrollment and downtown revenue. The preceding figures price that bet: a flat population, a shrinking metro, and a market that the city’s own study says cannot support two halls. Tulsa is the clearest example of where that bet leads. The performing-arts center still stands. Several of the academic programs cut to service the boom that raised it do not. The building outlived the faculty lines.

Portland State has that record in front of it, published nationally, before the concrete is poured. Tulsa is not a hypothetical about what could occur in Portland. It documents what happens when the same sequence plays out elsewhere, for the same reasons, under the same euphemism. The hall goes up in the boom. The faculty pay for it in the bust. Portland proposes to skip the boom and keep the bill.

SOURCES

1. Megan Zahneis, “The University That Couldn’t Stop Reinventing Itself” (online title: “The Ambition Trap”), The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 2, 2025 (January 2, 2026 issue). https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-ambition-trap

2. Portland State University, “PSU-Led Performing Arts and Culture Center Builds Momentum With $155 Million in State, City and Private Funding,” June 30, 2025. https://www.pdx.edu/news/psu-led-performing-arts-and-culture-center-builds-momentum-155-million-state-city-and-private

3. “Plan for two-venue Keller Auditorium, PSU Performing Arts Center challenged,” Oregon ArtsWatch, January 27, 2026. https://www.orartswatch.org/future-of-keller-auditorium-psu-performing-arts-center-challenged/

4. Oregon Employment Department, “Oregon’s Unemployment Rate Remains at 5.2% in June” (news release), July 15, 2026; data at QualityInfo.org. https://flashalert.net/id/OreEmployment/189753

5. Oregon Office of Economic Analysis, June 2026 Economic and Revenue Forecast, released May 20, 2026. https://www.oregon.gov/das/oea/Documents/OEA-Forecast-0626.pdf

6. “Oregon business closures outnumber openings — and the gap is growing,” Oregon Insight, The Oregonian / OregonLive, July 12, 2026. https://www.chronline.com/stories/oregon-business-closures-outnumber-openings-and-the-gap-is-growing,405346

7. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Business Employment Dynamics — Oregon” (second quarter 2025 data). https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/businessemploymentdynamics_oregon.htm

8. “More business openings than closings in Oregon in last decade, despite economic stigma,” Oregon Capital Chronicle, April 7, 2026. https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2026/04/07/more-business-openings-than-closings-in-oregon-in-last-decade-despite-dour-economic-stigma/

9. Portland Metro Chamber, 2026 State of the Economy and 2026 State of Downtown & the Central City, February 2026. https://portlandmetrochamber.com/resources/2026-state-of-the-economy/ and https://portlandmetrochamber.com/resources/2026-state-of-downtown/

10. “Downtown Portland office vacancy rate falls for second straight quarter,” Axios Portland, July 22, 2026. https://www.axios.com/local/portland/2026/07/22/downtown-office-vacancy-rate-falls-second-quarter

11. City of Portland, “Portland City Council adopts final budget for 2026-27,” June 18, 2026. https://www.portland.gov/hello/news/2026/6/18/portland-city-council-adopts-final-budget-2026-27

12. “Portland facing $1 billion-plus in arts, culture and entertainment infrastructure requests,” Oregon ArtsWatch, March 2026. https://www.orartswatch.org/portland-facing-1-billion-plus-in-arts-culture-and-entertainment-infrastructure-requests/

13. “Future of Keller Auditorium headed to Portland City Council,” Oregon ArtsWatch, June 2026. https://www.orartswatch.org/future-of-keller-auditorium-headed-to-portland-city-council/

14. Portland City Council, City Life Committee, public hearing on the Performing Arts and Culture Center resolution, July 28, 2026 (hearing record and testimony). https://www.portland.gov/council/agenda/city-life-committee/2026/7/28

15. Ann Cudd, “Portland is What We Make It,” Portland State University Office of the President blog, December 14, 2023. https://www.pdx.edu/president/blog/portland-what-we-make-it

Two days later, at about 2 a.m., a rock thrown through her open window struck her in the head. She reported the vandalism the day it happened; according to the complaint, no action was taken to protect her, and she transferred to another university.

Reed has not completed its investigation and admits no wrongdoing. Yet the settlement the college signed this month, which its filers call a national model, shows what campus civil-rights enforcement in America has become: a series of private bargains, campus by campus, under the threat of losing federal funding. The statute that would set one rule for every college remains in a Senate committee.

The complaints, filed under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, were submitted to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in 2024: one filed by a graduate student who left the college over harassment he reported, the other by the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.

On July 23, the parties announced a settlement, reached through mediation supervised by that office and effective July 17. Reed admitted no liability and continues to maintain that it did not violate Title VI. Instead, it agreed to a set of ongoing obligations running three years from the effective date. The two organizations that filed the September complaint announced the agreement jointly with the college.

The agreement is unusually specific. It reads less like a one-off truce than a draft of a broader enforcement framework for campuses. Reed will append guidance to its discrimination policy stating that the college considers the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, with its contemporary examples, to the extent the definition is useful as evidence of discriminatory intent. The guidance will state that for many Jewish people, Zionism is integral to their religious, ancestral, or ethnic identity, and that targeting Jews on the basis of Zionist identity constitutes prohibited discrimination when the policy’s other elements are met.

The college will appoint a Title VI coordinator. Faculty and staff will not cancel classes, excuse attendance, or apply incentives or disincentives for students to attend protests during class time. An independent consultant, selected in consultation with the ADL and the Brandeis Center, will evaluate the college’s handling of discrimination complaints for three years and publish an annual public report comparing how antisemitism complaints fare against complaints from other protected groups.

Mandatory training will cover incoming students, student-organization leaders, faculty, and the student judicial board. The college will pursue a credit-bearing partnership with at least one Israeli university, run climate surveys for two more academic years, and deliver a private written apology to the student struck by the rock.

Where these obligations come from matters as much as what they require, because none of them comes from statute. Each was hammered out in mediation between a private college and two advocacy organizations, supervised by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, and conducted under the pressure that hangs over every such negotiation: a school that refuses to settle a Title VI complaint risks its federal funding, and this year that risk is not hypothetical. About 100 of Reed’s students, about 7 percent of its enrollment, are Jewish, by Hillel International’s estimate. The college made the same calculation many others have made this year: a settlement was preferable to a fight. It signed.

There is a bill that would make this kind of forced calculation unnecessary.

The Jewish American Security Act, introduced in the Senate on May 19 by Senators Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and James Lankford (R-OK), would turn much of what Reed just accepted under pressure into a national standard for colleges that receive federal funding. One section is titled “Protecting Jewish students.” In places, its provisions read as if they were lifted from the Reed agreement in advance. Section 4 would require every institution receiving federal education funding to designate a Title VI coordinator, adopt a written nondiscrimination policy, and publish a grievance procedure with set steps: a way to report, notice to the person who reported, supportive measures, an investigation, a resolution, and written notice of the outcome. It would require seven years of records on every complaint and every corrective step. It would amend the Clery Act so that campus hate-crime data is reported in the FBI’s bias categories, making clear who is being targeted and how often. It would also add an antisemitism coordinator at the Department of Education, tasked with twice-yearly reviews of all pending Title VI complaints and with drafting a deadline-based plan to resolve any left unresolved for more than 180 days.

Reed took on a version of that framework for one campus, under pressure, to close a file; the bill would make the same framework a condition of federal funding everywhere, before any rock is thrown. Under the bill, the coordinator Reed just agreed to appoint would be required at every school that takes federal education money. Since the day it was introduced, the bill has gone no further than the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. No markup. No vote. Nothing.

The provisions are contested, and that fight is playing out on two tracks: in Congress, where the bill has yet to move beyond committee, and on campus, where similar terms are advancing to settlement.

Much of the argument centers on the new guidance about Zionist identity. Supporters say that anti-Zionism now functions as the primary vehicle for antisemitism on campus, and that a Jewish student singled out for a presumed tie to Israel is being singled out for being Jewish.

Treating Zionist identity itself as a protected category turns a political stance into a status, and critics point to their own record: since October 2023, campuses have seen students suspended, faculty investigated, and programs canceled over speech about the war, a pattern civil-liberties groups across the spectrum have documented. For the people who have lived it, the chilling effect is already here. Both describe a part of life on American campuses, and neither is offered in bad faith.

The Reed agreement anticipates that objection and tries to write a compromise into policy. Its stated purpose is to prevent and address harassment rather than to restrict protected expression, and it affirms free speech, peaceful protest, and academic inquiry by name. The IHRA definition enters the policy in a confined role: as evidence of discriminatory intent when the required elements of a violation are otherwise met, not as a standalone test of what may be said. That qualifier carries the compromise for the whole document. Whether that balance can hold in practice is what the next three years at Reed will test.

A college can owe a Jewish student protection from a rock through the window and still owe every student the right to condemn a war. The difficulty is not in stating both principles. It arises at the point where they meet: the complaint about a poster, the chant at a rally, the protest at a lecture that has to be interpreted as either harassment or speech, a choice no policy language, negotiated or legislated, can erase.

A third view, focused less on definitions than on enforcement, is evident in the local reaction and deserves a serious answer. On this view, the conduct alleged at Reed was already prohibited several times over by criminal law, by college policy, and by Title VI itself, and the failure was one of enforcement rather than definition, so the settlement writes new guidance where the institution needed only the will to apply its existing rules.

Read closely, the agreement half concedes the point. Its recitals state that its central purpose is to affirm Reed’s commitment to treat complaints of discrimination and harassment against Jewish and Israeli students in the same manner and with the same urgency as complaints from any other protected group. A promise of that kind does not create a new rule. It is a promise to follow the rules that already exist, and the choice to hire an outside consultant for three years to check whether that promise is kept shows where the parties understood the alleged failure to lie.

There is an obvious objection to any argument that turns from the substance to the mechanism: a statute that codifies a flawed definition of discrimination does not cure the flaw; it nationalizes it. The objection is fair, and it is an argument for amending the bill in committee, which is what committees exist to do. It is not an argument for the present arrangement, in which the same substance arrives campus by campus through agreements that no legislature debated, no court reviewed, and no voter can answer for. The mechanism should be judged on its own terms, and on those terms the settlement model comes up short.

Enforcement by settlement is, in practice, enforcement by accident. It reaches only the institutions that happen to be named in a complaint by an organization with the resources to carry that complaint to the end. It leaves the rest of the campuses to make it up as they go, or to do nothing at all, until their own incident and their own complaint arrive. A Jewish student at a college that has not been sued receives whatever protection that college chooses to extend. A Jewish student at Reed now receives a monitored, documented, three-year compliance regime. The gap between them is not in what they suffered; it is in whether a national advocacy organization decided to take up their case.

A statute removes the accident by imposing the same baseline obligations on every federally funded institution and applying it whether a complaint has been filed or not, whether the ADL is watching or not, and whether the administration of the day wishes to threaten a particular school’s funding for reasons of its own.

The settlements now praised as models are, on inspection, evidence of a gap in the law. They exist because the legislation that would make them redundant has been left in a committee drawer. Critics who fear that the current wave of agreements is coercive are pointing to a real defect, and the way to address it is not to offer fewer protections but to write clearer law. A rule that applies to everyone is harder to aim at anyone.

Reed will spend the next three years demonstrating what compliance looks like when a single college negotiates it alone, under supervision, on a clock. Congress has the alternative in front of it and has left it in committee since spring. A settlement binds one campus; a statute binds the country. The choice between them is not a choice about whether antisemitism deserves an answer. It is a choice about whether the answer is bargained in private, one campus at a time, or debated in public and applied to all.

On June 9, 1941, some 2,500 Army troops entered the North American Aviation plant in Inglewood, California, and broke a strike. United Automobile Workers (UAW) Local 683 had called the strike over wages that had not kept pace with the defense boom.

One of its organizers was Wyndham Mortimer, a founding vice president of the UAW and a member of the Communist Party. The strike was legal under the union’s constitution, though it defied directives from CIO president Philip Murray and Sidney Hillman to hold off striking in defense plants while federal mediation ran its course. In the spring of 1941, the party held to the line that the war in Europe was imperialist, that American workers had no stake in it, and that defense production was a legitimate field for militant action. Mortimer had organized the strike on that premise.¹

Thirteen days later, German armored columns crossed the Soviet frontier.

The party line reversed overnight. The workers at Inglewood were told that the conditions that had made their strike a mistake had existed all along, and that they were now to be led back in without a contract or a concession. The reversal was not debated in the membership meeting but simply announced, a fact the workers did not fail to notice.

The strike at Inglewood was no outlier. By 1941, the Communist Party had spent a decade building the largest left presence in the American labor movement since the IWW, with major influence in the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), the National Maritime Union (NMU), the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), and parts of the UAW. These organizers were, for the most part, serious unionists. They led the Flint sit-down, built the NMU out of the wreckage of the old International Seamen’s Union, and organized Black workers and female workers in industries the AFL had neglected or refused to organize. They won contracts, led strikes, and survived.²

Over the course of the 1940s, the membership of those unions came to understand that their leaders were implementing a series of reversals in union strategy that mirrored decisions made in Moscow. The Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 required the party to abandon the Popular Front and recast the war as imperialist. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 required the reverse. The wartime no-strike pledge was then enforced against rank-and-file grievances with an intensity many non-party organizers did not match.³ The 1948 endorsement of Henry Wallace over Truman, against the near-unanimous position of the CIO leadership, was the reversal that finally forced the conflict inside the unions into the open. To see how such conflicts take shape inside unions, it helps to start with the basic form they often take: the caucus.⁴

A caucus is an organized group within a union that works to shift its direction. It puts forward candidates for office, takes positions on contracts, and makes its case in union meetings and elections. A caucus is not a separate union and holds no formal power; it succeeds only by persuading members. Where such a group wins the union’s offices, it is no longer a caucus but a leadership; the question of accountability follows it there. What follows traces how organizers came to their positions—whether from the members they organized or from organizations outside the union whose priorities the members never voted on.

Each of these strategic shifts could be defended on its own terms. The real problem, however, was the cumulative pattern: over time, members came to see that the union’s direction was being set elsewhere. By then, the question of to whom the organizers answered was no longer an abstraction; the membership knew.

The Price of Expulsions

In 1949 and 1950, the CIO expelled 11 of its member unions. Expulsion was not a symbolic censure. The federation revoked each union’s charter, cut it off from CIO organizing, legal, and financial support, and chartered a rival union with a mandate to take its members. The unions expelled were those charged with answering to the Communist Party rather than to their own memberships.

Philip Murray and the CIO leadership led the purge under pressure from the Truman administration, the Catholic Church, and the emerging anticommunist consensus in the press. The expulsions are usually remembered as Cold War events, and they were. But the pressure succeeded for a reason internal to the unions themselves: the members whose loyalty would decide the outcome no longer believed their union’s direction was truly its own.

The decision was formalized at the CIO’s 1949 convention in Cleveland. By that October, the outcome was already clear: the UE, the federation’s third-largest union, was to be expelled as a Communist instrument and replaced by the newly chartered IUE under James Carey.⁵ Over the following year, 10 more unions were expelled or forced out, representing some 900,000 members, about a fifth of the CIO at its peak.⁶ Some were folded into larger unions; a few, like the ILWU, survived. Most did not.

The standard account often glosses over how readily the expelled unions’ memberships accepted the split. UE officers expected members to rally against the IUE raid. They did not. The IUE began as a shell, but by 1950 and 1951 it was winning plant after plant, taking about half the UE’s membership over the following years.⁷ That outcome required CIO money, government backing, employer support—and members who no longer resisted.

The UE’s failure to hold its members was no accident; it was a cumulative result of a decade of reversals. By 1949, rank-and-file members had lived through a decade of reversals. Explanations for the union’s shifts on the Marshall Plan, Henry Wallace, or the wartime no-strike pledge no longer sounded like positions workers had reached together. They sounded like positions they had been told to adopt, then abandon, then adopt again. When the IUE came raiding, the UE asked its members to defend a direction they had never chosen. Many declined. By then, the question of to whom the organizers answered was being decided in the union elections.

The damage the expulsions did to the American labor movement was severe. Left-led unions had been among the most militant in the CIO and among the most willing to organize workers the AFL had abandoned. Their removal did not pass those capacities to the remaining unions. It destroyed many of them. After 1950, the CIO was a smaller and more cautious federation, and the 1955 merger with the AFL completed a shift already underway: away from organizing the unorganized and from the expansive premise on which the CIO had been founded.

Yet those losses alone do not explain why some left-led unions did not survive while others did. The ILWU helps explain why. Under Harry Bridges, the union operated more independently on questions of union strategy than the UE did, and its members recognized its positions as their own. The ILWU also had advantages in structure and position that the UE lacked: concentration on the West Coast waterfront and a stronger defensive position against raids.⁸ Any adequate explanation of its survival must include both how democratically the union was run and where and how it was situated in the economy.

Forms of Political Entry

To understand how outside organizations related to unions, it helps to distinguish several forms of political entry. The Communist Party was not the only entity to wrestle with organized entry into unions, only the most consequential one. The Trotskyist tradition matters here because it named the tactic, openly debated its purposes, and developed a vocabulary that the Communist case often blurred. In 1934, Trotsky urged his followers in France to enter the Socialist Party as a disciplined but temporary faction. The point was tactical: to enter where workers were radicalizing, recruit, build influence, and eventually reemerge as a stronger, independent force.

American Trotskyists tried their own version in 1936, when the Workers Party entered Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party. By their own standards, it worked: they recruited substantially from the left wing, especially the youth section, and, after the expulsion in 1937, emerged with a larger organization. James Cannon, the movement’s leading figure, later described it as what it had been: a planned entry to recruit and withdraw.⁹

The Socialist Party was a smaller organization than the CIO unions, and its internal dynamics are harder to reconstruct. Even so, the Trotskyists’ uneven record of entries helped give organizers a shared vocabulary for the different ways political groups could enter unions.

One form of entry is maneuver: a group enters a larger organization to recruit and later departs. Another is a colonizing entry: a cadre enters, intending to remain and gradually steer the host organization toward an outside program. A third is deep entry: over time, the cadre become inseparable from the rank and file around them, accountable to the union’s internal life rather than to directives from elsewhere. These are distinct forms. The Communist Party’s work in the CIO often resembled the second. The more enduring examples—Bridges and the ILWU, some UE locals, and later TDU—came closer to the third.

TDU and Deep Entry

Organizers who owe their allegiance to an organization outside the union will eventually face a test. They can defend the outside line and lose the membership; they can side with the membership and break with the outside organization; or they can try to pass the outside line off as the union’s own. That strategy can work for a while. Over time, it usually fails.

Teamsters for a Democratic Union is the clearest modern American example of the more deeply rooted form of caucus politics. It was founded in 1976 amid anger over a weak freight agreement and over a union structure that had denied the rank-and-file meaningful control for generations.

The founding meeting brought together several political tendencies: International Socialists, independent socialists, Catholic workers, unaffiliated militants, and members whose politics began and ended with workplace concerns. A principle reaffirmed from the start distinguished TDU: its positions would be set by the Teamsters, not by any outside tendency acting as such.¹⁰

TDU enforced that commitment in practice. Its conventions were open, its officers elected, and its positions on contracts, elections, and strategy developed through processes in which an outside cadre could argue their case but could not impose a position decided elsewhere. Participating political groups could contribute their ideas, but they did not set the course in advance.

What made TDU different was not the absence of politics but the presence of accountability. It did not take positions inside the union that had been set elsewhere. It opposed the 1976 contract because its members thought it was bad, and it backed Ron Carey in 1991 because years of organizing had persuaded them he was the candidate their movement had been building toward. In that respect, TDU came closer to deep entry: a cadre shaped by the union they were organizing, not simply placed in it from outside.

The 1991 election marked the reform movement’s greatest breakthrough. A federal consent decree made direct election of Teamster officers possible for the first time, and TDU had a candidate in Ron Carey, a militant UPS local president with no ties to the old guard. He won. The decree made the election possible; 15 years of rank-and-file organizing made the victory the members’ own. Carey then led the 1997 UPS strike, still remembered as the most effective private-sector strike of the decade.

Carey lost the 1997 election to Hoffa’s son, who then took over the leadership of the union. The reform movement spent much of the next two decades on the defensive before the O’Brien-Zuckerman slate won in 2021 under conditions TDU had spent years helping to create.¹¹ The reform movement endured because it had been built by a caucus answerable to the members it organized.

The Presence of Accountability

Taken together, these cases point to a distinction that does more to explain the outcomes than the specific ideology involved. Organizers rooted in the memberships around them built unions that could survive political tests. Organizers ultimately answerable to programs set elsewhere often built impressive unions and caucuses, too, but when those organizations were tested, they were harder to defend. Structure and circumstance determined which unions had any chance of withstanding a rival union’s raid at all. Among those that did, the decisive variable was the presence of accountability.

The question has never been whether workers can hold political convictions. The question is to whom the organizers answer when those convictions and the life of the union pull in different directions.

Endotes

^[1] Wyndham Mortimer, Organize! My Life as a Union Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971). The wildcat strike began the first week of June; roughly 2,500 Army troops seized the plant on June 9 and dispersed the picket line, and the workers voted to return the following day.

^[2] Harvey Levenstein, Communism, Anticommunism, and the CIO (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981); Steve Rosswurm, ed., The CIO’s Left-Led Unions (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

^[3] Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

^[4] Roger Keeran, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict That Shaped American Unions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

^[5] Proceedings of the Eleventh Constitutional Convention of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Cleveland, Ohio, October 31–November 4, 1949.

^[6] Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin, Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Eleven unions were expelled, representing a combined membership of roughly 900,000 to one million.

^[7] Rosswurm, The CIO’s Left-Led Unions. Roughly 300,000 former UE members joined the IUE within three years; over the raiding decade the UE lost more than half its membership.

^[8] Robert W. Cherny, Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2023); Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

^[9] James P. Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1944).

^[10] Dan La Botz, Rank and File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (New York: Verso, 1990).

^[11] Kim Moody, US Labor in Trouble and Transition (London: Verso, 2007); “Teamsters United Takes the Wheel,” Labor Notes, November 2021. The O’Brien-Zuckerman slate won by roughly 67 percent to 33 percent, the first TDU-backed victory in the international union in nearly a quarter-century.

“What you fund shows what you value.” Those were the words of Bridget Burns to a symposium on the future of Oregon’s higher education system on November 1, 2011.¹ At the time, Burns was chief of staff and senior policy advisor to the Oregon University System, the state agency that coordinated the state’s seven public universities. Within two years, she had left Salem. Within four, the agency she staffed no longer existed. Within 15 years, she was testifying before Congress as chief executive of a national consortium funded by the same foundations whose degree-attainment agenda had reorganized Oregon’s schools. Her career follows the same sequence of decisions that left Oregon’s universities to manage their own decline.

Burns’ rise through Oregon higher education system was rapid and, by her own account, unlikely. She grew up in a low-income family in rural Montana, began college with the support of a Pell Grant, and transferred to Oregon State University, where she served as student body president.² At 22, she was appointed to the Oregon State Board of Higher Education, the citizen board that then governed all seven public universities. She earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Oregon State in 2005 and a master’s in public policy in 2011, rising through the chancellor’s office to its senior staff position.³

The 2011 Rupture

Burns’ own success in higher education was not enough to dissuade her from leading its corporatization and subsequent dismantling, however. She led the government relations campaign behind the 2011 legislation, SB 242, that removed the Oregon University System from state agency status. In its place was a reconstituted system, led by corporate boards of trustees, who had expanded their authority over purchasing, personnel, and finances.

Her colleagues in higher-education government relations gave Burns a national award for the effort; the citations describe the campaign as having freed the universities from state-agency status.⁴ Freedom is the operative euphemism, one that makes sense only against two decades of disinvestment.

Oregon’s 2011 rupture with direct university governance followed two decades of disinvestment. Ballot Measure 5 capped property taxes in 1990, and a governor’s task force urged the state in 1997 to treat its universities as contractors selling services rather than as public institutions.⁵ Defenders of SB 242 point to that history, and they are right to: the state cut funding first, then offered autonomy as the remedy, and the universities took it. A state that has released its universities to manage their own decline, however, no longer has to answer for it.

Three statutes consolidated the shift: Senate Bill 909 created the Oregon Education Investment Board; Senate Bill 1581 established the achievement compacts of 2012; and Senate Bill 270 in 2013 granted the University of Oregon and Portland State independent governing boards, defined each university as “an independent public body,” and set the remaining campuses on the same path.⁶ By 2015, the Oregon University System was dissolved.⁷ The chancellor’s office, in which Burns had served as chief of staff, was abolished along with it.

Burns left Salem in 2013, the year SB 270 passed and two years before the dissolution was complete. She departed for an American Council on Education fellowship at Arizona State University, where she worked directly with President Michael Crow. During that fellowship year, she and Crow developed the University Innovation Alliance, launched in 2014 to raise graduation rates at large public research universities by sharing and adapting student-success practices across campuses. Its 11 founding members included Oregon State University. Portland State never joined.⁸

Who Was in the Room

The public record does not show what role, if any, Burns played in the interim committee that drafted SB 270 in 2012. It does show who was in the room as Oregon’s new governance structure took shape.

In August 2011, Governor Kitzhaber convened LearnWorks, a design lab sponsored by the Oregon Business Council, charged with developing implementation strategies for the newly created Chief Education Office, the Oregon Education Investment Board, and the Higher Education Coordinating Commission. The member directory lists Bridget Burns, chief of staff to the Oregon University System, alongside the president of the Oregon Business Council, an Intel education relations manager, the Portland Business Alliance’s government relations manager, and John Tapogna (then of ECONorthwest), whose firm would help assemble Governor Kotek’s Prosperity Council report 15 years later.⁹

LearnWorks was a workshop rather than a hearing or a task force. Throughout August 2011, its members met daily to develop Oregon’s new education system. The universities’ coordinating agency sent its chief of staff. Over the following four years, much of the framework discussed in those meetings was enacted into law.

Coordination, Privatized

For decades, the Oregon University System governed the campuses, coordinated statewide funding and policy, and managed shared administrative services: a central bank, payroll, and auditing.¹⁰ When the system was dissolved, those functions did not disappear. Responsibility for some moved to the new institutional boards, some to the Higher Education Coordinating Commission, and the rest ceased altogether. Until 2015, OUS audited each university’s finances; afterward, each board oversaw its own finances, working from materials prepared by the campus administration itself.

Pre-reform, the Oregon University System (OUS) deliberated under the state’s public meetings law, which required it to open its sessions and release its records upon request. Now, Burns’ group, The Alliance, convenes its member presidents under the confidential and non-transparent “Chatham House Rules”, which abandons the public as a partner in public higher education.¹¹

The University Innovation Alliance receives funding from Gates, Ford, Lumina, Kresge, and their peers. This is the same corporate philanthropic sector that created the unrealistic mandate for student achievement in Oregon’s statutes. This “40-40-20” law resembled President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, demanding that by 2025, 40 percent of Oregon adults should hold at least a bachelor’s degree, 40 percent should have associate’s degrees or certificates, and the remaining 20 percent should attain a high school diploma.¹² Educators knew from the beginning that this aspirational expectation would never – could never – be realized, and of course, it was not.

This is the body that also failed in its mission for higher education. And, it has done so by migrating public entities from public scrutiny to private operations in which the Alliance selects its own members, sets its own metrics, and audits its own results. Nothing was privatized in the formal, statutory sense. Everything was privatized in the operative one.

Accounting for the Alliance

Back when SB 242 was being debated in the Oregon Legislature, Burns argued that state agency status did not serve students. She called the state’s central management of university quality and practice “bureaucratic.” Her argument was that universities released from the system, and connected to one another voluntarily, could move faster than any chancellor’s office would permit. She made the same argument about voluntary networks to Congress in June.

The Alliance’s member campuses expanded proactive advising, predictive analytics, completion grants, and chatbot-based student support, and shared lessons across institutions. The consortium now claims 19 public research universities enrolling more than 570,000 students. It reports that its members have produced more than 180,000 additional graduates above baseline projections since 2014.¹³ Its flagship completion-grant program distributed just over $3 million across 11 universities in three years, at an average award of $741.¹⁴ The completion-grant program, which awards emergency assistance to low-income students nearing graduation, is especially touted as a key to degree attainment.

Oregon has one campus within the Alliance, making the state a test case. Oregon State University, a founding member, graduated 5,670 students in 2019–20, up from 3,911 in 2012–13. OSU reports that graduates from racially marginalized groups increased 117 percent across those years.¹⁵ The Alliance claims that its approach works. Yet two facts qualify that success. Oregon State’s in-state tuition rose by more than half between 2014 and 2024, because a consortium has no power over how much a Legislature appropriates.¹⁶ Portland State, 90 miles north, is not a member; the state’s other large public university receives none of those resources.

By 2016, two years after its 2014 launch, the Alliance had raised $18.45 million in philanthropic funding. It announced another $2.9 million in 2024 to expand from 10 campuses to 17.¹⁷ A decade of national philanthropy for coordination reaches 17 campuses out of roughly 4,000. Foundations can fund a laboratory; they cannot sustain a system.

The Alliance also chooses its own baselines, and its claim of “additional” graduates rests on those choices. A forecast is a set of judgments about which inputs to include, which assumptions to lock, and how far to project. I have documented the same pattern at Portland State, where a $35 million deficit target is the output of a model whose fixed assumptions guarantee the conclusion.¹⁸ In the Alliance’s case, the underlying numbers are not in dispute: federal completion data record the graduates, and the counts withstand scrutiny. What belongs to the Alliance is not the graduates but the forecast they are measured against, the baseline that turns ordinary growth into “additional” completions. That forecast has never been reconciled independently.

The Witness

On June 3, 2026, Burns testified before the House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development, using a hearing on “Building an AI-Ready America” to present the Alliance as “a national laboratory for innovation.”¹⁹

She told the subcommittee that responsible adoption of artificial intelligence requires infrastructure for trusted collaboration, peer learning, and cross-campus coordination — infrastructure that her 19-member campuses enjoy and the nearly 4,000 remaining degree-granting institutions largely lack.

The concern is well founded, and the testimony doubles as a record of how states dismantled the very coordination she now says is missing. Oregon dismantled its version early and decisively, and the government relations campaign that cleared the way won her a national award. She is now paid to warn the country about the consequences of the autonomy she helped to render in Oregon. Her foundation now argues to fill the void that she, in her prior role, helped to create.

Oregon set out to raise its graduation rates and, for a decade, told itself the way to do so was to loosen the state’s hold on its universities. It did. What it has now is the work of coordinating its universities not by the state, but by a private consortium that answers to its funders, admits the campuses it chooses, and reports its own results. The public university system that once did this work for every campus in the state is gone. What replaced it serves 19 campuses in the country, one of them in Oregon, and calls itself a laboratory.

Notes

1. Bridget Burns, remarks at the “From Goal to Reality: Achieving 40-40-20 in Oregon” symposium, Corvallis, November 1, 2011, quoted in Oregon University System, From Goal to Reality: A Report on Strategies to Meet Oregon’s 40-40-20 Education Goals (May 2012), 9 (Burns, identified as “LearnWorks participant and Chief of Staff for OUS”: “What you fund shows what you value. It is the testament to your character. It indicates what you care about … We care about excellence and productivity and we’re not putting our value on that right now.”). ERIC ED539338.

2. Bridget Burns, interview transcript, “An Educated Guest” podcast, November 15, 2022, University Innovation Alliance, https://theuia.org/blog/innovating-together-11-15-22-episode-bridget-burns-educated-guest-podcast-transcript; witness biography, Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development, June 3, 2026, https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/119338/witnesses/HHRG-119-ED13-Bio-BurnsB-20260603.pdf.

3. Arizona State University faculty profile, Bridget Burns, https://search.asu.edu/profile/2224046.

4. 1776 advisor profile, Bridget Burns, https://www.1776.vc/profile/bridget-burns/ (award for “leading the successful legislative effort that freed Oregon’s seven universities from state agency status”); University Innovation Alliance, “Bridget Burns,” https://theuia.org/team/bridget-burns (Edward Crawford Award).

5. Oregon Ballot Measure 5 (1990), property-tax limitation, Oregon Constitution, art. XI, sec. 11b; Governor’s Task Force on Higher Education and the Economy, Higher Education and the Oregon Economy (Portland, OR: Oregon Business Council, 1997). Both are discussed in Ramin Farahmandpur, “From Kitzhaber to Kotek: The Managed Demise of Oregon Public Higher Education,” Academic Gadfly, June 11, 2026, and “Prosperity by Subtraction,” Academic Gadfly, June 29, 2026.

6. Oregon Senate Bill 242 (2011); Senate Bill 909 (2011); Senate Bill 1581 (2012); Senate Bill 270 (2013), Enrolled, §§ 1–3, https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2013R1/Downloads/MeasureDocument/SB270/Enrolled.

7. Higher Education Coordinating Commission, 2024 University Evaluation: University of Oregon (ORS 352.061), https://www.oregon.gov/highered/strategy-research/Documents/Legislative-Budget-Resources/Leg-2025/2024-University-Evaluation-University-of-Oregon-ORS%20352.061.pdf.

8. Michael T. Nietzel, “Scaling Higher Ed Collaboration: An Interview with University Innovation Alliance Executive Director Bridget Burns,” Forbes, June 1, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2020/06/01/an-interview-with-university-innovation-alliance-executive-director-bridget-burns/; the eleven founding members are listed in “University Innovation Alliance receives $3.85M in new grant funding to improve student success,” University of Kansas, March 4, 2016, https://news.ku.edu/news/article/2016/03/04/university-innovation-alliance-receives-385-million-new-grant-funding-improve-student.

9. On LearnWorks: Oregon University System, From Goal to Reality (May 2012), 9 (ERIC ED539338), describing LearnWorks as “a group of about 30 individuals with professional expertise and passion for Oregon public education,” “convened by the Governor and sponsored by the Oregon Business Council,” which “met every day throughout the month of August 2011” to shift Oregon from a model that “incentivizes enrollment growth and ‘seat time’” to one “focused on successful outcomes.” LearnWorks Member Directory, State of Oregon (listing “Bridget Burns, Chief of Staff, Oregon University System” alongside Duncan Wyse, Oregon Business Council; John Tapogna, ECONorthwest; Public Strategies Group; Intel; and the Portland Business Alliance); Oregon Business Council, “Putting Students at the Center: An Overview of Oregon Learns” (six-year retrospective), https://cdn.orbusinesscouncil.org/docs/policy/Oregon_Learns_Six-Year_Retrospective--v2.pdf. The OUS report gives roughly 30 participants; the OBC retrospective gives roughly 40. On ECONorthwest’s staffing of the Prosperity Council report, see Farahmandpur, “Prosperity by Subtraction,” note 2.

10. State Board of Higher Education, “Evolving Roles and Responsibilities,” 2013, https://www.eou.edu/governance/files/2013/09/Evolving-Roles-and-Responsibilities-State-Board-of-Higher-Education.pdf (direct governance, statewide funding and policy coordination, shared administrative services including a central bank, payroll, and auditing).

11. Bridget Burns, written testimony, Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development, Committee on Education and the Workforce, U.S. House of Representatives, June 3, 2026, https://edworkforce.house.gov/uploadedfiles/bridget_burns_written_testimony.pdf.

12. University Innovation Alliance, Completion Grants Playbook, https://cg.theuia.org/ (eleven participating institutions provided over $3 million in completion grants to nearly 5,000 students across three academic years; average award $741, campus averages ranging from $423 to $1,000; funded by Ascendium Education Group and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation).

13. “Oregon State part of national consortium of universities that has outpaced its graduation goals,” Oregon State University, June 2021, https://today.oregonstate.edu/news/oregon-state-part-national-consortium-universities-has-outpaced-its-graduation-goals (graduates rose from 3,911 in 2012–13 to 5,670 in 2019–20; graduates of color up 117 percent; low-income graduates up 17 percent). The percentage claims rest on the Alliance’s baseline projections; the graduate counts do not.

14. National Center for Education Statistics. n.d. “Oregon State University Institutional Profile.” Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). U.S. Department of Education. Accessed July 26, 2026. https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/.

15. “University Innovation Alliance receives $3.85M in new grant funding,” University of Kansas, March 4, 2016 (total funds awarded of $18.45 million, from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, the Lumina Foundation, the Markle Foundation, USA Funds, and the U.S. Department of Education); “University Innovation Alliance grows to 17 schools, lands important philanthropic investment,” PR Newswire, October 2024, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/university-innovation-alliance-grows-to-17-schools-lands-important-philanthropic-investment-302277335.html ($2.9 million; expansion from ten to seventeen campuses).

16. Ramin Farahmandpur, Factual Review Memorandum, Findings 1–7, prepared for the PSU-AAUP review team, 2026.

17. “Q&A with University Innovation Alliance CEO Bridget Burns,” ASU University Design Institute, https://udi.asu.edu/co-lab/article/University-Innovation-Alliance-CEO-Bridget-Burns-Q-and-A.

18. Funders per note 17. On Oregon’s 40-40-20 goal and its philanthropic genealogy, Oregon Senate Bill 253 (2011); Lumina Foundation attainment goal, 2008.

19. Burns, written testimony, June 3, 2026 (see note 11); hearing record, “Building an AI-Ready America: Higher Education in the Age of AI,” June 3, 2026, 2175 Rayburn House Office Building.

By way of background, the increasingly toxic council spent five weeks arguing over two competing plans to restore some of the positions lost in a financially challenged budget just last month. The disputed difference was 0.12 percent of the city budget, a margin that in most households would be resolved by checking the couch cushions.

The socialist-led plan came to a vote and tied, 6-6. Under the charter, a tie summons Mayor Keith Wilson, who is not a member of the council, has never cast a vote there, and now had to decide whether to support either plan. The council president formally offered him up to two minutes to explain his historic first vote.

He uttered just eight words to explain his “no” vote, and the ordinance died 7-6. The surviving plan then passed 10-2, mostly because the losing side concluded that saving 30 workers beat saving none, which is less a compromise than a hostage negotiation with oneself.

It was at this point that Councilor Angelita Morillo observed that the council had been forced to call “the daddy of the city of Portland” to break its tie. Councilor Loretta Smith rose on a point of order. “Who are you calling Daddy?” Morillo clarified: “He’s your Daddy, not mine.” Smith responded that she already has a Daddy. The council president gaveled for order, which is the parliamentary equivalent of a parent counting to three.

Somewhere in the crosstalk, Smith also said the only two words of the entire exchange that qualify as an argument in favor of the mayor’s role. His authority is, she pointed out, “Charter given.” She is correct. The tiebreak is right there in Section 2-401. The voters ratified it. The Charter Commission—on which sat one of the city counselors on the losing side gave the mayor this power as insurance against deadlock.

The Portland Mercury filed its coverage of the first tiebreaking vote of the new government directly beside an invitation to name a baby porcupine, though the publication nominated its own entry: “Daddy.” Television stations aired the clip. Nobody aired the part where Councilor Sameer Kanal spent the morning reading the charter’s police-accountability protections into the record, or the part where the city’s own budget director acknowledged telling bureaus to underspend, which is understandable, because fiscal guidance rarely competes with a televised paternity dispute.

For Portlanders who prefer their city politics with footnotes: sociologist Max Weber drew a line between authority people obey because it’s written into law and authority they obey because one person is treated as a parent figure. In the habitually nasty climate this council creates, someone has to be the adult in the room.

Morillo’s metaphor framed the council as having a father figure. Smith’s rebuttal insisted the council merely has a rulebook.

Behaving in a dignified manner while conducting the people’s business is not a lost art, and the majority of this council has lived up to that standard. Smith, for her part, defended the decorum while racking up three points of order in five minutes. The council president, himself aligned with the socialist bunch, barely lifted a finger to maintain order.

The entire episode makes one wonder whether the 2022 charter overhaul really created a weak mayor—one who no longer oversees a bureau, casts regular policy votes, or has veto power. Indeed, by charging the mayor with the obligation to break a deadlock, Portland voters moved his chair to the head of the table. Every future 6-6 council knows whose desk holds the 13^th vote. The council will have earned its adulthood on the day a fight this consequential ends without him.

Wednesday was not that day. Instead, the city named a porcupine.

The New York Times, defending its coverage of one of the winners, explained that it had spent years documenting extreme views on both sides. The alarm was framed as a new story about a country drifting toward its extremes.

The most persuasive response to the alarm came from the left-of-center press.¹ Writing in The New Republic, Perry Bacon rejected the equivalence between the socialist left and the MAGA right, and he was right to do so.²

The left practices electoral democracy; its program is popular in some quarters; its officeholders are a small minority. The equivalence records none of these distinctions. Bacon, however, is answering the wrong question, and so are the centrists whose alarm he corrects.

The socialist left of 2026 has won real ground: the mayoralty of the largest city in the country, a handful of congressional seats, city council seats in Portland and elsewhere; it took most of them not from the right but from the Democratic Party’s own bench.

Those victories deserve credit, and they answer one question: the left can win power. What remains unsettled is whether it can hold it. The Democratic Socialists of America is a nonprofit organized through committees and 501(c)(4)s. It is not a party with a ballot line and the discipline a ballot line imposes, and it is not a union with members bound by a contract and a shared material interest. Whether a nonprofit can turn election nights into power that survives the term is the question both the alarm and the defense avoid.

The question has been posed before. In 1915, the Nonpartisan League, a dues-funded farmers’ organization, captured North Dakota’s government by running its candidates through Republican primaries: it elected a governor, chartered a state bank and a state mill, and within five years saw that governor become the first in American history to be recalled. The League survived only by merging into the Democratic Party, whose North Dakota affiliate still carries its initials.

Twenty-five years earlier, the Farmers’ Alliance had won legislatures across Kansas and the South on borrowed ballot lines, concluded within two years that it could not keep what it had won, and reorganized as the People’s Party. In the 1850s, when the Know-Nothings began winning elections, they shed their fraternal shell and announced themselves as the American Party.

In 2010, the Tea Party sent a generation of insurgents to Congress through committees and 501(c)(4)s; those insurgents persist mainly as the Freedom Caucus, disciplined not by the organizations that launched them but by the Republican primary. The one long-running socialist administration in American history, Milwaukee’s, governed city hall for most of the half century after 1910 in the opposite form: a party with a ballot line, a dues-paying membership, and candidates bound to a program. In the American record, the nonprofit and committee forms win office; the party form keeps it.³

The left’s recent victories are real, but the machinery to sustain them does not yet exist. For a decade, the left has traded for display the organization that would make its wins compound instead of evaporate. It has invoked a class it has not organized, substituted a social media audience for a party, and relied on institutions whose members never agreed to lend them to the left. It needs the machinery it has declined to build.⁴

Three Substitutions

The reason to doubt that these gains will last is that each rests on a substitution, display in place of organization. Marx distinguished a class in itself, a shared position in production, from a class for itself, a class that has recognized that position and organized to act on it.⁵ The American working class is the first and not yet the second. The post-Sanders left invokes the second while holding only the first. By defining the working class as everyone who is not a billionaire, the left folds salaried professionals, public-sector employees, and university faculty into the same category as warehouse and food-service labor, and then licenses a coalition of credentialed professionals to claim the standing of a class to which that coalition does not belong.⁶

The left organizes on social media, but a platform is not a party. The political theorist Jodi Dean calls this condition “communicative capitalism”: speech enters a circuit that translates it into engagement and disperses it as revenue, rewarding intensity over organization.⁷ The more a post inflames, the more it circulates; nothing in that circuit requires it to connect to dues, meetings, or votes. An online manifesto can reach a million readers without producing a single meeting. Face-to-face organizing produces members, obligations, and structures that outlast the news cycle.

The party form once concentrated that energy and pointed it toward a decision; algorithmic engagement, by contrast, directs the same energy toward revenue for the platform. A party answers to its members; a platform answers to its advertisers. A zoning vote becomes historic; the next post displaces the last; and the organization that won the vote recedes into the background of its own announcement. A socialist mayor elected by that circuit is not a socialist party, and winning the office does not come with the machinery that will outlast the term.⁸

The left builds inside someone else’s machinery: unions made by their members, not by the left. The Rank-and-File Strategy directs members into targeted unions, which it treats not as ends accountable to their members but as instruments for a political program. Since 2025, that program has been joined by an anti-Zionist test for any candidate seeking the DSA’s endorsement.

In Oregon, for example, endorsements in Portland City Council races have turned on international questions that many members never debated in a meeting. The dues-paying member who joined for a contract is enrolled, without a vote, in a project whose aims may not be hers. This institutional capture generates strikes, protests, and headlines, but it draws on a solidarity it did not create.

A union that subordinates its members’ shared material interests to a faction’s political program trades solidarity for ideological purity, handing legislators a ready argument: that the union speaks for a movement, not for its members.⁹

None of the three substitutions is a failure of will alone. Union density stands near a tenth of the workforce, the institutions that once carried working-class life are gone, and social media is the only assembly ground a demobilized city still offers. Those obstacles explain the substitutions. They do not redeem them. The class persists as a label, not as an organization, and the difficulty of the work does not turn the label into a fact. A movement that mistakes social media for the party will not build the party on the day conditions allow. If a more favorable moment arrives, it will find a left with slogans, candidates, and hashtags, but still without the mass organizations that could seize it.

An Ironic Defense

On the basic question of democratic legitimacy, Bacon is right: the left accepts the elections it loses, while the movement it is compared to tried to overturn one. On that point, the asymmetry is not close, and the centrists who blur it are evading a real difference between the two.

His remaining defenses are the three substitutions, mistaken for virtues. He says the left is loyal to the electoral form; in practice, it relies on elections in place of an organized class. He says its program is popular; yet polling well is what a class in itself can do without becoming a class for itself, and majorities have favored redistribution for decades while the power to enact it did not exist. He says its officeholders are powerless: each of the two socialists who recently won House primaries ranks, by his own count, around the 250th among Democrats in Washington. He calls anyone who thinks the two blocs are close in power “either stupid or dishonest.” A social media presence, a handful of captured locals, and a roster of officeholders do not make a party. Point by point, Bacon shows that the left is not dangerous because it is not yet a force capable of holding what it wins. The irony of Bacon’s defense is that he is entirely correct.

The weakness, in Bacon’s telling, is the centrists’ fault. The conflation of socialist and Trumpist, he writes, is a rhetorical tool, and the harm lies with the people who wield it. That account is too generous to the left and too hard on its critics. The centrists did not invent the left’s organizational fragility; they merely described it. A decade of invoking a class without organizing it, and of announcing victories without building the machinery to sustain them, has produced a left whose harmlessness a single column can assert without contradiction. The conflation works because the condition it names is real.

Bacon never asks what would make the left worth fearing or defending. He measures the socialist left against the MAGA right and finds the socialist left smaller. By that narrow measure, he is accurate. But smallness is not harmlessness, and a harmless left is not a program at all. A left that had organized the class it invokes would not need a sympathetic columnist to point out how little it can do; it would be a power its opponents would have to answer, the way organized labor once forced answers from employers and courts. Bacon can defend the left only in the language of reassurance; the left’s present weakness will not support anything bolder. The defense that the left is no threat is also the admission that it has not yet become anything its opponents are required to reckon with.

His advice points the same way. Socialists, liberals, and pro-democracy conservatives should contest the primaries and then unite to defeat the right in the general election. The arithmetic is sound, but it exposes the mechanism of the left’s own containment: the major party as the place where insurgent energy is gathered, ranked, and filed into a permanent minority. The promise that the left is no threat and the demand that it fall into line are the same claim.

A left worth fearing or defending would do the opposite of all three. It would organize the class it invokes into dues-funded organizations it controls, link elected officials to those organizations through binding obligations rather than biographical affinity, and build unions and parties that answer first to their members’ shared material interests. It would treat elections as one tactic among others, not as a substitute for the organized base it lacks.

The equivalence is false, and the left’s defenders are right to reject it, but their very defense reveals a more serious danger. The danger is not that the left is called extreme. The danger is that the description offered in its defense is accurate: a class invoked and not organized, social media where a party should stand, a union captured and not built. The left has shown it can win offices; it has not shown it can hold them. A movement can survive being called dangerous. It is harder to survive being defended into irrelevance, and hardest of all when the defense is true. If the left is to escape that condition, it will have to do the thing it has so far described more often than it has done: build the machinery that could make its own arguments finally matter.

Notes

1. Paul Krugman has offered a stronger version of the same case, arguing that most self-described democratic socialists are in fact social democrats, supporters of progressive taxation, a safety net, and market regulation, and that the appeal of “socialism” reflects anger at oligarchy rather than support for socialism as such. Where Bacon defends the left as harmless, Krugman defends it as, in substance, not socialist at all. See Paul Krugman, “There Are Very Few Socialists in America,” Paul Krugman (Substack), July 2, 2026.

2. Perry Bacon, “Democratic Centrists Need to Stop Saying ‘Both Sides’ Have ‘Extremes,’” The New Republic, June 30, 2026, https://newrepublic.com/article/212517/. Former Senator Joe Manchin’s remark and the statement attributed to The New York Times are quoted there, as are the officeholder tallies cited below.

3. On the Nonpartisan League and the recall of Governor Lynn Frazier, Robert L. Morlan, Political Prairie Fire: The Nonpartisan League, 1915–1922 (University of Minnesota Press, 1955). On the Farmers’ Alliance and the founding of the People’s Party, Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (Oxford University Press, 1976). On Milwaukee’s Socialist administrations, Douglas E. Booth, “Municipal Socialism and City Government Reform: The Milwaukee Experience, 1910–1940,” Journal of Urban History 12, no. 1 (1985): 51–74.

4. The three arguments are developed at length in Ramin Farahmandpur, “The Trojan Horse Strategy: How the DSA Is Using Unions as Political Vehicles,” Academic Gadfly, March 6, 2026; “The Feed and the Party: The Illusion of Machinery in Municipal Socialism,” Academic Gadfly, April 24, 2026; and “The Imagined Proletariat: Rhetoric without a Subject,” Academic Gadfly, May 2, 2026, https://academicgadfly.substack.com.

5. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), for the formulation of a class “for itself”; and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1845–46).

6. On the working class defined by negation against “billionaires” and the absorption of distinct strata into one category, Farahmandpur, “The Imagined Proletariat” (note 4). Union density figures are drawn from the same source.

7. Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Polity, 2010); Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Duke, 2009); Crowds and Party (Verso, 2016); and Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (Verso, 2019).

8. On the genres of the feed and the distinction between a DSA-endorsed mayor and a party that would hold the office accountable, Farahmandpur, “The Feed and the Party” (note 4).

9. On the Rank-and-File Strategy, the 2025 endorsement test, and the Oregon record, including the Portland City Council campaigns and the “Socialists in Office” committee, Farahmandpur, “The Trojan Horse Strategy” (note 4).

Portland State University’s several recent presidents have undertaken an institutional strategy in the face of a steady, 15-year enrollment decline that has failed to solve the problem. Each has chosen to focus on erecting building after building, even as the number of students living or learning in them shrinks.

PSU’s most recent example is its pursuit of the Portland Arts and Culture Center. President Ann Cudd is “doing things right”: she successfully secured $137.5 million in state-backed bonds for the project, which includes, in addition to the City of Portland’s planned 3,200-seat theater, a complex of learning spaces and a second, smaller, 1,200-seat campus theater.²

Cudd called the PACC project evidence of “bold leadership and creative vision.” The goal is to lift up the university’s renowned performing arts programs, capitalizing on the city’s need to replace the Keller Auditorium, in the hope of eventually boosting enrollment. Yet Cudd, like her predecessors, is simultaneously managing — not reversing — decline.²

A mere nine months after securing PACC bonding from the Oregon Legislature, Cudd announced that 19 academic departments might be reduced or eliminated, putting as many as 220 jobs at risk.³ By May 2026, the list had narrowed to nine departments, two marked for closure, and 52 faculty positions at stake, in order to cut $16 million from the budget.⁴

This is not “doing the right things.”

PSU’s current crisis plays as two competing narratives: a hopeful expansion on one hand, and a painful contraction on the other. Instead, they should be seen as two parts of the same story. This is an account of choices made in a shrinking enrollment climate: choices about building our way out at the expense of academic programs and faculty, eroding the university’s core mission.

The argument is not that theater bond money could have gone to faculty salaries. It could not. State bonds and private gifts build buildings; they do not cover payroll, and PSU has said so about every project it has raised. The argument is about whether this strategy threatens to exacerbate, rather than reverse, the enrollment crisis.

The labor case for the complex is strong, and it deserves to be stated first. A Crossroads Consulting analysis commissioned by the City of Portland found that closing the Keller Auditorium would cost the region as many as 336 jobs at peak and about $42.3 million in labor income over a two-year shutdown, among them stagehands, musicians, wardrobe workers, and food-service staff. No comparable downtown venue could host the Keller’s full slate of productions. For the building trades, the full complex, an estimated $650 million project, means years of union work. Organized labor is right to support it, and protecting those workers is the strongest argument for the project.⁵

That case is one I have made, and it stands. But it is the City of Portland’s argument, not the university’s. A public institution already cutting Philosophy, History, World Languages, and its core general education program faces a different question than the city does: whether a major performance venue belongs at the center of its strategy while its academic core contracts. A stagehand and a philosophy professor are asking different questions, and they deserve different answers.

A University in Decline

Portland State’s enrollment has fallen every year since its 2010–11 peak, and the university has lost 23 percent of its students since 2019 alone.³ Cudd did not cause the decline, but she has not taken steps to stop it either. As enrollment has fallen, the revenue supporting faculty salaries, course offerings, and student services has eroded. The university’s own enrollment model, prepared by the Office of Institutional Research and Planning in November 2023, forecast continued annual declines through 2025–26.

What is now marked for elimination is the core of the university’s mission. University Studies is the interdisciplinary general education program that every undergraduate completes; it is the common core shared by all degrees, and the provisional plan assigns it about $10.7 million in reductions and 24 potential layoffs, the largest single share of the cuts. Conflict Resolution prepares graduate students for careers in mediation and civic life. Philosophy, History, and World Languages teach the reasoning, historical perspective, and linguistic range that a public university exists to provide. Cutting these programs would narrow the institution’s purpose and reduce what it offers students.⁴

Cudd’s rationale for the complex is that expanding the university’s renowned arts and music programs could turn enrollment upward in later years. The project has been sold on that promise: to attract new partners and audiences, to link the campus to Portland’s cultural offerings, to serve the city for a century.⁷ Grant the ambition. It still describes a hoped-for future rather than addressing the fiscal crisis at hand. The chief cause of the current crisis, the enrollment decline, is ignored by the proposed complex. It is a wager on a distant recovery, placed by a manager who told her own finance committee in September 2025 that PSU faces a future “where it’s going to have to operate as a smaller institution than it has over the past decade.”⁸

When the city commissioned Hunden Partners to assess market feasibility, the January 2026 report concluded that Portland could not support two Broadway-capable venues and recommended against renovating the Keller. Cudd treated the report as validation for the project. Yet the report makes a civic case, not an academic one. It recommends a new venue at the PSU site rather than a renovated Keller, but that recommendation concerns the larger, city-owned venue, not PSU’s own 1,200-seat theater. The study does not make PSU’s academic case, and the larger venue remains unfunded and contested; even with PSU’s bonds approved, the city could still owe $200 million to $300 million whose source it has not identified. None of the report’s findings touches PSU’s operating budget, where the decisions about layoffs were made.⁶

A Decade of Building

The complex is not the first major building PSU has constructed as its enrollment has fallen, but it is the largest in a decade. As the student body contracted, the university opened or rebuilt one major facility after another. The Karl Miller Center, a $61 million renovation and addition for the School of Business, opened in 2017. A $52 million rebuild of the Peter Stott Center produced the 3,000-seat Viking Pavilion in 2018. A $70 million modernization of Neuberger Hall, since renamed Fariborz Maseeh Hall, finished in 2019. The seven-story Vanport Building opened in 2021. The Vernier Science Center reopened after a major remodel in 2024. By the PSU Foundation’s own accounting, $54 million in donor gifts helped unlock nearly $250 million in state support to build or renovate six campus facilities across those same years.⁹

None of that money came from tuition or the General Fund. State bonds and private donors paid for the buildings, which is precisely the point. Under Presidents Shoureshi, Percy, and Cudd, as enrollment kept falling, the institution’s steady answer to decline was to build. Recruitment, advising, retention, and the academic programs that draw and keep students never received a campaign of this scale. Taken together, these choices describe an institution investing first in its own physical expansion while its academic core withers.

Set the two columns side by side. Nearly $250 million in state support and $54 million in gifts for six buildings in a decade, then $137.5 million more in state bonds for the complex. Against that, a retrenchment plan proposes about $16 million in academic cuts and the elimination of two departments, one of them the program every undergraduate completes. The university found the will and the donors to build. It has not focused on a plan to recruit the students who would fill what it built. The retrenchment plan itself concedes the point: PSU, it states, is “maintaining an infrastructure built for 30,000 students while currently serving 20,000.”¹⁰

Portland State is not the first shrinking university to answer decline with construction. During the 2000s, the University of Akron borrowed heavily for an estimated $640 million building campaign on the theory that new facilities would draw new students. Enrollment fell instead, from nearly 30,000 in 2011 to some 15,000 today, leaving Akron overbuilt and indebted, selling property while cutting faculty.¹¹

The academic-industrial complex is a term scholars use to describe an institution whose first commitment is its own reproduction, concealed behind the language of neutrality, benevolence, and reform. The framework does not depend on any claim that capital dollars were taken from classrooms. It describes the locus of a university’s attention, its prestige, and its risk. Portland State has put all three into buildings while treating the programs that define it and the people who sustain them as expendable.¹²

A Choice, Not a Necessity

Other paths were available. In January 2026, the faculty union PSU-AAUP placed a detailed package of alternatives to involuntary layoffs on the table: a two-cohort retirement incentive and a retirement transition program with phased FTE reductions, both designed to generate recurring salary savings and both grounded in past practice at PSU and peer institutions. The union also argued that targeted investment in recruitment, advising, and community connection could rebuild enrollment over time. No building does that work. The administration refused this alternative even as it continued to cite the enrollment-based structural deficit to justify cutting positions.¹³ The involuntary layoffs and program eliminations moved forward.

Portland State has not disclosed the annual cost of operating the 1,200-seat theater it will own beginning in 2030. For a university already in retrenchment, that missing number is part of an academic future being cast in concrete, with no public accounting of the program cost implications that will compete with other academic offerings.

Ann Cudd raised money for the complex by promising Portland a “renewed spirit,” to be sparked by “meaningful educational and cultural experiences.” ¹⁴ Yet the programs she has marked for elimination already provide the same. A public university is defined by what it teaches, not by what it builds, and no venue can substitute for a general education program, a philosophy department, or the faculty who teach.

By substituting edifices for education, three PSU presidents have chosen to manage decline rather than lead a turnaround.

Notes

1. The Drucker maxim. The aphorism, as commonly quoted, is attributed to Peter Drucker. His published formulation, in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 45, contrasts efficiency and effectiveness: “Efficiency is concerned with doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things.” The management/leadership phrasing is a later popularization of the same distinction.

2. Funding and the “bold leadership and creative vision” remark. Senate Bill 5505 (2025) provided $137.5 million in state bonds: $85 million for the 1,200-seat theater and academic space, and $52.5 million for parking. With $7.6 million from Prosper Portland and $10.5 million in philanthropic pledges, the total reached about $155 million. The “bold leadership and creative vision” language is from Cudd’s statement in the funding announcement. PSU news release, June 2025, pdx.edu/news; KGW, June 27, 2025, kgw.com; KOIN, July 2, 2025, koin.com.

3. Retrenchment and enrollment. The announcement that 19 departments could be reduced or eliminated and that as many as 220 faculty and staff positions were at risk (Bill Knight, PSU-AAUP), and the enrollment decline (every year since 2010; 23 percent since 2019): OPB, March 9, 2026, opb.org; KPTV, March 10, 2026, kptv.com; Axios Portland, March 9, 2026, axios.com; PSU, “2026 Institutional Reductions,” pdx.edu/president/2026-institutional-reductions. Office of Institutional Research and Planning, Portland State University, “Enrollment Forecast Annual FTE Model” (David Burgess, Director, November 1, 2023), pdx.edu/research-planning. The OIRP annual FTE series shows enrollment peaking in 2010–11 and declining every year thereafter.

4. The May Provisional Plan, University Studies, and Conflict Resolution. PSU’s Provisional Plan for Retrenchment, dated May 14, 2026, proposes eliminating two academic departments, University Studies and Conflict Resolution, and reducing seven others, for a total of about $16.1 million in budget reductions and 52 potential AAUP layoffs across the nine departments. The plan states that, for each eliminated department, “the elimination of the entire department is proposed,” and Table 1 assigns University Studies about $10.7 million in reductions and 24 potential layoffs, and Conflict Resolution $367,703 in reductions and 2 potential layoffs. Portland State University, Provisional Plan for Retrenchment, May 14, 2026, pp. 8–9; PSU Article 22 2025-2026 website, pdx.edu.

5. Labor figures. Crossroads Consulting Services, Economic Impact Analysis: Potential Temporary Closure of Keller Auditorium, City of Portland Office of Management and Finance, May 2024. The report notes that employment, labor income, value added, and output are interrelated and not additive. A one-year closure was estimated at 320 jobs and $20.5 million in labor income; the two-year closure figures are approximately 336 jobs at peak and $42.3 million in cumulative labor income. The estimated $650 million figure is for the full complex (see note 6).

6. Hunden study. The Hunden Partners market feasibility study, commissioned by the City of Portland and released January 23, 2026, found insufficient market demand for two Broadway-capable venues and recommended a single new Broadway-capable venue at the Portland State site rather than a renovated Keller, setting the ideal capacity for that venue at 3,200 seats. Its cost estimates included a full Keller renovation near $290 million, a 1,200-seat PSU venue near $115 million, the large Broadway-capable venue between $350 million and $425 million, and the full complex, including both venues, parking, hotel, and conference center, near $650 million. City officials described the findings as not the city’s ultimate proposal, and reporting noted the city could still owe $200 million to $300 million for the city-owned venue. City of Portland, “Future of Large-Scale Performing Arts” market feasibility study, portland.gov/arts; Lizzy Acker, “Portland is told it can’t sustain 2 Broadway-ready theaters,” The Oregonian/OregonLive, January 27, 2026; Willamette Week, January 23, 2026; Oregon ArtsWatch, January 27, 2026. A follow-up Hunden analysis (April 21, 2026) reaffirmed the recommendation and states that it does not account for construction costs, the cost of closing the Keller, or the ongoing operating expenses of either venue. Cudd’s “renewed spirit” and “meaningful educational and cultural experiences” language is from a PSU statement issued the day the study was released, January 2026.

7. PACC claims. “Attract new partners and audiences,” “linkages to other cultural offerings,” and “serve Portland for a century”: PSU Performing Arts Venue FAQ, pdx.edu/construction/performing-arts-venue/faq; PSU news release, June 2025.

8. The “smaller institution” remark. Cudd, “PSU is facing a future where it’s going to have to operate as a smaller institution than it has over the past decade,” board finance committee, September 2025: OPB, September 25, 2025, opb.org.

9. PSU construction during the enrollment decline. Karl Miller Center (opened 2017; about $60.7 million, two-thirds state bonds and one-third private donors, with no student funds used): PSU, “Karl Miller Center,” pdx.edu/buildings; Portland State Vanguard, November 2017. Viking Pavilion at the Peter W. Stott Center ($52 million, completed April 2018) and Fariborz Maseeh Hall, formerly Neuberger Hall ($70 million, January 2018 to August 2019): pdx.edu/buildings; pdx.edu/construction. Vanport Building (opened December 2021, a collaboration among PSU, OHSU, PCC, and the City of Portland): portland.gov, December 7, 2021. Vernier Science Center (reopened Fall 2024): pdx.edu/buildings. The six-facility figure, $54 million in donor gifts unlocking nearly $250 million in state support, is from Portland State University, “Portland State Successfully Completes Landmark Campaign,” pdx.edu/news, October 2021.

10. Infrastructure concession. Portland State University, Provisional Plan for Retrenchment, May 14, 2026, p. 4. In context, the plan refers to administrative structures, staffing levels, and physical plant.

11. University of Akron comparison. Akron added nearly two dozen buildings during Luis Proenza’s presidency (1999–2014) through a $640 million construction program financed largely by debt. Its enrollment has since fallen from nearly 30,000 in 2011 (the university’s own figure) to approximately 15,000, about half its level 15 years earlier. The university now holds some $378 million in debt and is selling buildings and reducing faculty, and Ohio’s Auditor of State found it continues to own and maintain excessive building capacity. Crain’s Cleveland Business, March 19, 2025, and April 13, 2018; Signal Akron, May 2024; Ohio Auditor of State, University of Akron Performance Audit, ohioauditor.gov.

12. Academic-industrial complex framework. Andrea Smith, “Social-Justice Activism in the Academic Industrial Complex,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 23, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 140–145.

13. Phased retirement and alternative package. PSU-AAUP, “Retirement and FTE Proposals: Real Alternatives to Layoffs,” January 26, 2026, psuaaup.net. The package included a two-cohort Retirement Incentive Offer (retirements effective July 1, 2026, and July 1, 2027) and a Retirement Transition Program with a phased FTE reduction option. In that post, the union states that the administration “has been slow to engage with the full package as an alternative to widespread layoffs, even as they continue to cite the structural deficit as justification for cutting positions.” The administration did not adopt the full package as its alternative to involuntary layoffs; it advanced only a narrower, consolidated Retirement Transition Program for AY 2025–26 through AY 2027–28 (February 23, 2026), while its May 14, 2026 Provisional Plan proposed involuntary layoffs across nine departments (see note 4). PSU-AAUP, “Learn More About Our Contract,” psuaaup.net; PSU Retirement Transition Program page, pdx.edu/academic-affairs/retirement-transition-program.

14. The “renewed spirit” remark. Cudd’s “renewed spirit” and “meaningful educational and cultural experiences” language is from a PSU statement issued the day the Hunden study was released, January 2026 (see note 6).

Two key polls measuring voter sentiment in the 2026 Oregon governor’s race do not agree. The published polls show a toss-up: a February survey by FM3 Research put the Democratic incumbent, Tina Kotek, ahead of Republican Christine Drazan 45 to 40, and a May survey by the Hoffman Research Group found the two tied at 45.¹ The prediction markets, where traders buy and sell contracts on political outcomes, show something closer to a decided race, giving Democrats an 85 to 87 percent chance of holding the office.² The gap between a tied poll and an 85 percent favorite is not a contradiction. It reflects the central fact of the race, pointing to a contest decided by where Oregonians live and whether they turn out rather than by whom they are persuaded to support.

Oregon has not elected a Republican governor since 1982. After this 44-year run, the rematch grows out of the result of the last one: in 2022, Kotek defeated Drazan 46.9 percent to 43.5 percent, with the unaffiliated Betsy Johnson taking 8.6.³ That contest was among the most competitive in the country, and Drazan came within three and a half points.

The key question for 2026 is whether the 2022 conditions that Drazan can reproduce—rural margins, tighter metro races, crossover voters—are enough once those she cannot reproduce—Johnson’s presence and the creation of a three-way field—are presumably gone. The filing deadline falls in August, and a late entrant could still join the race as an independent or nonaffiliated candidate.

The discontent that registers in public polling and keeps the contest close has clear causes. Kotek ranks among the least popular governors in the country: Oregon students underperform on state reading and math tests amid stubborn, chronic underfunding of public schools; unsheltered homelessness has declined by only about 4 percent since 2023; and the cost of living has weighed on every recent statewide vote.⁴ The polls register that record, but the geography and turnout assumptions the markets rely on may not.

The Map

Oregon’s statewide elections are decided in a narrow band of the map. The Portland metropolitan area and the Willamette Valley decide the outcome; the rest of the state, however, votes Republican by margins that can exceed three to one in the eastern counties, yet rarely provides enough votes to overcome them. A Republican can carry eastern Oregon and the southern timber counties by overwhelming margins and still lose, because the most populous regions tend to vote Democratic; even nonaffiliated urban voters choose Democrats.

The 2022 result was a textbook case of how those few counties decide Oregon elections. Kotek won on the strength of Multnomah County, where her margin was overwhelming, and on a favorable result in Washington County, the suburban area west of Portland. Drazan posted strong margins across the rest of the state. Clackamas County, the third and most competitive leg of metropolitan Portland, was contested ground. The pattern has held for a generation: Democrats win statewide by running up the score in Multnomah and holding Washington, and Republicans lose by margins that eastern Oregon cannot close. The one caveat is that housing prices in urban areas are pushing Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters out into the suburban margins, making those areas less contested and more reliably blue.

The clearest recent signal on the map came in May. Measure 120, the referendum on the gas tax and vehicle fees that the legislature had placed on the primary ballot, failed by 83 percent to 17.⁵ The geography of that vote is instructive. Eastern Oregon rejected it by more than 90 percent, with Harney County reaching nearly 97 percent—margins Drazan needs in rural Oregon. But the Portland metro rejected it as well, by about 75 percent.⁶ A tax revolt that unites the state is not the same as a candidate who can. Still, the metro figure is the one that should interest Drazan: the firewall is not uniformly satisfied.

The Math

The numbers for 2026 differ from 2022 in one decisive respect: there is no Betsy Johnson. In the three-way race, Kotek won with under 47 percent of the vote, and, as one analyst noted at the time, the winner did not need to reach 40.⁷ A two-way race raises the bar for both candidates and changes where the extra votes may come from. Johnson drew somewhat more from Democratic-leaning voters than from Republicans, which means her absence does not simply transfer her share to Drazan.⁸ The votes return toward a more partisan baseline, and that baseline favors the incumbent.

That leaves Drazan with a clear set of goals. She has to hold the rural margins Republicans reliably produce and the suburban margins they produce less dependably; she has to narrow Kotek’s metro advantage, particularly in Washington and Clackamas counties; and she has to win the largest bloc in the state, the nonaffiliated voters, who now outnumber the registered members of either party.⁹ Nonaffiliated voters tend to choose what their communities choose: in urban areas, they vote Democratic, and in rural areas, they vote Republican. The decisive factor in 2022 was summed up by one pollster at the time: the race was a dead heat that Kotek won because of the Democratic registration advantage, the surplus of registered Democrats over registered Republicans statewide.¹⁰ That advantage has not shrunk.

One structural advantage genuinely favors Drazan. In 2022, crossover ran in her direction: surveys found more Democrats willing to vote for her than Republicans willing to vote for Kotek, and more voters viewed Kotek unfavorably than favorably, even as she won.¹¹ The discontent shows up clearly in the data. For 2026, the key question is whether it produces Republican votes or merely discourages Democratic ones.

The Landscape

Three key facts define Kotek’s baseline strength, and none of them concerns her record. The first is the presidential voting history. Oregon has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1988 and by double digits since 2008; Harris carried the state by 14.3 points in 2024 even as much of the country moved toward Trump.¹² A candidate for governor does not get the full presidential margin, but it still shapes the race. The presidential contest, however, is not happening for another two years; this effect is more pronounced in states whose gubernatorial contests run concurrently with the presidential race.

The second is the nationalization of party identity. The moderate Oregon Republican who could win statewide on local terms, the type Vic Atiyeh represented when he carried all 36 counties in 1982, has largely disappeared, and the party label now carries a national brand the state rejects.¹³ The third is registration. Vote-by-mail and automatic registration produced the nonaffiliated plurality, which makes the electorate larger and less predictable but also removes the stable partisan coalition a challenger could once rebuild.¹⁴ These facts change only slowly. They do not decide the race on their own, but they explain why markets discount the polls.

The Cycle

The national political climate in 2026 also leans toward Democrats. Midterms usually hurt the president’s party: it has lost ground in 37 of the past 40 cycles. This time, the president’s approval stands near 39 percent, and fewer than a quarter of Americans approve of his handling of the cost of living.¹⁵ Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by about four points, and independents have shifted roughly 12 points leftward since the term began.¹⁶ Recent off-year results point the same way: the 2025 governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia swung about 14 points to Democrats, and special elections across 2025 and 2026 swung an average of about 15.¹⁷ For Republican Drazan, the timing is unfortunate.

The race also carries an unusually national cast for a governor’s contest. The federal government spent the fall attempting to federalize roughly 200 Oregon National Guard troops for a Portland deployment that courts blocked, and the administration eventually abandoned. It was an episode that pulls the contest toward national questions and away from Kotek’s record.¹⁸ The cost-of-living story plays out locally too: gasoline reached roughly $5 a gallon during the war with Iran, a price spike Kotek blamed for the gas tax’s defeat.¹⁹ The same conditions that make an incumbent vulnerable on the cost of living are the conditions that mobilize an opposition base in a midterm. For Kotek, the cost-of-living pressure cuts both ways; for Drazan, the midterm calendar mostly works against her.

What to Watch

For an analyst, the race comes down to a small set of measurable indicators. The first is metro turnout. Drazan’s path does not rely on Multnomah and Washington progressives; it depends on their staying home while rural and suburban turnout remains high. The early indicator on election night will be the metro share of the returns and the size of Kotek’s Multnomah margin compared with 2022.

The second is the suburbs. Washington and Clackamas counties are where a narrowed Democratic margin would show up first. If Drazan is holding Kotek closer there than Kotek held the metro in 2022, the race is live. If not, the rural margins will not be enough.

The third is the nonaffiliated break. The largest bloc in the state is also the least predictable, and the candidate who wins it decisively wins the race. Public polling has carried a substantial undecided share throughout, which is where that break will be found.²⁰

The fourth is the national mood. National surveys show voters preferring Democrats for Congress by about four points, and the off-cycle legislative races of 2025 and 2026 have broken the same way. If that pattern holds into November, the Democratic floor in Oregon rises with it, and a tied poll tends to favor the incumbent.

Put these numbers together, and the gap between the poll and the market closes. The discontent with Kotek is real, and a two-way race with no spoiler gives Drazan a cleaner shot than the three-way contest she nearly won. But the map shows where pro-Kotek votes are strongest; the math requires metro voters to stay home, an outcome Drazan cannot engineer; the landscape sets a Democratic floor; and the 2026 calendar raises that floor. The most likely outcome is a second Kotek term won on a smaller margin than her party would prefer. The result that would surprise the markets is precisely the one Drazan is best positioned to pursue: a metro that stays home in the one year it has the most reason to vote.

Washington County deserves the closing word. The county comes into play if general-election moderates find themselves underwhelmed by both of their choices: Democratic candidates positioned too far to their left and an unpopular incumbent governor.²¹ Primary voters differ from general-election voters, and the county that decides Oregon’s close races belongs to the latter. If Drazan finds an opening anywhere, she finds it there.

Notes

1. Newsweek, “Christine Drazan Chances vs. Tina Kotek in Oregon Governor Race,” May 2026, citing FM3 Research (Jan. 28–Feb. 4, 2026; 1,065 likely voters; margin of error ±3.1), Kotek 45 / Drazan 40; and the Hoffman Research Group (May 11–12, 2026; 603 likely voters; margin of error ±4), tied at 45.

2. Newsweek, May 2026. Prediction markets gave Democrats an 85 to 87 percent chance of holding the governorship.

3. “Oregon gubernatorial election, 2022,” Ballotpedia (final tally near Kotek 46.9 percent, Drazan 43.5, Johnson 8.6); “Changed political environment will shake up Kotek-Drazan rematch,” KGW, May 21, 2026.

4. “Oregon Republicans handed Drazan another shot to beat Kotek,” East Oregonian, May 26, 2026: Kotek ranks among the least popular governors nationally; fewer than half of Oregon K-12 students are proficient in reading and fewer than a third in math; unsheltered homelessness has fallen about 4 percent since 2023.

5. “Gas tax failure: on transportation, voters tell Oregon leaders to try again,” OPB, May 20, 2026; “Oregonians overwhelmingly reject Governor Kotek’s signature gas tax increase,” Right Now Oregon, May 20, 2026 (Senate Bill 1599 moved the referendum from the November 2026 general election to the May 2026 primary). Measure 120 failed by roughly 83 percent to 17.

6. “Gas tax failure,” OPB, May 20, 2026. Eastern Oregon counties rejected Measure 120 by more than 90 percent, reaching about 97 percent in Harney County; roughly 75 percent of Portland metropolitan voters opposed it.

7. Kyle Kondik, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, on the 2022 three-way race, quoted in “Oregon gubernatorial election, 2022,” Ballotpedia: in a three-way contest the winner might not need to reach 40 percent.

8. Dirk VanderHart, in “Oregon 2022 election results round-up,” OPB, Nov. 9, 2022: polling indicated Johnson drew somewhat more support from Democratic-leaning voters than from Republicans.

9. Oregon Secretary of State, voter registration by party. Nonaffiliated voters are the largest registration group in Oregon, a product of automatic voter registration (Oregon Motor Voter) and statewide vote-by-mail.

10. Tim Nashif, Hoffman Research Group, quoted in “New independent poll shows Drazan with slight lead over Kotek,” Willamette Week, Oct. 19, 2022: the 2022 race was a dead heat that favored Kotek because of the Democratic registration advantage.

11. Willamette Week, Oct. 19, 2022: 2022 crosstabs showed more Democrats willing to vote for Drazan (about 7 percent) than Republicans for Kotek (about 1 percent), and Kotek’s negatives exceeding her positives.

12. “Oregon presidential election voting history,” 270toWin; “2024 United States presidential election in Oregon,” Wikipedia. Oregon has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1988 and by double digits since 2008; Harris carried the state by 14.3 points in 2024.

13. “Victor Atiyeh,” The Oregon Encyclopedia; “1982 United States gubernatorial elections,” Wikipedia. Atiyeh, the most recent Republican to hold the office, carried all thirty-six counties in his 1982 reelection.

14. Oregon Secretary of State, voter registration by party; on Oregon Motor Voter and vote-by-mail.

15. “2026 midterm elections,” USPollingData; William Galston, “GOP midterm prospects darken as Trump approval falls,” Brookings, Apr. 28, 2026; Morning Consult, 2026 generic ballot tracker. The president’s party has lost ground in thirty-seven of the past forty midterm cycles; Trump approval near 39 percent, with fewer than a quarter approving on cost of living.

16. Morning Consult, 2026 generic ballot tracker; USPollingData, 2026 midterm tracker. Democrats roughly +4 on the generic ballot; independents about +12 since January 2025.

17. Galston, “GOP midterm prospects darken,” Brookings, Apr. 28, 2026. The 2025 New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial results swung roughly fourteen points toward Democrats; special-election swings averaged about fifteen points across 2025–26.

18. “Oregon National Guard troops officially ordered to demobilize, Kotek says,” KGW, Jan. 6, 2026. The administration federalized roughly 200 Oregon Guard troops in late September 2025 for an attempted Portland deployment; the troops were never deployed amid litigation, and the administration abandoned the effort.

19. “Oregon voters reject hikes to gas tax and vehicle fees,” Oregon Capital Chronicle, May 19, 2026; OPB, May 20, 2026. Average Oregon gas prices reached roughly $5 a gallon amid the Iran war; Kotek attributed the measure’s defeat to the resulting price spike.

20. Newsweek, May 2026, noting a substantial undecided share across public surveys of the race.

21. Oregon’s urban population has dispersed slightly over this period, a shift that bears more on legislative seats than on statewide races but that reshapes the suburban electorate.

This, despite the fact that no communist holds a seat in Congress, no communist country has sent troops to our borders, the Soviet Union dissolved 35 years ago, and our nearest communist neighbor – Cuba – can’t even keep its lights on.

Such hysteria was a subject of taunts by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto when it was published in 1848. A specter is haunting Europe, they wrote, and all the powers of old Europe — pope and tsar, French radicals and German police spies — had entered into a holy alliance to exorcise it. The fear of communism existed before it became a governing system anywhere on earth. Back then, anti-communist hysteria only elevated its significance, and Marx thanked them for the publicity.

French philosopher Jacques Derrida arrived at what was supposed to be the funeral of communism 145 years later. He published in 1994 Specters of Marx, based on a series of lectures from the prior year, observing that Francis Fukuyama and others had, on the occasion of the Soviet Union’s collapse, triumphed in the death of the beast. Fukuyama claimed that history had ended and liberal capitalism had won.

Derrida noticed something off about this funeral. Never, he observed, had the death of an idea been proclaimed so loudly or so often. Nobody stages repeated exorcisms over a grave they believe is empty. He coined a word for the condition: hauntology, a near-homophone of ontology. Ontology is the study of what is; hauntology describes what neither quite exists nor quite disappears and keeps returning. And he dwelt on the double meaning of the word conjuration. To conjure is to summon a spirit as well as to swear an oath against it. The two acts cannot be separated. Every exorcism begins by calling the ghost into the room.

In true hauntological form, the president of the United States spent a third of his speech performing a séance instead of celebrating our country’s birthday. Communism is the enemy of free people everywhere, he told his audience. Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the opposite of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; it is death, tyranny, and the pursuit of evil. In true Trump fashion, he proclaimed this apparition the worst idea in history, championed by the worst people. He called it a loser, of course.

The ghost was named, described, denounced, exiled, buried, and then dug up again, because no burial of a ghost ever holds.

If he were a reader, one might assume that he was taking a page from Derrida, who found his next ghost in Hamlet, the play at the center of Specters of Marx. When the ghost of the old king appears on the ramparts, it wears armor with the visor down. The ghost sees us before we see him, and we can never verify the identity of the person behind the metal. Derrida called it the visor effect, and it explains why specters are so politically useful. A ghost has no face of its own, so any face can be assigned to it.

Trump demonstrated with his rant how useful a faceless ghost can be. The Communist Party, he told the crowd, is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals, and everybody who does not want to work. The speaker’s tactic at work here is the installation of a convenient menace: the migrant, the unemployed, unwelcome transporters of the infection.

The anti-communist rhetoric of this speech deployed a sleight of hand that deserves scrutiny. By throwing all Trump’s bogeymen into the mix, an economic category becomes a category of treason. To lack a job or a visa is to belong to the enemy. Marx would have recognized the maneuver instantly, because analyzing it was his life’s work: the anxieties produced by an economic order are gathered up, given a foreign face, and marched out of town.

A materialist might ask what work the ghost performs. Follow the specter through the speech and it leads directly to Trump’s agenda. Within a few breaths of the exorcism, the president called for terminating the filibuster, passing the Save America Act, and, in his own words, not losing elections for 100 years.

Tactically, the ghost is the license he needs. Forging a permanent single-party majority is a difficult thing to justify while congratulating the republic on 250 years of self-government. Invoke an eternal enemy, though, and holding power forever may look less like ambition and more like sacred duty.

If communism is a greater threat than both world wars combined, then no filibuster, no ordinary alternation of parties, can be allowed to stand in the way of the defense. Reintroducing anticommunism doesn’t require that an actual communist threat exist – Trump can just manufacture one. He admitted as much when he declared that the identity of a nation is the destiny of a nation. An identity built on an enemy needs its ghost the way a border needs a far side.

Mount Rushmore served as the perfect backdrop for this spectacle. The president posted a video of his own face carved into the mountain beside Lincoln’s in advance of the show. Showmanship underscored the message, with granite faces above, fireworks after, and a 28-minute performance by the leader of the free world.

And yet the speech could not hold its celebratory pose. It kept breaking off to wrestle the revenant, tallying the hundred million dead of the last century, refighting the Cold War, promising to send the ghost’s living hosts into exile.

Mourning, Derrida argued, is the work of making sure the dead stay where we put them, of fixing the remains in a known place. A man who declares an idea dead once has finished mourning. A man who declares it dead 14 times in 28 minutes is standing on a grave he does not trust to contain its inhabitant.

He is right not to trust that grave, though not for the reason he thinks. The exorcism at Mount Rushmore was aimed at the wrong ghost. What haunts the 250th anniversary is not Marx, whose U.S. party could caucus in a school bus. It is the promise of equality in the Declaration itself, written by an enslaver, signed in 1776. An unkept promise that returns every Fourth of July to measure the distance between the ideal and our reality. That specter needs no summoning. It arrives on schedule with the holiday, wearing no visor at all.

When the president named the people he wanted exiled, he did not describe saboteurs or spies. He described those who tell our children we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors: teachers, historians, the people whose work is to keep the older ghost visible. Every boast about being the freest people on earth conjured that older ghost from wherever the evicted, the uninsured, and the deported are kept off camera. The more extravagant the celebration, the harder it is to ignore who has been left out of the story.

This is a fact that is not just haunting him; it is haunting all of us.

In the late 1990s, a gubernatorial task force on higher education and the economy urged Oregon to stop treating its universities as public institutions and start treating them as contractors selling services.¹ The 2008 recession did not create that idea; it gave its advocates the opening to implement it. Between 2011 and 2014, the Legislature radically rewired the system through outcome-based funding contracts, the dismantling of the chancellor’s office, and the shift of power to institutional boards, all masked by a slow rhetorical shift from public “funding” to private “investment.”

Today, the Prosperity Council continues that project. It effectively revives the 1997 task force under a new name, drawing on the same business network, recycling familiar assumptions, and moving toward an identical end. What is new in the 2026 report is its bluntness. It openly concedes that Oregon has starved its universities, then recommends policies that would lock that starvation in place.

Echoes of 1997

The Council’s membership underscores the continuity of the project: decision-making on higher education is once again concentrated among business leaders, with no educators at the table. All but two of its members come from business, led by co‑chairs Renée James, founder of Ampere Computing, and Curtis Robinhold of the Port of Portland. These two are joined by executives from Tillamook, Columbia Sportswear, Hoffman Construction, and Schnitzer Properties. The only exceptions are two labor representatives, Robert Camarillo and Alice Dale, who dissented from the tax recommendations. No educator serves on the panel. The report itself was assembled with help from the consulting firm ECONorthwest and two communications agencies.

In its design and sponsorship, the Prosperity Council is essentially indistinguishable from the 1997 task force, operating within the same ideological ecosystem. The Oregon Business Council—whose Education Roundtable produced the white papers that, by the Council’s own account, laid the groundwork for the 2011–2014 reforms and introduced the 40-40-20 attainment goal—praised the new report as soon as it appeared. So did Oregon Business & Industry.³ The lobby that recast public support for universities as a private “investment” two decades ago is once again diagnosing Oregon’s economy and prescribing its cure.

From Citizens to Human Capital

The reforms of the past decade rested on one central reframing. A degree has always been an investment for the student, who trades tuition and time now for higher earnings later. What changed was the state’s posture: public “funding” became public “investment,” and the university’s worth was made to turn on a calculable economic return rather than on any public obligation. The Prosperity Council report simply extends that logic to its conclusion.

In the report, discussion of higher education is subordinated to a chapter labeled ‘Workforce’ and relegated to a section on ‘talent development,’ rather than placed within any dedicated examination of education itself. The university is listed there as a “critical driver of workforce development, research, innovation, and business growth,” aligned with “high-demand fields such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and semiconductors.”⁴ Nowhere does the report acknowledge a liberal arts education as a fundamental public good. Education appears as a pipeline, justified only by what comes out the other end.

Even the Council’s leading critic reasons the same way. Writing in The Oregonian, economist Joe Cortright urged the state to set aside tax cuts and invest in education instead, arguing that an educated population is the true source of Oregon’s prosperity.⁵ He is right about the policy and is nearly alone in saying so. Yet, he relies on the very rhetoric the reformers championed: the human-capital case, in which talent is a competitive advantage, and schooling is merely an economic input. It is the same rhetoric that helped turn a public good into a budget line.

This shared rhetoric undermines the Council’s case on its own terms. Even if one grants the premise that universities should be judged primarily by their contribution to economic competitiveness, the argument falters because of evidence showing that slashing taxes rarely delivers the growth it promises. More fundamentally, a university defended only for its “return” in the form of higher earnings or productivity has already conceded that it can be closed if those returns are judged inadequate.

A Receipt, not a Fix

What sets this report apart from earlier iterations of this agenda is that it acknowledges the conditions those reforms produced. In the talent chapter, the Council notes that Oregon “ranks 37th nationally in higher education appropriations per full-time student” and “invests 24% less per student than the national average,” and that this has produced “the highest average tuition and fees in the West.”⁶ In effect, the architects of this long-running disinvestment are finally cataloging their own handiwork.

Yet, having named the problem, the report makes repairing it the tenth of its ten priorities and the only one that pledges specific funding for universities. That pledge is $20 million per biennium for a research-commercialization fund. The constraint is neither money nor specificity: the same report commits $250 million per biennium to prepare vacant industrial land for commercial tenants—more than twelve times what it offers the universities it has just conceded it starved.⁷

Against a funding gap that leaves Oregon roughly a quarter below the national average, and with the highest tuition in the region, $20 million is a receipt, not a fix. There is no proposal to restore operating support, cut tuition, or expand need-based aid. The report admits that the institution is starving and then treats it as an afterthought.

The Austerity Reflex

Oregon’s current fiscal bind traces back to Measure 5, the 1990 property-tax cap that eroded the state’s capacity to fund schools and universities for nearly two decades before the Great Recession.⁸ The Prosperity Council does not confront that legacy; instead, it proposes to cut further.

Its near-term recommendations for the 2027 legislative session are a sequence of tax reductions: raise the estate-tax exemption to between $3 million and $5 million; restore a capital-gains break for investors in small-business stock, the lapse of which has preserved roughly $40 million in state revenue; and add new research tax credits. A fourth change to the Corporate Activity Tax, which funds Oregon’s schools, is supposed to be revenue-neutral; the other three have no such constraint. One of those three, the capital-gains break for investors in small-business stock, would especially reward transactions like the one its own co-chair completed last year: Renée James sold Ampere Computing to SoftBank for $6.5 billion in 2025. Broader tax restructuring is safely exiled to a working group scheduled to report in 2029.⁹

The report is unusually candid about where this all leads. A “more balanced” tax system, it says, “may require broader-based revenue tools that can be more regressive in isolation.”¹⁰ In plain language, that is a sales tax—a tax that falls hardest on people with the least money and is justified with the promise that later spending will make up for it.

The Council defends this shift toward a more regressive tax system by citing a comparison in which an Oregon filer earning $40,000 appears to face a higher effective tax rate than a similar filer in Washington. That claim leaves out property taxes and misses the main point: Oregon now has one of the least regressive tax systems in the country precisely because it has no sales tax and relies more heavily on income taxes.¹¹ To align with Washington is to imitate the most regressive tax systems in the nation, where the poorest fifth of households pay more than three times the share of income that the richest one percent pays.¹²

The underlying ideology is a familiar austerity reflex: lower taxes will unleash growth. That is one claim for which we have an unusually clear test. In 2012, Kansas made deep cuts to business and income taxes. Economic growth lagged behind its neighbors and the national average, while state budgets experienced repeated shortfalls, prompting a Republican legislature to reverse the cuts over the governor’s veto. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded that the results lined up with the bulk of academic research and recommended that states focus instead on improving schools and infrastructure.¹³

The timing in Oregon makes the proposal even more striking. Governor Kotek’s office projects a $5.7 billion loss of federal funding in the 2027–29 biennium, much of it affecting the Oregon Health Plan.¹⁴ Despite this, the Council recommends cutting state revenue and urges the governor to “reject proposals that increase personal or business taxes and fees unless there is meaningful support from Oregon’s employers of all sizes.”¹⁵ In effect, it hands employers a veto over the state’s ability to survive its own fiscal crisis.

Oregon’s Shock Doctrine

Oregon’s university crisis was underway long before it was officially declared. The rhetoric of “crisis” has consistently served as a political tool, a way to present a long-planned agenda as emergency repair. This pattern is the “Shock Doctrine” of higher education in action,¹⁶ and the Prosperity Council leans heavily on that script. Its report opens with a dashboard: Oregon ranked 49th in employment growth, with unemployment at 5.2 percent and 41 percent of residents unable to afford basic needs.¹⁷ The distress is real. Its root causes, however, differ entirely from the report’s framing.

In classic Shock Doctrine fashion, the Prosperity Council seizes on a national jobs slowdown and heightened poverty to sell the same trickle-down tax program Oregon’s business lobby has pushed for 20 years. National job growth slowed significantly in 2025, falling from an average of 168,000 jobs a month the year before to 49,000—the weakest year outside a formal recession in more than two decades.¹⁸ Oregon’s numbers were further depressed by hard years at two major employers, Intel and Nike. The Council takes that national slowdown and a measure of poverty and recasts them as grounds for their familiar demands for favorable tax treatment.

The Council’s widely publicized listening tour does little to alter, and much to obscure, the continuity of its business-driven agenda. The Council may have held 66 listening sessions and collected a thousand surveys, but a panel drawn almost entirely from corporate executives was never going to deviate from its corporate imperatives.

We no longer have to speculate where this “talent pipeline” reasoning inevitably leads. In 2023, West Virginia University—the flagship campus in one of the poorest states in the country—shut down its entire department of world languages under a funding formula that rewarded degrees tied to defined workforce needs. The department was not losing money; it generated roughly $800,000 in net revenue per year.¹⁹ It was cut anyway, because its courses offered what the formula could not easily price. A program does not have to be failing to be eliminated; it only has to fall outside the scope of what the funding formula is designed to measure. A formula built on that single metric turns a university into a vocational school by another name, keeping the degrees it can price and discarding the rest.

That is where the Prosperity Council’s rhetoric points, no matter how often it invokes prosperity shared by all. The blueprint was drawn in 1997 and written into law between 2011 and 2014. It has now produced a report willing to concede the damage in one chapter and extend it in the next. What remains of Oregon’s public universities is being steered, on schedule. The Prosperity Council is not forecasting Oregon’s future; it is asking the 2027 Legislature to finish a plan begun in 1997: the public university remade as a workforce vendor, kept only for what the funding formula can price. The blueprint is complete. What remains is the vote.

Notes

1. Ramin Farahmandpur, “From Kitzhaber to Kotek: The Managed Demise of Oregon Public Higher Education,” Academic Gadfly, June 11, 2026, https://academicgadfly.substack.com. On the 1997 panel: Governor’s Task Force on Higher Education and the Economy, Higher Education and the Oregon Economy (Portland, OR: Oregon Business Council, 1997).

2. Oregon Prosperity Council, Recommendations for Oregon’s Long-Term Competitiveness & Prosperity (Salem, OR: Oregon Prosperity Council, June 2026), https://www.oregon.gov/gov/Documents/Oregon%20Prosperity%20Council%20Report_June%202026.pdf. Council roster, p. 2; “Prosperity Council Support,” p. 32 (staffing by ECONorthwest, Gard Communications, and Sound & Vision Agency); labor members’ dissent, Chapter 2 (Taxes), “Dissenting perspective,” p. 20.

3. Oregon Business & Industry, “Policymakers Must Act Urgently on Prosperity Council Report,” June 25, 2026, https://oregonbusinessindustry.com/prosperitycouncilreport/. On the Oregon Business Council’s Education Roundtable and its self-credited role in the 2011–2014 reforms, see Farahmandpur, “From Kitzhaber to Kotek” (see note 1), and Oregon Business Council, “Policy Papers — Education and Talent Development,” https://orbusinesscouncil.org/policy-papers/policy-papers-education-and-talent.

4. Prosperity Council, Recommendations (see note 2), Chapter 5 (“Talent Development”), p. 30.

5. Joe Cortright, “Opinion: Oregon’s prosperity won’t be built on tax cuts,” The Oregonian/OregonLive, June 14, 2026 (updated June 15), https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2026/06/opinion-oregons-prosperity-wont-be-built-on-tax-cuts.html.

6. Prosperity Council, Recommendations (see note 2), Chapter 5, p. 29. The report’s “37th” figure tracks the FY2023 State Higher Education Finance (SHEEO) data; my earlier essay cited “32nd” from an April 2025 Oregon Capital Chronicle report using a different year and measure. Both figures circulate; the Council’s own number is used here.

7. Prosperity Council, Recommendations (see note 2), Chapter 5 (Recommendation 10), p. 30, and Executive Summary, pp. 6–7 (University Innovation Research Fund, $20 million per biennium). On the $250 million-per-biennium allocation to prepare industrial land for commercial tenants, see Prosperity Council, Recommendations (see note 2); and Dirk VanderHart, “‘Prosperity Council’ wish list for Gov. Tina Kotek: lower taxes, less regulation, more land,” OPB, June 25, 2026, https://www.opb.org/article/2026/06/25/prosperity-council-kotek-taxes-regulation-land/.

8. Farahmandpur, “From Kitzhaber to Kotek” (see note 1); Oregon Ballot Measure 5 (1990), property-tax limitation, Oregon Constitution, art. XI, sec. 11b.

9. Prosperity Council, Recommendations (see note 2), Chapter 2 (“2027 Legislative Session”), pp. 18–19. On the Qualified Small Business Stock provision and the roughly $40 million preserved by Oregon’s prior disconnection, see also Julia Shumway, “Kotek’s prosperity council pushes for lower taxes, fewer regulations,” Oregon Capital Chronicle, June 25, 2026, https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2026/06/25/koteks-prosperity-council-pushes-oregon-lawmakers-to-revisit-tax-cuts-leaves-details-up-in-air/. On co-chair Renée James’s sale of Ampere Computing to SoftBank for $6.5 billion in 2025, see “Prosperity Council’s Report Challenges Kotek to Signal That Oregon Is Open for Business,” Willamette Week (Oregon Journalism Project), June 25, 2026, https://www.wweek.com/news/state/2026/06/25/prosperity-councils-report-challenges-kotek-to-signal-that-oregon-is-open-for-business/.

10. Prosperity Council, Recommendations (see note 2), Chapter 2 (“Priority Recommendations”), p. 18.

11. Prosperity Council, Recommendations (see note 2), Chapter 2, pp. 16–17 (the effective-rate comparison, which excludes property taxes). On Oregon’s relative standing, Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All 50 States, 7th ed. (Washington, DC: ITEP, January 2024), https://itep.org/oregon-who-pays-7th-edition/; Oregon Center for Public Policy, “Oregon’s tax system weighs more heavily on the poor than anyone else,” January 9, 2024, https://www.ocpp.org/2024/01/09/oregon-tax-weighs-more-on-poor/.

12. ITEP, Who Pays?, 7th ed. (see note 11): in Washington the lowest-income fifth pay about 13.8 percent of income in state and local taxes against roughly 4.1 percent for the top one percent.

13. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Kansas Provides Compelling Evidence of Failure of ‘Supply-Side’ Tax Cuts,” January 22, 2018, https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/kansas-provides-compelling-evidence-of-failure-of-supply-side-tax; see also “The Kansas tax cut experiment,” Brookings Institution, 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-kansas-tax-cut-experiment/.

14. Office of Gov. Tina Kotek, preliminary analysis of the federal reconciliation law (H.R. 1), August 2025, projecting a $5.7 billion reduction in federal funds in the 2027–29 biennium concentrated in the Oregon Health Plan; reported in Dirk VanderHart, “Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ will slash $15 billion in federal money to Oregon, Kotek says,” OPB, August 11, 2025, https://www.opb.org/article/2025/08/11/oregon-braces-impacts-trump-budget-cuts-billions-federal-money/.

15. Prosperity Council, Recommendations (see note 2), Chapter 2 (“2027 Legislative Session”), pp. 18–19.

16. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007). The reading of crisis as a political instrument is developed in Farahmandpur, “From Kitzhaber to Kotek” (see note 1).

17. Prosperity Council, Recommendations (see note 2), Executive Summary (“Top Challenges”), p. 4.

18. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data as summarized in “December 2025 Jobs Report,” Indeed Hiring Lab, January 9, 2026, https://www.hiringlab.org/2026/01/09/december-2025-jobs-report/ (2025 monthly average of 49,000 jobs against 168,000 in 2024; 584,000 added in 2025, the weakest non-recession year since 2003).

19. On the West Virginia University cuts and the profitability of the world-languages department, see Farahmandpur, “From Kitzhaber to Kotek” (see note 1), and the sources collected there, including “West Virginia University’s Unprecedented Proposed Cuts Become Clear,” Inside Higher Ed, August 11, 2023, and reporting in West Virginia Watch (September 15, 2023; April 23, 2024).

A glimpse into a personal tragedy sometimes gives us a picture of terrible human possibility writ large. Painful but necessary, such lessons are our only hope of preventing future carnage. That is why the fourth annual Fellowship and Summer Institute on Antisemitism and Jewish Identity in Educational Settings hosted a compelling Holocaust survivor.

Irene Weiss is 95 years old. A photograph of her, taken 82 years ago, documents what would become the worst day of her life. For decades, Irene did not know that a Nazi photographer shot the image in the spring of 1944, on the arrival ramp at Birkenau, the killing center within Auschwitz. Decades later, her daughter found it in a published album.

In the image, a 13-year-old girl in a headscarf leans forward, searching the crowd for her younger sister, Edith. The sister was already gone, moving with the column bound for the gas chambers.

Listening to her this week at George Washington University, I kept returning to one fact: in 2024, I stood on that ground. Auschwitz-Birkenau lies about 90 minutes outside Krakow. I walked the platform where Nazi soldiers sorted people. A man with a baton decided instantly who would work and who would die. I had read about the place, but witnessing it brought a different order of knowledge.

Now, two years later, I sat in a room and listened to a woman who had been a child on that exact site.

More than 400,000 Hungarian Jews were deported by train to Auschwitz over a matter of weeks in 1944. Irene’s entire family was among them, fed into a killing-and-slave-labor operation that wiped out most. Her father was forced to move bodies and perform other labor as a Sonderkommando; he was shot as soon as he could no longer do the work. Irene’s mother and three younger siblings were murdered upon arrival. Only her sister Serena joined her among the survivors.

Irene and Serena were assigned to the section the prisoners called Kanada, where the belongings of the murdered were sorted and stored: the suitcases, the shoes, the eyeglasses, the photographs of families. For eight months, Irene handled what was left of the dead. She spoke about cruelty as something she had been made to study at close range, and she questioned not only the camp but the civilization that made it possible. How could it happen, she asked, in the heart of the modern West?

My own conclusion, not hers, is that civilization can break down, and barbarism is closer than we imagine. The same progress that laid track across a continent laid the track to Auschwitz-Birkenau. If it could happen once, it could happen again.

The officers who ran Birkenau’s human-sorting center decided who was old enough and strong enough to work. The rest were exterminated. Irene believes that her scarf saved her life. After her head had been shaved in the Munkács ghetto, her mother had given her the cloth; it made her look older than her 13 years—old enough to work.

That is why she survived; dissociation is how she survived. Irene moved through her captivity as though she were on another planet, as though she were watching the experience from outside her own body. Some realities are too terrible to endure in any other way.

For those of us who heard her story, the experience was just the opposite. Connecting our learned history to her lived experience rehumanized the scene: a child on a platform, delivered to the macabre scene of loss, misery, and endurance against all odds. Her job is to keep reminding us of the terrible possibilities; our job is to listen and believe her.

I am grateful to Irene Weiss’s daughter, Ilana, for confirming the photograph, and to Naomi Gamoran for her help.

Jews from Subcarpathian Rus undergo a selection on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, May 1944. Irene Fogel (later Weiss), age thirteen, is in the front row, second from left, facing forward. From the Auschwitz Album, photographed by SS-Hauptscharführer Bernhardt Walter and his assistant SS-Unterscharführer Ernst Hofmann of the Erkennungsdienst (Identification Service). United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Yad Vashem (Public Domain), Source Record ID FA 268/026.

In a crisis, one looks for proximate causes to determine the best approach for resolution. When it comes to the fiscal plight of Oregon's “public” universities, however, it's necessary to look back nearly 30 years—to the real start of the decline.

Though some point to the 2008 recession as the catalyst for higher education restructuring, the fact is that the plan to institute “reform” was devised in 1997 as a proposition of corporatists.

Their vision emerged from the Governor’s Task Force on Higher Education and the Economy, a panel of executives from banking, construction, health care, and technology, which argued that universities should no longer be treated as public agencies but as independent vendors.

This Task Force recommended that Oregon regard its institutions “as independent entities from which services can be contracted,”1 rather than as state agencies. This shift in terminology carried major institutional and political consequences: a state agency is funded, while a vendor is paid for results. Much of what followed grew out of that redefinition.

Later described as a response to a crisis, these reforms are better understood as the adoption of an earlier policy. The 2008 recession is often treated as the cause of Oregon’s higher education reforms. The timing of enactment may make that interpretation plausible. After all, in this time, enrollment surged, tuition climbed, and state revenue fell, prompting legislative action. Each element of that account is supported by evidence.

The fiscal strain, however, predated the recession. Measure 5, the 1990 property-tax limitation,2 had been reducing the state’s capacity to fund education for two decades. The recession deepened an existing strain; it did not create the reforms so much as provide the opening to enact them. The plan had been drafted, funded, and circulated for years, and the downturn simply created the political opportunity for implementation. Read alongside the restructuring bills passed in 2011, the 1997 report reads as a detailed policy blueprint.

The Imported Doctrine

The 1997 report reflected a national education doctrine that was already well established. In 1986, the National Governors’ Association, under the chairmanship of Lamar Alexander, published Time for Results,3 which urged states to tie school funding to measurable outcomes, develop sanctions for institutions that failed to meet goals, including state takeover, and strengthen coordination between K–12 and higher education so both could be directed toward common benchmarks.

Three years earlier, A Nation at Risk supplied the doctrine's founding rationale.4 The report itself never ranked the variables; the reformers who invoked it distilled it into a single claim: that teacher quality outweighs every other factor in student achievement, including class size, household income, and school resources. By the time the Oregon Task Force convened, these ideas had already become policy orthodoxy.

The Network Behind It

These ideas were advanced and sustained by a coordinated network of business groups, foundations, advocacy organizations, and private vendors that supplied money, publicity, and political influence.

Oregon’s corporate reform agenda can be traced to 2004 and 2005, when the Oregon Education Roundtable, a project of the Oregon Business Council, produced a set of white papers funded by the Oregon Community Foundation and the Lumina Foundation. The Roundtable concluded that the state’s education system “must be funded and structured differently,”5 proposed tying expenditures to performance outcomes, and introduced the goal that became known as 40-40-20. The 40-40-20 law (SB 253 in 2011) absurdly demanded a 100% high school graduation rate and an 80% post-secondary completion rate—unrealistically untethered from reality and misaligned with the predicted future workforce needs.

This theme surfaces at every stage. Lumina set its own national goal in 2008: 60 percent postsecondary attainment by 2025,6 advancing a similar completion agenda on a national scale. Advocacy organizations such as the Chalkboard Project and Stand for Children brought the message into the public arena, arguing that more money was not the answer and that schools should be audited, monitored, and held accountable for results. The American Legislative Exchange Council supplied a model for legislators. Pearson supplied the tests. What appeared to be homegrown common sense was, in fact, supported by a coordinated policy network.

The influence was not subtle, and the network has acknowledged it. The Oregon Business Council credits its Roundtable white papers with laying the conceptual framework for the reforms the legislature enacted between 2011 and 2014.7 A similar pattern appeared lower in the system. The Chalkboard Project, funded by a consortium of private foundations, saw its CLASS model for evaluating and paying teachers adopted into state law and supported with public funds, with an additional $16 million in 2015.8 In both cases, privately funded initiatives were translated into public policy.

Just as important as the network promoting these reforms was the rhetoric it used to make them appear necessary and reasonable. One of the most consequential changes was the shift from speaking about public funding to speaking about investment.

The Roundtable’s agenda was evident in the rhetoric of its white papers. The white papers borrowed the language of critical education, transformation, liberation, and empowerment to describe a managerial vision of schooling. They warned that an Oregonian without a postsecondary credential would face “a precarious existence” in an economy that punishes the uneducated. They recommended that funds be “organized around students, not institutions.”9 In this usage, “institutions” meant labor and the unions that defend it. The Roundtable approached public higher education primarily as a workforce training ground and, therefore, as a major budgetary expense.

From Funding to Investment

The most important change was rhetorical because it redefined the state’s obligation to public universities. Reformers increasingly described higher education as an investment expected to produce returns rather than as a public good deserving support.

Calling it funding suggested a public commitment; calling it investment implied that support depended on measurable payoff. A state that funds its universities recognizes a public obligation to support them, while a state that invests in them reserves the right to demand proof of return before committing more.

It also recast the relationship among the state, students, faculty, and institutions in more market-oriented terms. As Bridget Burns, then chief of staff of the Oregon University System, told a 2011 symposium, “what you fund shows what you value.”10 She was correct, and the budgets that followed made clear that the state was willing to support higher education less robustly.

This redefinition was translated into policy and governance, where the state redefined its relationship to higher education in concrete institutional terms.

In 2011 and 2012, that language was written directly into Oregon’s education governance structure. Senate Bill 909 created the Oregon Education Investment Board, chaired by the governor, and Senate Bill 242 established the Higher Education Coordinating Commission. The following year, Senate Bill 1581 introduced achievement compacts, annual contracts that required institutions to report their progress toward state benchmarks. Meanwhile, the chancellor’s office of the Oregon University System was dissolved. Portland State, the University of Oregon, and Oregon State were granted their own boards of trustees, which assumed authority by 2014.

The governor also converted the elected Superintendent of Public Instruction into an appointed assistant officer, and the governor became the superintendent, at least in name.11 The direction was consistent: the state centralized political authority over education in the governor’s office while reducing its financial obligation to institutions. It no longer functioned primarily as the direct steward of public higher education, instead positioning itself as an investor that retained authority to set terms while reducing its financial commitment.

This shift in Oregon was not unique. Scholars of higher education had already seen the writing on the proverbial wall. Michael Peters described the entrepreneurial university as one that shifts the cost of attendance onto students, courts international enrollment for revenue, treats knowledge as a private commodity, and installs a class of administrators hired to run public institutions as though they were private businesses.12 Peter Eckel and his colleagues gave the result a name: the quasi-public institution, severed from the state and redefined from a public good into a private one.13 Oregon was not improvising; it was implementing a recognizable model.

The University as a Revenue Model

Portland State University offers a clear illustration of how the statewide program was implemented. Responding to declining state support, it adopted performance-based funding measured in student credit-hour production. It introduced flexible degrees completed largely online, offered accelerated programs, and gave credit for prior learning.

In 2013, it launched Rethink PSU, a $3 million pool of student fees from online courses, awarded to departments that competed to streamline their operations.14 It convened an Academic Program Prioritization committee to sort programs into the healthy, the promising, and the challenged. It pursued out-of-state and international students as a deliberate revenue strategy, setting a target of 3,000 international students enrolled. The 1997 report had recommended this approach years earlier, urging Oregon's public universities to compete for out-of-state learners as a source of tuition revenue.15 The university's response followed the recommendation closely.

University administrators stated the rationale in planning documents. Portland State’s strategic plan for 2011 through 2014 set the goal of expanding online and hybrid courses partly because doing so would limit the impact on the university’s physical space. The reasoning was primarily fiscal: more students, fewer buildings, and a lower cost per credit. The same plan presented the recruitment of international and out-of-state students as a means of raising revenue. Enrollment had been recast as a source of income, and the plan made that explicit.16

If the strategic plan outlined the university’s revenue rationale in broad terms, the committee’s plan demonstrated how that calculus operated more narrowly within the institution, ranking programs by administrative and financial value.

The Academic Program Prioritization process exposed the institution’s preference for administrative and financial metrics over measures of teaching and learning. Although its criteria appeared comprehensive, in practice, they were mostly fiscal.

The committee evaluated every program according to its relation to the university mission, student demand, quality, productivity, financial performance, and trajectory.17 Each unit was required to file reports that measured graduation rates at four and six years; time to degree; revenue generated by grants, contracts, and gifts; instructional expenditures per student credit hour; faculty salary benchmarks; and average class size.

Measures that might capture what a program teaches, or what a student gains from it, were nearly absent. The rubric’s only gesture toward quality asked to what extent students participated in scholarship, creative work, community engagement, or internships beyond the classroom—a question the form could pose, but the spreadsheet could not score.18 The remaining criteria translated teaching and learning into financial data points.

From the outset, the administration described Academic Program Prioritization as a process that assessed a program’s value in line with the institution’s strategic priorities. It presented the process as a means of guiding “strategic investment in programs that best support institutional goals.”19 In that formulation, a program’s worth is measured by whatever advances the institution’s strategy, while the institution’s strategy is itself shaped by the same budgetary logic used to evaluate the program. The result is a circular framework in which value is determined by the priorities it is supposed to justify. In this construction, the evidence strategic priority is reduced to economic survival, not an educational mission.

Under this model, credit-hour production became the basic currency of academic worth. Courses with strong enrollment were treated as financially justifiable, while those with lower enrollment were increasingly framed as liabilities, regardless of what they taught or whom they served. Academic Program Prioritization was presented as a means of directing investment toward the programs that best supported institutional goals, not inherent educational value. In practice, it gave administrators a defensible framework for deciding which programs to reduce, along with rhetoric that cast programs as healthy or challenged and made such reductions appear to be neutral triage rather than administrative choice.

To be fair, this model gained support in part because it coincidentally addressed other legitimate concerns. Frustrations with inequitable student outcomes and institutional stagnation gave added validation to this model. Outcomes funding and the 40-40-20 goal drew genuine support from equity advocates who saw that the old model rewarded universities for enrolling low-income and first-generation students without ever answering for whether those students graduated.

While these concerns were valid, so too were the other pressures on enrollment: a shrinking college-age population and a post-2008 flight from the humanities toward business and engineering. A fair account grants all of this, but none of it exonerates the framework.

A funding model built on credit-hour production needs no administrator with particular ideological hostility; its structure alone will turn any enrollment decline, whatever its cause, into a rationale for elimination. Equity entered the same system and emerged as a metric. The promise to graduate underserved students became a number to be optimized, and the disciplines that examine power and inequality became line items that failed to clear the minimum. The system did not need to target those disciplines explicitly; its design was sufficient to disadvantage them.

The implications of this structure are clearer when it is taken to an extreme conclusion. West Virginia University offers a useful comparison because it illustrates what can happen when the same governing rationale is carried even farther.

What the Model Produces

The model’s consequences are not hypothetical. The clearest cautionary case rests in a state that carried the model to its endpoint.

In 2023, West Virginia University, the only research flagship in one of the poorest states in the country, declared a $45 million deficit and announced a restructuring it called Academic Transformation. The Board of Governors approved it that September, cutting 28 majors and 143 faculty positions and eliminating its entire Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics. They kept only a handful of instructors to teach Spanish and Chinese as electives.20 The cuts were shaped by a new state funding formula, written into law that same year, that rewarded degrees tied to workforce development.21 The Modern Language Association noted that no other state flagship had abandoned language instruction on such a scale.22

One detail makes the underlying logic especially clear. The world languages department was profitable, returning roughly $800,000 a year. The university cut it anyway.23 A program need not be failing in substantive terms to be judged unsuccessful under the formula. It has only to teach what the formula cannot readily price. As a substitute for its language faculty, the university floated a partnership with a digital platform, reducing the discipline to a subscription-based substitute.24

The sorting process that began under names like Academic Program Prioritization can, when carried to its logical end, result in deep institutional cuts, and the first disciplines to go are often the ones the metric cannot read: languages, the humanities, and other liberal arts fields whose worth is not easily quantified.

Seen in that light, the rhetoric of crisis begins to look less like an explanation and more like a political instrument. What appeared to be emergency reform was, in fact, the continuation of a much older agenda—one might say, “the Shock Doctrine” of higher education.25

The natural progression of this agenda is visible in Oregon today, where the governance structure created during Gov. John Kitzhaber’s tenure remains largely intact under Gov. Tina Kotek. The Higher Education Coordinating Commission (HECC), established in that period, still directs funding, and Ben Cannon, who advised Kitzhaber on education and became the commission’s first director, continues to lead it.26

At the same time, the state’s commitment to its public universities has not meaningfully recovered. Under Kotek, appropriations have risen only marginally, increases university presidents describe as reductions in real terms; Oregon ranks 32nd nationally in public investment in higher education, and tuition now supplies more than half of university revenue.27

In 2026, with several campuses facing multimillion-dollar deficits, the Oregon legislature directed HECC to study how to make the system “financially sustainable,” an administrative phrase that now reads less like a plan for renewal than a strategy for managing permanent austerity.28

Taken together, these patterns make clear that the crisis functioned less as the cause of reform than as the occasion for implementing it. Reformers often said as much themselves. Sue Hildick, once president of the corporate-reformist Chalkboard Project, stated the position plainly: “Getting more money is not a goal.”29

A movement that spent two decades demanding accountability from public universities while accepting, and often rationalizing, the steady withdrawal of public support was never confused about funding. The ambiguity was politically useful because it redirected attention away from disinvestment and toward institutional blame.

The plan was launched before the crisis, and much of it has now been realized. What remains of Oregon’s public universities may best be understood as the residue of a public system after a long program of managed retreat.

The meeting is mandatory. Workers are pulled from the factory floor in shifts, seated in a back room or a rented hall. They are shown slides.

A manager who has been pleasant for years now speaks in a new register. He explains that a union is a third party, an outside organization that will insert itself between the company and its people, collect dues, and make promises it cannot keep.

He says he is not permitted to make threats and then, in the conditional, describes what tends to befall workplaces that organize.

The lights come up. Everyone returns to the floor.

Labor law has a name for this: the captive-audience meeting. A version of it has been staged in American workplaces for almost 90 years.

What looks like a series of separate events is, in fact, one continuous campaign, and the captive-audience meeting is its central act. Written down in 1936, protected by statute in 1947, licensed from the top in 1981, and refined every year since, the campaign has been interrupted only when workers have organized in numbers large enough to make it fail.

The meeting held in a rented hall in 2026 follows the script James Rand circulated to his fellow employers in 1936. The script does not change. What changes is whether the workers in the room are organized enough to refuse it.

From Rifles to Talking Points

The Pinkertons at Homestead and the militia at Ludlow were part of an earlier phase of this control—cruder, open, and lethal.

At Homestead in 1892, Andrew Carnegie’s lieutenant, Henry Clay Frick, locked out the steelworkers and floated 300 Pinkerton agents up the Monongahela River on barges to retake the mill. The workers met them at the bank. By the end of the day, men were dead on both sides, and the union at Homestead did not recover for 40 years.

At Ludlow, Colorado, in April 1914, the state militia and guards employed by the Rockefeller coal company fired on a tent colony of striking miners and their families and set the canvas alight. Eleven children and two women died in a pit dug beneath one of the tents.

The captives have always been there; what changed was the means of keeping them in line, from violence to more subtle means of intimidation.

The Mohawk Valley Formula

None of it is improvised. The script exists.

In 1936, during a strike at the Remington Rand works in the Mohawk Valley of upstate New York, company president James Rand Jr. assembled a set of tactics and circulated them to other employers as a model.

His methods were straightforward: Label the organizers outside agitators. Recruit loyal employees to serve on citizens’ committees. Equate the union with disorder. Threaten to close the plant. Stage a dramatic return to work and urge the local press to call it a verdict.

The National Labor Relations Board examined the tactics, found them unlawful, and described the assembled steps as a battle plan against organized labor; congressional investigators studying anti-union practices reached similar conclusions.

The approach outlived the condemnation. Employers kept both the technique and the label: the Mohawk Valley Formula.

From Consultants to “Persuaders”

What the Mohawk Valley Formula began, a new business model completed.

Employers drew a lesson from the violence of the preceding decades: the same ends could be achieved with consultants rather than with bloodshed. Overt violence was expensive and ruinous to the brand.

In 1939, a Sears labor manager named Nathan Shefferman, backed by company seed money, founded Labor Relations Associates, the first labor-relations consultancy in the country and the model for every firm that followed. Labor historians call him the father of the union avoidance industry.

By the time a Senate committee exposed the operation in televised hearings two decades later, the firm had hundreds of clients and a repertoire of bribery, surveillance, and staged committees. The trade survived the scandal and grew into an industry billing in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Federal law calls the practitioners “persuaders” and requires them to report their activity, but a loophole in the statute exempts anything labeled “advice,” and most of the trade reports nothing.

The persuaders do not call themselves persuaders. They use euphemisms instead. They are labor-relations consultants, workplace advisers, and providers of “positive employee relations.”

The same firms that sell “positive relations” supply the staging for captive-audience meetings: the slides that depict unions as third parties, the talking points about outside agitators, the rehearsed insistence that no one is making threats, even as the threats are implied.

When the State Took a Side

The state did not merely tolerate the campaign. In time, it wrote part of the campaign into law.

The Wagner Act of 1935 had protected the right to organize, but in 1947, Congress passed the Taft–Hartley Act over a presidential veto and added a provision guaranteeing employers the right to oppose unionization, so long as the opposition stopped short of an explicit threat.

The following year, the Board held that employers could require workers to attend the meetings where the argument was delivered.

The captive-audience meeting, condemned as a battle plan a decade earlier, became a protected and enforceable routine. The formula had been unlawful. Its central act was now a statutory entitlement, and every mandatory meeting since has rested on the 1947 statute and the 1948 ruling.

For decades, the federal government posed as the referee. That posture changed in 1981. When the air traffic controllers of PATCO struck, President Reagan fired more than 11,000 of them at once, barred them from federal employment, and dissolved their union.

The private campaign against organizing had always required deniability. After 1981, it required less. The state had demonstrated that mass firing was not an outrage but a style of governance, and employers took the instruction to heart. The government that had once condemned the Mohawk Valley Formula now modeled a new version of it from the dais.

A Second Front in the 2020s

While corporations refined the private campaign, the government opened a second front.

In the spring of 2025, by executive order, the administration invoked a seldom-used national security exclusion in the Civil Service Reform Act to remove collective bargaining rights from roughly two-thirds of the federal workforce—close to a million workers. Agencies began canceling contracts already in force.

The labor historian Joseph A. McCartin called the order the largest single act of union busting in American history.1

The House passed a bill to reverse it, and that bill waits in the Senate to this day. The courts are divided, and for now, an appeals court has cleared the administration to proceed.

The character of this anti-union campaign was on display late that year, when the Department of Homeland Security terminated the contract covering 47,000 airport security officers one day after the House voted to restore the rights the order had taken away.

The referee, meanwhile, has been recruited to one side.

For most of 2025, the National Labor Relations Board could not function, lacking the three confirmed members it needs to decide cases, and workers waited the better part of a year for rulings on whether they had been fired for organizing.

Early in 2026, the Senate confirmed James Murphy and Scott Mayer, giving the Board a majority sympathetic to employers; Mayer had served as chief labor counsel at Boeing. The new NLRB majority has identified its targets: a 2023 decision that made interference with organizing costlier and a 2024 ruling that banned the captive-audience meeting outright.

The agency built to umpire the contest is preparing to re-legalize the oldest play in it.

Delay as the Instrument

The meeting is still running.

Workers at a Buffalo Starbucks organized in 2021, and four years later, not a single unionized store in the country has secured a first contract, even though the union has filed more than 1,000 unfair labor practice charges and drawn nearly 200 consolidated complaints before the National Labor Relations Board. An administrative law judge has described the company’s conduct as a scorched earth campaign.

Amazon warehouse workers on Staten Island voted to unionize in 2022 and encountered a wall of refusal that still stands. In late 2025, Starbucks workers began an open ended strike, timed to one of the company’s busiest sales days, which spread to more than 100 stores.

That wall is not incidental; it is by design. A company does not need to prevail in an election to defeat a union. It needs only to withhold a contract.

After a vote, it contests the result, files objections, and bargains at a pace that yields no agreement, conceding nothing as the months pass. Turnover does the rest. A workforce that voted to organize is replaced, hire by hire, with one that never did, and the majority that won the election dissolves before anyone can enforce it.

The persuaders supply the playbook for each stage. The statute supplies the clock.

Delay is not a failure of the system; it is the instrument.

The captive-audience meeting is the opening scene. The drawn-out bargaining and quiet replacement of the workforce make up the rest of the script.

The Rhetoric of Intimacy

The companies running the meeting describe themselves in family terms. Starbucks calls its workers partners and insists it wants an agreement. Amazon speaks of direct relationships with its associates.

The rhetoric of intimacy is itself part of the campaign, the way the citizens’ committees were part of the Mohawk Valley Formula.

What a company says about its workers and what it files against them before a labor judge are, in substance, entirely different documents. One is delivered in the rented hall, in the voice of concern; the other is delivered in briefs and objections, in the language of delay.

The union remains the only instrument that has ever changed the outcome—the only thing that turns a captive audience back into a workforce able to govern the terms of its own working life.

That is why the persuaders have been hired, in every generation, to make certain the meeting ends the way it always has.

The meetings are not glamorous, but they are still the most important hands-on civics class in everyday American life.

Most leaders grew up on the classroom version of civics, learning about the three branches of government, how a bill becomes law, and how democracies function. The real lessons of how to put these theories into practice came later. While serving on committees, they learned how to run meetings and participate in caucuses. Most of us, however, will never sit on a board, run for office, or write a resolution. As a consequence, the lesson of how power actually plays out in such settings may remain a mystery.

For workers who carry union cards, the local affiliate is where they actually practice self-government. It’s where a hospital orderly learns to amend a motion from the floor, where a community college instructor learns how to count a strike vote, where an electrician learns to chair a meeting, where a custodian learns to file a grievance and push it through multiple steps.

This is on-the-job training in democracy. A union local is one of the last places in American life where ordinary people are expected to participate actively, not just watch from the sidelines. Unlike many other organizations, which mainly ask you to show up, a union trains members to navigate meetings, debate issues, and make decisions using formal rules of order.

For many working people without formal training in leadership, the union is often the only place to gain the skills and confidence elected officials deploy every day. It wasn’t always like this; social and civic organizations—Lions Clubs, City Clubs, Rotary—were much more prominent. Today, however, they have faded. So too have other, similar organizations, such as PTAs and county political parties. Even when they do exist, they flourish only when people have the time and economic comfort to participate.

The work unions do for public life goes far beyond bargaining and grievances. Unions turn out voters at higher rates than any other working-class institution. Their members often become the organizers who staff city councils, school boards, and statehouse committees. Locals help fund community groups that defend public libraries, public schools, public parks, and public lands. Behind efforts to pass minimum-wage hikes, paid leave laws, and workplace safety rules are unions doing the hard work of coalition-building. Stewards become mayors. Bargaining chairs become legislators. When a private equity firm moves to close a public hospital, when a corporate owner threatens to ship jobs elsewhere, when a state agency looks to cut a service, the community’s response is often led by unionists.

When union density falls, wages drop—and so do the practical skills people need to act together. Fewer people know how to organize a campaign, draft a resolution, hold a leader to a promise, or build coalitions across real differences. Robert Putnam’s famous work on the decline of community organizations in postwar America found that union membership fell the fastest. Later political science confirmed the link between fewer unions and weaker mass democratic participation.

That link is not an accident. When unions and other mass-membership institutions that teach ordinary people how to act together vanish, people slowly lose the ability to collaborate effectively. What remains are individual acts of consumer choice, private complaints, and the habit of looking for a strong leader who promises to act on workers’ behalf.

So, we should ask: Is there anything else that trains millions of Americans in the daily work of governing themselves?

The answer is a qualified “yes.” Tenant unions, mutual aid networks, immigrant rights groups, and congregations with strong committee structures all do organized, rule-bound work at a large scale. Where they exist and function well, they offer democratic training that closely resembles what labor does. The difference is that organized labor is the only entity doing it for millions of people, backed by legal protections that force employers to recognize members’ decisions, and with the staying power to keep it going for decades instead of just during election cycles or other episodic periods.

Of course, not every local operates equally well. Some unions run staff-dominated meetings in which members are there to ratify, not to deliberate. Some have turned meeting rules into an empty routine by going through the motions without real discussion. The answer is not to write off such unions; it is to strengthen those that have grown weak. A weak local can be revived. A dissolved local cannot.

Oregon knows this story in its bones. The 1934 longshore strike shut down the Portland waterfront, alongside a broader West Coast action. Teachers walked out in 2019 to demand better school funding. Staff at Powell’s organized in waves. Graduate workers built some of the earliest public-sector graduate employee unions in the country. Portland Community College faculty negotiated some of the strongest contracts for part-time faculty and walked out in 2026, in the first community college strike in Oregon’s history. Nurses recently went on strike at Providence, winning a strong contract in so doing. Oregon’s labor movement isn’t a relic of the past. It is a living civic institution doing work few other institutions are positioned to do.

Oregon’s experience is not an exception; it is a concentrated version of a broader struggle over who governs public institutions. Take, for instance, the phenomenon of higher education power dynamics. On campus after campus across the United States, upward accretion of administrative control has threatened to reshape institutions for a generation and undercut a long tradition of shared decision-making. Centralizing authority is often framed as a financial necessity, but it also narrows who gets to decide how teaching and learning are organized.

Boards of directors, institutional administrators, and their C-suite counterparts all speak the language of power. Unions pull the other way. The people who do the institution’s daily work gather to set priorities, argue over proposals, and insist that decisions be made with them, not for them. These are the counterweights to the firm consolidation of power at the top.

And that’s why working people set out the folding chairs, start the coffee, and call a meeting to order. They argue over amendments, count votes, and hold one another to rules they wrote themselves. No one will mistake it for a seminar in democratic theory. It is something better: the practice itself, carried out by people the rest of the system rarely trusts to govern anything.

Without tending, activist union effectiveness may erode, one lapsed meeting or one dissolved local at a time. Those at the top of unionized workplaces relish opportunities to exploit the demise of such locals, further consolidating what already exists as considerable management power. But what such CEOs cannot defeat is the will of workers to defend their rights, to seek justice, and to find each other in union halls throughout the state.

Our ongoing task is to protect those rooms and multiply them, so that the everyday habits of self-government are not forgotten, and so that unions remain living schools of democracy.

On January 20 and 21, 2025, President Donald Trump signed Executive Orders 14151 and 14173, dismantling federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs across agencies, contractors, and institutions of higher education. These orders revoked Executive Order 11246, which had mandated affirmative action in federal contracting since 1965, dissolved federal DEI councils, and required universities receiving federal funds to certify that their programs do not advance what the administration describes as illegal discrimination.

Institutions moved quickly. Florida and Texas campuses closed DEI offices, the University of North Carolina system rolled back diversity programs, Ohio State dissolved its diversity office, and Columbia stripped DEI language and diversity statements from its hiring processes. These developments are not a correction to an overreaching experiment in equity. They extend a long-standing pattern in which universities substituted symbolic diversity initiatives for structural change: celebrating the language of inclusion while maintaining the conditions that make genuine inclusion impossible. The federal rollback has merely stripped away the symbols, leaving the underlying structure exposed.

At Portland State University, the 2025 Climate Survey quantified what faculty and staff of color have long documented: a 21-point racial inclusion gap between administrators and the broader campus community, accompanied by a significant loss of trust in institutional leadership. These disparities predate Trump’s executive orders, concealed beneath strategic plans, diversity committees, and public statements of commitment. What has changed is that the institutional alibi—the performance of equity—can no longer obscure the persistence of institutional racism in Oregon’s public universities.

The National Pattern: When Diversity Hiring Is Just Theater

National data on faculty representation expose a persistent failure. As of the 2022–23 academic year, 26 percent of tenure-track faculty were people of color, up from 21 percent in 2016–17. This apparent progress is driven largely by increases in the numbers of Asian American and Hispanic faculty. Over the same period, the percentage of Black full professors rose from only 3.3 percent to 3.5 percent, a gain of 0.2 percentage points. In the most recent data, Black women saw their pay relative to white men fall at both the associate and full professor ranks, according to data from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR).

A 2023 report from the American Psychological Association identified one key reason behind these patterns: faculty of color are subjected to an “inequity tax.” This tax consists of invisible and uncompensated labor—mentoring students of color, educating white colleagues about racism, staffing diversity committees, and absorbing the emotional impact of institutional neglect—performed in addition to meeting the same publication and grant expectations as colleagues who carry none of these burdens. Promotion and tenure committees neither recognize this labor nor adjust expectations to account for it. The result is predictable: higher attrition, lower promotion rates, and the reproduction of predominantly white faculty hierarchies.

Yale’s experience remains instructive. Following a 2005 commitment to diversify its faculty, the university hired 56 faculty of color; by 2012, only 22 remained. Those who left reported that they did not feel fully included in the intellectual community, were excluded from informal networks, and had to work harder than colleagues of equivalent rank to receive comparable recognition. Yale’s response was a $50 million initiative that, once again, funded recruitment and salary incentives rather than addressing the ways the institution itself produces exclusion. Similar independent reviews at other institutions, such as UCLA, documented a pattern of bias and discrimination against faculty of color and complaint procedures too weak to address it, despite public commitments to inclusion.

Oregon’s Particular Failure in Public Higher Education

Oregon’s public universities are not exceptions to this pattern. Their history of lawsuits, failed recruitment initiatives, and stagnant faculty demographics shows how national dynamics take on a specific regional form.

Portland State University professor and administrator Douglas Samuels filed the largest employment-related racial discrimination lawsuit in the state’s history after being demoted and reassigned to the Black Studies program following years of inequitable treatment in pay, committee assignments, and job responsibilities. In 2009, PSU settled for $795,000. Samuels’ attorney publicly stated that the university had a reputation for a hostile work environment for faculty and staff of color.

PSU’s response in the years that followed was to produce strategic plans. Its five-year plan pledged to create an open, inclusive, and diverse environment and to adopt best practices for the recruitment, retention, and advancement of diverse faculty. Yet 16 years after the Samuels settlement, approximately 40 percent of PSU’s incoming students are students of color, while faculty of color remain at roughly 14 percent of the professoriate.

The University of Oregon has fared no better. Among the nation’s top 62 research universities, UO ranked lowest for faculty of color from 2005 through 2012. Its recruitment program, which offered departments $90,000 to hire faculty of color, was widely regarded as ineffective for a reason that required no sophisticated analysis: search committees composed overwhelmingly of white male full professors tend to hire candidates who resemble themselves. Philosopher Naomi Zack noted that she was one of only two women of color holding full professorships anywhere in the university. The university’s incentive program did not alter that basic fact.

The 2025 PSU Climate Survey reflects a similar pattern. The 21-point racial inclusion gap between administrators and other campus members indicates that those who make decisions about hiring, promotion, tenure, and program continuity experience the institution differently from those whose careers are governed by those decisions. Administrators who report high levels of racial inclusion are the same people who determine which programs survive budget cuts, which grievances advance, and which faculty lines are renewed. The survey revealed who holds power and how that power sidelines faculty and staff of color while preserving a sense of inclusion among those who control the institution’s resources.

Diversity Initiatives as Management Strategy, Not Structural Change

More than a decade ago, Sara Ahmed argued that university diversity initiatives are less about transforming institutions than about managing diversity and its perception. Subsequent experience has borne them out. Universities across the United States have deployed diversity offices, multicultural centers, and equity statements primarily as instruments of fundraising, accreditation compliance, and protecting their public image rather than as mechanisms for structural change.

Trump’s executive orders have exposed this logic. Institutions that built reputations on diversity commitments abandoned them at the first sign of federal pressure, closing DEI offices, stripping DEI language from websites, and rescinding diversity statements in hiring. The speed and scale of capitulation confirm what critics of symbolic diversity work have long argued: a commitment to equity that cannot survive a change in administration was never structural.

When the performance of diversity is withdrawn, what remains is the underlying institution: the same hierarchies, the same informal networks, the same promotion committees, and the same patterns of exclusion that existed before strategic plans were drafted and diversity statements were posted online. If diversity initiatives have functioned primarily as instruments of image management, the question is not whether universities should have such offices but what structural change would entail in practice.

What Structural Change Actually Requires

Measures that alter institutional structure share one feature: they make the cost of exclusion visible and attach consequences to it.

Public exposure of this data is the first accountability strategy, not because universities lack this information, but because they refuse to share it. Portland State knows promotion and tenure rates for faculty of color by department and rank. The University of Oregon knows how many faculty hired under its $90,000 diversity incentive remained after three years. These numbers are rarely published. Making them public—disaggregated by race, gender, and rank and subject to external review—would expose the gap between proclaimed commitment and documented outcomes.

Cluster hiring addresses the institutional isolation that drives attrition. A single faculty member of color in a department of 14 white colleagues is not a diversity hire; that person is a token, burdened with representing an entire population, excluded from informal networks, and evaluated by colleagues with little stake in retaining them. Hiring faculty of color in cohorts provides social support and builds intellectual communities that make scholarly careers sustainable. Institutions that have implemented cluster hires show measurably higher retention rates for faculty of color.

Promotion and tenure criteria must also change. Mentoring students of color, advising equity committees, and managing the institutional fallout from discrimination complaints are forms of academic labor that universities currently extract without recognition. Portland State and Oregon State have begun to include contributions to diversity in promotion standards. These revisions are meaningless, however, if individual departments retain full discretion over whether such work counts. Uniform enforcement, with administrative accountability for departments that ignore or minimize diversity contributions, is what distinguishes a structural revision from a symbolic one.

Search committee composition is another locus of institutional power. Committees dominated by tenured white faculty tend to reproduce their own composition; this is not simply a tendency but a well-documented pattern. Diversifying committees, requiring external reviewers for searches in departments with poor retention records, and holding department chairs accountable for search outcomes directly reshape practices that universities already understand. The PSU-AAUP contract, faculty senate procedures, and collective bargaining agreements provide the institutional framework for enforcement. The tools exist; using them is a matter of administrative will, not institutional capacity.

Beyond Performance

The current political moment has stripped higher education of one of its most effective alibis. For decades, Oregon’s public universities, like institutions across the United States, could point to diversity statements, equity officers, and multicultural programming as evidence of institutional commitment. Those instruments are now being eliminated, abandoned, or reclassified, and the underlying institution stands essentially unchanged. Trump’s executive orders did not create Oregon’s racial hierarchies; they removed a thin layer of symbolic compliance that universities had used as proof of change.

The PSU Climate Survey’s 21-point racial inclusion gap did not appear in 2025. It has long been visible in exit interviews, discrimination complaints, and the career trajectories of faculty who left. The Samuels settlement at PSU, the University of Oregon’s last-place ranking among major research universities for faculty of color, and the national pattern in which the percentage of Black full professors increased by only two-tenths of one percentage point over seven years are not anomalies.

The choice before Oregon’s public universities is not between diversity programs and their absence. It is between material change and continued performance. Anything less is not reform; it is rehearsal for the next statement of regret.

Note: An earlier version of this essay was presented as "Challenging Institutional Racism in Pacific Northwest Higher Education" at the American Association of University Professors Annual Conference on the State of Higher Education in Washington, D.C., in June 2016. This version has been substantially revised and updated.

Contracts are not just legal formalities. They are moral commitments. They are how people bind their future selves to one another against the chance that power, mood, convenience, or expediency will later suggest another course. Hannah Arendt called the capacity to make and keep promises the political act par excellence. Without it, she argued, no future could be planned, no institution could endure, and no relationship could outlast the moment of its making. A promise allows people to plan on the assumption that words will hold. Contracts are promises written down, made between parties for whom a handshake is no longer enough.

At the center of labor history is this question: what keeps a powerful party from breaking a contract? The answer is not virtue. Institutions do not honor contracts for moral reasons. They honor them when enough opposing power makes breaking them costly. That power takes many forms: organized resistance, public scrutiny, litigation, political pressure, and historical memory. E.P. Thompson, writing about the 18th-century English crowd, described an older form of restraint: a moral economy, a shared sense of what was owed and what counted as fair. That sense was enforced not by goodwill but by the willingness of working people to resist reforms that stripped custom of its substance. When that moral economy was strong, contracts were more likely to hold. As those restraints weakened, contractual protections did as well. Unchecked power turned contracts into guidelines. Without enforcement, guidelines became rhetoric. By that point, the relationship between subject parties had already been abandoned.

Recent history offers many examples. In 2012, Hostess Brands used bankruptcy proceedings to void union contracts and shed pension obligations, ending the employment of workers who had spent decades under terms they believed were secure. The maneuver was lawful under the bankruptcy code. That the maneuver was lawful did not change what it did to those workers.

In Wisconsin, Act 10 stripped public-sector workers of collective bargaining rights on a sweeping scale, turning decades of negotiated agreements into hollow administrative remnants. At Bennington College in 1994, 27 faculty members, including tenured professors, were dismissed in a single afternoon under the label of “presidential reorganization.” At Antioch College in 2007, retirees learned that pension obligations would not be honored when the institution closed. During the pandemic, similar patterns appeared at institutions such as Ithaca College, Marquette University, and the University of Akron, where faculty contracts were treated as subordinate to enrollment shifts and budget stress.

In each case, the institution relied on procedure as its method. Bankruptcy law allowed it. Legislative authority sanctioned it. Board action approved it. Financial necessity demanded it. But that method answers a different question from the one the contract was supposed to settle. A contract sets terms in advance. It marks what can be done and what cannot. The procedural maneuver says only that the stronger party has found a way around those terms. A contract that can be set aside whenever the stronger party faces enough pressure is not really a contract. It is a wager. The weaker party is betting that the conditions under which the stronger party will keep its word will continue to hold. When those conditions change, the wager fails.

Institutions often violate contracts through a familiar deceit. They rarely deny the importance of contracts outright. Instead, they claim to be honoring them through procedure. The grievance is filed. The hearing is held. The records are produced. The written response is issued. Procedure is followed even as the promise itself is set aside. The form of the contract becomes cover for violating its substance. A worker who reads the documents closely and tries to recover that substance is told that substance is open to interpretation, while procedural rulings are final. The procedures, meanwhile, have usually been designed by the party they protect.

The Iliad shows clearly what modern institutional language often tries to obscure. A broken contract does not damage only the immediate parties. Achilles withdrew, and the Greek campaign faltered. It faltered not simply because Achilles was a great warrior but because his withdrawal taught every other Greek noble the same lesson: what had been awarded to one man could be taken from another by the same authority. The agreement that held the campaign together had been broken, and everyone could see what that meant. Each fighter now had to measure his own standing against that reality. The soldiers had learned what their leaders could do. The campaign continued, but the war had changed.

Broken institutional contracts teach the same lesson today. The faculty member who watches a colleague laid off out of order reads the precedent. The pensioner who watches a bankruptcy court erase obligations reads the precedent. The public-sector worker who watches a legislature strip bargaining rights reads the precedent. The lesson is precise: the contract means whatever the institution decides it means.

The first remedy for institutional contract violation is not legal. Law comes later. The first remedy is recognition: saying clearly that a contract has been broken and naming what the institution has done. That matters because the main weapon of contractual evasion is the claim that no violation has occurred, that procedures were followed, that the institution acted in good faith within the agreement. When that claim goes unanswered, the institution’s version prevails. When it is challenged, the violation at least becomes visible. Whether it is then remedied depends on other forms of power: courts, public opinion, political pressure, and collective action by those affected. But recognition comes first.

At the opening of the Iliad, the wrath of Achilles is named, sung, and remembered. Without that act of naming, a precedent stands unchallenged.

A small group of well-heeled property owners surrounding the Keller — the Halpern Group — have spent considerable treasure to advocate for the first option, while advocates for PSU’s proposed 3,000-seat complex range from Governor Tina Kotek to the Oregon Legislature to organized labor. PSU has already raised more than $137 million toward its vision of teaching spaces, a conference center and hotel, and the new large theater in what it is calling the Portland Arts and Culture Center, or PACC.

One thing both sides agree on is that the Keller Auditorium, built in 1917, cannot withstand a major earthquake. No one questions whether the Keller will close for seismic work; it will. The issue is what happens to the people whose livelihoods depend on it during the two years it is shut down.

That is the question Crossroads Consulting Services set out to answer in an economic impact analysis delivered to the City of Portland in May 2024. Commissioned through the City’s Office of Management and Finance, the report modeled a 24-month closure during fiscal years 2027 and 2028. In a debate that often drifts toward abstractions, this report is the clearest factual anchor. It deserves a larger place in the public discussion than it has gotten.

What it shows is sobering. In FY 2027, the closure would eliminate approximately 320 jobs supported by Keller operations and $20.5 million in regional labor income. In FY 2028, those figures rise to 336 jobs and $21.8 million in labor income. Over the two-year closure period, $42.3 million in labor income would disappear, along with $96.3 million in total economic output and approximately $5.1 million in local and state tax revenue. These are not aspirational projections about what some future arts investment might one day produce. They are conservative estimates, drawn from standard regional economic modeling, of what stops happening when a venue with $46.8 million in annual operating activity goes dark.

And those losses are not just lines on a spreadsheet. In FY 2028, the direct employment loss is 229 jobs: facility staff, stagehands organized through IATSE Local 28, musicians performing with touring orchestras, wardrobe workers, box office staff, and food and beverage workers serving audiences at intermission. Another 107 jobs would be lost indirectly or through induced effects: restaurant servers near the Keller whose Saturday-night tips depend on a show being in town, rideshare drivers, parking attendants, and suppliers tied to the facility’s operations. Crossroads explicitly names IATSE. Broadway Across America, the main vendor of this venue, warned of “the potential loss of jobs for members of IATSE and other staff associated with the Keller Auditorium” in its formal communication with the City.

Much of this turns on Broadway, the traveling company, which is the single largest source of the affected work. During fiscal years 2018 through 2023, Broadway accounted for 46 percent of Keller performances and 55 percent of total attendance, averaging approximately 177,000 annual Broadway attendees. According to Broadway Across America, more than half of those attendees come from the suburbs and beyond, and more than 70 percent are season subscribers. In a typical Portland season, six to eight touring shows run for as many as twelve weeks, with eight performances a week. Every one of those performances employs the IATSE crew, the touring musicians, and the facility staff who make the show possible.

If no successor venue is operating when the Keller closes, Portland will not simply put Broadway on hold for two years; it will lose it. Broadway Across America will move its Portland season to Seattle and San Francisco. Season subscribers, who make up most Broadway attendance, will spend their money elsewhere, as the Crossroads report predicts. Other users will move to other venues. Some may hesitate to come back even after construction ends if they see Portland as unreliable or uncertain. In other words, the damage would outlast the closure itself. Re-staffing the facility with skilled personnel becomes, in the report’s words, “a challenge.” The IATSE crews who have spent decades building technical expertise specific to Keller productions will either find other work in the region or relocate. Once that experience disperses, it does not snap back into place the day the doors reopen.

This is where the PACC matters most. If the Performing Arts and Culture Center is built and operating by the time the Keller closes for renovation, Broadway can move across the South Park Blocks to the PACC instead of across state lines to Seattle. The crews move with the touring schedule. Season subscribers keep their subscriptions. Musicians keep their gigs. Wardrobe staff keep their wages. Downtown restaurants keep their pre-show traffic. The labor income Crossroads projects as lost does not disappear because the work behind it continues.

Economic activity will propel the city’s resurgence, building on its robust and globally renowned arts and culture scene. PSU, which has lost 23 percent of its enrollment in recent years, would be able to capitalize on its new performing arts resource to attract students interested in both performance and back-of-the-house training.

A second labor benefit of the PACC option concerns construction. Because PSU is a public landowner, Oregon law requires that capital projects meet high-road construction standards, including prevailing wage requirements, the use of registered apprentices, and workforce equity protections. Over the life of the project, the construction phase is estimated to support roughly 2,000 construction jobs across the trades: laborers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, ironworkers, and operating engineers. Portland needs more work of that kind, not less, at a moment when the region’s broader construction pipeline has slowed. In fact, the PSU project is expected to stimulate a 10-year building renaissance, returning cranes to the skies over Portland.

That helps explain why organized labor is lining up behind the project. This is not generic civic boosterism or a reflexive institutional endorsement. It is a practical response to a specific decision with visible consequences for its members. They understand the Crossroads numbers because those numbers describe the workers they represent. The labor case for the PACC is the one these organizations have been making to the legislature and the city all along. Portland’s reputed pro-labor city councilors should prioritize these objectives as they weigh the decision before them.

Sooner or later, the Keller will close. Once renovated, it could be reopened as an intermediate-sized performance space, adding to a thriving cultural mecca. Meanwhile, however, the question is whether the workers who keep it running go dark with it, or move a short distance to a successor venue ready to take them in. The Crossroads analysis puts a price on those two outcomes. The PACC is what makes the better one possible.