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.

I want to stay with this scene because it shows how an old antisemitic script can run through an academic institution without ever using a slur.

Two small marks of punctuation around a working verb.

In her February 2026 testimony before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Amy Spitalnick of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs described what makes antisemitism distinct from other forms of prejudice. It functions, she said, as a conspiracy theory rooted in tropes and lies about Jewish control and power. Jews are alleged to manipulate finance, manipulate numbers, and manipulate the institutions that other people inhabit in good faith. The remedy proposed by anyone who reproduces the trope is always the same: a public accounting, a demand that the suspected party submit to communal scrutiny of methods the community has already decided are suspect.

The trope does not need to identify you.

Antisemitism is harder to address than many other forms of bias for precisely this reason. A slur announces itself. A swastika announces itself. The conspiratorial mode operates differently. It works through syntax, framing, and the public theater of demand. It can be spoken by a colleague who has never used a slur in his life, who would object strenuously if asked whether he holds antisemitic views, and who may not consciously hold the suspicion that his sentences enact.

Consider how the conspiratorial accusation appears in professional settings. The accused is a member of a protected class who holds administrative responsibility involving numbers, budgets, or data. The accuser raises a question about transparency. The question is asked publicly rather than privately. The numbers the accused has presented are placed in quotation marks, indicating they may not be real numbers, may not be the right numbers, or were derived through methods the community does not understand and therefore must distrust. The accused is asked to demonstrate his methods to an assembled group. The demand is framed not as discipline but as healing. The community has been suffering. The accused is either the source of or the obstacle to relieving the suffering. His public confession of method is the path to collective repair.

Individually, these elements are innocuous: transparency as a virtue, methodological demonstration as normal academic practice, communal healing as a worthy aim. The trope does not need to identify you; it organizes the combination. The combination produces an old sequence of suspicion: the figure who hides the numbers, the demand for public exposure, the framing of his accounting as restorative for everyone else.

The trope of Jewish manipulation of finance and numbers is among the oldest in the antisemitic repertoire. It spans centuries: from the medieval moneylender to the Weimar caricature of the Jewish financier engineering economic ruin to the contemporary financial conspirator. The version that took root in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s did not begin in the camps. It began with newspaper articles, radio broadcasts, and public demands that Jewish methods be subjected to communal scrutiny. When a professional setting reproduces the demand to expose hidden Jewish manipulation of numbers, it is not inventing a new accusation. It is reactivating an old one.

A colleague who enacts this sequence need not be antisemitic in any conventional sense. He may be repeating a pattern he has never examined. He may believe, sincerely, that the suspicion he holds is a response to objective evidence rather than a script. He may even see himself as an ally, serving on diversity committees and imagining that he is merely advocating for fairness. The script does not care what he believes. The script runs through him.

Spitalnick was careful to describe antisemitism as a feedback loop rather than a fixed inventory of slurs. The conspiratorial mode adapts to different cover stories. One year it appears as “fiscal responsibility,” another as “program oversight,” another as “community healing” or “transparency reform.” The language changes, but the suspicion stays the same. It appears among people on the right and people on the left. It appears among people who consider themselves allies of Jewish colleagues, who would be wounded to learn that their words have been recognized for what they were.

The recognition is an account of pattern, not an accusation of intent. Pattern is what trope is.

I have collected examples of this pattern in my working life. I have not collected them to file as evidence in any single proceeding. I have collected them to confirm that I am not imagining what addresses me, that the unease I feel in these moments is not a private paranoia but a recognizable script. The trope does not need me to be visibly Jewish to function. It needs only that I occupy the position the trope assigns: the administrative role involving numbers, the methodological complexity that others in the institution have not learned, and the accounting that the community can demand.

Once a person has been placed in that role, the trope arrives, whether his name announces him or not. The quotation marks are added. The demand is made. The community is summoned. The figure is asked to account for himself.

The first protection is recognition. Not of the colleague, not of the grievance, not of the apology. Recognition of what addresses you, so that the next time the quotation marks appear around someone else’s verb, in someone else’s email, on someone else’s list, the people who read the message know what they are reading.

If there is a second protection, it is refusal: refusal to treat these demands as neutral, refusal to see quotation marks around someone’s work as a harmless stylistic choice.

Two small marks of punctuation. The trope rides on smaller things than that.

Whether the Moda Center renovation fits the same pattern as the Washington Commanders deal, the King Dome saga, and the Tampa Bay Rays subsidy is not easily answered. The answer is more complicated than the public conversation allows: the framing drives the politics, and the conditions determine the contract. Whichever positions hold political weight over the next four months will shape the 20-year lease.

I. The proposal on the table

Nearly two years after the City of Portland purchased the Moda Center from the estate of Paul Allen for $7.13 million in August 2024, Senate President Rob Wagner introduced Senate Bill 1501. The legislation, which Governor Tina Kotek signed on April 27 after a bipartisan 24-6 Senate vote, established a framework for shared ownership of the arena between the State of Oregon and the City of Portland. The state is authorized to issue up to $365 million in general obligation bonds toward a renovation estimated at $600 million. The state’s contribution is contingent on the Trail Blazers signing a binding 20-year lease after the sale of the franchise to Texas billionaire Tom Dundon, who purchased the team for $4.25 billion in August 2025.

The City of Portland, under Mayor Keith Wilson, has proposed $120 million in upfront capital and an additional $14 million per year in operating and maintenance costs over the life of the lease, for a total city contribution exceeding $400 million over 20 years. Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson has proposed $88 million in renovation funding and an additional $13 million in maintenance from county sources, including motor vehicle rental tax and business income tax revenues. The Blazers, under Dundon, have committed zero dollars to construction, though the team would be responsible for cost overruns.

The combined public commitment, in present-value terms, is about $665 million against a privately held franchise that just sold for $4.25 billion, to an owner whose fortune was built running the nation’s largest subprime auto lender.

II. What opponents get right

Opponents are not wrong about how stadium financing works. A 2023 review in the Journal of Economic Surveys, conducted by economists John Charles Bradbury, Dennis Coates, and Brad R. Humphreys, examined more than 130 studies of stadium and arena subsidies spanning four decades and concluded that large public subsidies for professional sports venues are not justified by their returns.

The Trail Blazers organization, Mayor Wilson’s office, and the bill’s legislative sponsors cite economic-impact figures. They list $670 million in annual regional impact, 4,500 jobs, 1.6 million annual visitors, and 7,000 hotel rooms booked for a single sporting event. But the figures rely heavily on flawed methodologies that treat money spent at the arena as new economic activity rather than as spending diverted from other regional venues, count private profit as public benefit, and label construction wages as economic stimulus without subtracting the opportunity cost of the public dollars.

Portland economist Joe Cortright has called the proposal a giveaway. State Senator Kim Thatcher, one of six votes against SB 1501, cited the same body of research on the Senate floor; her vote was correct on the empirical merits even if her broader politics are not.

Opponents are right about the pattern: the public bears the cost. At the same time, the private owner keeps the revenue, a recurring mechanism by which billionaires capture public subsidies for the construction of vanity assets that remain in private hands.

III. The distinction that changes the analysis

One feature sets the Moda Center deal apart from the standard pattern.

Because the City of Portland owns the building, the renovation, if it proceeds, would be a public investment in a publicly held facility, not a transfer of public money to a private owner for the construction of a private building. The closest analogies are the Portland International Airport, which Mayor Wilson invoked in his State of the City address; the Oregon Convention Center; the Veterans Memorial Coliseum next door; and the public museums, libraries, and concert halls that constitute the cultural infrastructure of every American city.

Public investment in shared civic infrastructure is a defensible tradition on the left, different in kind from the Washington Commanders subsidy, the Atlanta Falcons subsidy, or the dozen other deals Robert Reich has documented. The Commanders and their stadium are privately owned; the public was paying off a billionaire’s mortgage. The Moda Center is publicly owned, and the public would be paying for upgrades to a public asset. The distinction is necessary, though not sufficient.

Public ownership of the building does not, by itself, change the pattern: the public bears the cost while the private owner keeps the revenue. Under a 20-year lease to a privately held franchise, the renovation revenue, naming rights, concessions, ticket revenue, and franchise appreciation all remain in private hands. Public ownership relocates the cost-revenue split rather than ending it.

Public ownership creates a contractual position in which enforceable conditions can be written into the lease before public money is committed. Without such conditions, public ownership is a formality that changes the accounting but not the political or financial stakes. Under the conditions outlined in Section VII, public ownership becomes the precondition for a public investment that differs in kind from the standard stadium subsidy. The distinction depends on the conditions being written into the lease as enforceable terms. Failing that, the objection is valid.

What the council writes into the lease will determine whether the public investment returns enough value to the public to justify the expenditure, and whether the labor, environmental, and community requirements attached to the renovation are set out in enforceable contract language rather than left to the goodwill of a Texas billionaire.

IV. Lower Albina and the question of restorative development

For much of the twentieth century, the neighborhood now called Lower Albina was the heart of Portland’s Black community. The neighborhood was decimated in the 1950s and 1960s when scores of homes and businesses were demolished to make way for Interstate 5 and for the Memorial Coliseum. The displacement and redlining that preceded it have been documented by the Albina Vision Trust, the Portland City Archives, and the I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project’s own history page. The Moda Center sits on land taken from a Black neighborhood under an urban renewal policy well-documented by historians.

The Albina Vision Trust, led by Executive Director Winta Yohannes, has spent several years building a restorative development plan for the neighborhood. Albina One, the 94-unit affordable housing development that opened in September 2025, was the first major project. It was designed and constructed by Colas Construction, only the second Black-owned construction company to put a crane in the sky in Oregon’s history. In 2024, the Trust entered into the Albina Rose Alliance, a formal partnership with the Blazers organization built on a joint development strategy, joint legislative advocacy, and a shared commitment to the generational prosperity of displaced residents.

Yohannes told state lawmakers in February that the success or failure of SB 1501 would depend on how the deal affected the entire neighborhood, not just the arena. Yohannes’s testimony places public investment within a frame that the populist objection does not address: whether the renovation of a community asset can be tied to the rebuilding of a community destroyed by prior policies. The frame is restorative, not philanthropic. It treats the Moda Center renovation as one piece of a larger accounting the city owes to Lower Albina, including the Albina Vision Trust’s freeway caps over I-5, the 1803 Fund, the affordable housing pipeline, and a community benefits agreement that has not yet been written into the lease.

V. Two tales of organized labor

The labor argument for the renovation breaks into two parts, and the two parts are not the same case.

The case for the construction workforce is the stronger of the two. Councilor Eric Zimmerman and the Mayor's office have committed to a project labor agreement, with prevailing wage requirements, local apprenticeship hiring through the Oregon State Building and Construction Trades Council, measurable diversity targets, and Pacific Northwest-sourced timber.

Multnomah County Chair Vega Pederson has demanded union labor for both construction and ongoing operations and maintenance work at both Moda Center and the Veterans Memorial Coliseum as a prerequisite for the county’s contribution.

The Oregon State Building and Construction Trades Council represents 31 member unions. Laborers Local 737, Ironworkers Local 29, Glass Workers Local 740, Elevator Constructors Local 23, and Linoleum/Carpet Local 1236 are among its locals with jurisdiction over the work. A union-built renovation of a publicly owned building is precisely the project the labor movement has fought for across the postwar period, from the Hoover Dam to the federal courthouses to the PDX modernization that Mayor Wilson invoked as an analogy.

The case for the operations workforce is more troubling. The food service, concessions, parking, ticketing, and logistics workforce at the current Moda Center is not unionized, except for a small group of engineers. Mark Davison, president of Teamsters Joint Council 37, told the Portland Mercury in April that the lack of union representation in those categories is atypical for Oregon, a state without right-to-work laws, and that the Teamsters had been in conversation with Moda workers for roughly a year about the terms of their employment before the public funding negotiations began. The Teamsters represent workers at Lumen Field and Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, Oracle Park in San Francisco, and Ball Arena in Denver; the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union represents workers at other comparable venues across the country.

Organized labor in Portland is pushing for a labor peace agreement, a neutrality contract committing the Blazers’ incoming ownership group, under Tom Dundon, to remain neutral during union organizing campaigns and to refrain from suggesting opposition to representation. Councilor Mitch Green has stated publicly that a labor peace agreement should be a bare-minimum precondition for any public financing of arena renovations. The condition is not currently in the deal.

The operations question is where the populist argument has the most political traction and where the conditional argument must be most precise. A renovation that creates union construction jobs while leaving the operations workforce in the hands of a billionaire who has no track record of labor neutrality is not a complete labor victory. The labor case for the renovation requires both union construction and a binding labor peace agreement covering the existing workforce, written into the lease as a condition of public funding.

VI. The Clean Energy Fund problem

The Portland Clean Energy Fund was passed by Portland voters in 2018 as a 1% surcharge on the sales of large retailers with more than $1 billion in national revenue. The fund was originally projected to generate $60 million annually; it has averaged $200 million per year since collections began. The mandate is climate investment with community benefit, with a particular focus on creating jobs for people of color, building infrastructure to respond to climate change. The mandate has not been amended by voters since.

Mayor Wilson’s proposed funding package includes up to $75 million in PCEF revenue, contingent on a Climate Investment Plan amendment and approval by the PCEF citizen-led advisory committee. This allocation is the most contested element of the package. Two left-leaning councilors, Mitch Green and Tiffany Koyama Lane, have refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement that would have given them access to the ongoing negotiations between the city and the Blazers; the stated reason is that the public case for the use of PCEF money should be made in public, not behind closed doors. Several other councilors, including Jamie Dunphy, Elana Pirtle-Guiney, and Sameer Kanal, have indicated they could support the use of PCEF revenue conditioned on the advisory committee’s recommendation. No advisory committee recommendation has been issued because no design plan or project scope has yet been finalized. The Blazers have not yet selected a general contractor, and the project timeline indicates that final design plans will not be available until December.

The PCEF allocation is the weakest point in the conditional case. The fund was created to support specific climate and equity work with accountability mechanisms in a city with a documented history of climate work being defunded when a higher-priority political demand arises. The Albina Rose Alliance includes climate-friendly building commitments, and some portion of the renovation could meet PCEF eligibility standards, particularly if the building is upgraded to a fully electric standard with solar generation, energy storage, and resilience infrastructure that serves the surrounding neighborhood during heat domes and ice storms.

PCEF eligibility has not been established. Until the design scope is public, until the climate components are itemized and budgeted, until the PCEF advisory committee has issued a recommendation against the existing Climate Investment Plan criteria, the PCEF allocation is a giveaway with climate language attached. It cannot be defended.

VII. The conditions of a defensible deal

The conditional case requires that the lease language include the following provisions as conditions of public funding:

• A binding labor peace agreement: Covering the food service, concessions, parking, ticketing, logistics, and operations workforce at the Moda Center, modeled on the Lumen Field and Climate Pledge Arena agreements.

• A project labor agreement: Covering all construction phases of the renovation, with prevailing wage, local hire through Oregon State Building and Construction Trades Council apprenticeships, and diversity targets enforced through hiring data rather than aspirational language.

• A community benefits agreement: Coordinated with the Albina Vision Trust, the 1803 Fund, and the Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center. It must be enforceable in court and include measurable commitments to affordable housing pipelines, displaced-resident return programs, and local procurement.

• A public equity stake: Capturing the franchise’s appreciation during the term of the 20-year lease, structured as a share of any eventual sale price above a defined threshold. (Edan Krolewicz, the Trail Blazers fan who launched the Rip City Not Rip Off campaign, has proposed a model that would generate $6.7 to $10.2 million annually for the city, and is one approach among several.)

• Restricted PCEF allocations: Tied strictly to verified climate components of the renovation, evaluated by the PCEF advisory committee against the existing Climate Investment Plan criteria, with the burden of proof on the city to demonstrate eligibility rather than on the advisory committee to identify exclusion.

The conditional case also requires that the negotiations be conducted in public, not under a non-disclosure agreement. Council Vice President Olivia Clark and Council President Jamie Dunphy have justified the NDA by arguing that complex commercial negotiations require confidentiality. Because the Blazers are negotiating with a public body to use public money to renovate a publicly owned building, however, the public has a right to see the terms before they are written into a 20-year lease that will outlast the current council. Councilors Green and Koyama Lane were correct to refuse the NDA. Their refusal sets a model for the rest of the council's negotiating posture.

VIII. The choice before the council

It is true that Portland is heavily taxed and that city services are deteriorating. It is also true that the maneuver by which billionaires take public money while teachers are furloughed is a recurring pattern of American urban politics, and that this pattern deserves our wrath.

Treating the Moda Center renovation as a replication of the welfare-for-billionaires scheme is misleading, however.

The current deal does not meet any of the conditions outlined in Section VII. It is being negotiated under a non-disclosure agreement. The funding package includes a PCEF diversion. The package contains no labor peace agreement covering the existing workforce. The package contains no public equity stake in the franchise. The team is contributing zero dollars to construction.

An optimal deal is possible. Councilors Green and Koyama Lane are exercising political muscle from outside the negotiating room, and they should be supported by every Portlander.

Two verdicts are possible. If the council writes the conditions of Section VII into the lease as enforceable terms, the renovation becomes a defensible public investment, and the case for support stands. If the council writes the deal currently being negotiated under non-disclosure, in which the team contributes zero dollars to construction, the operations workforce remains non-union, the PCEF is diverted, and the public retains no equity stake in franchise appreciation, the case for opposition stands.

Portland has the negotiating advantage in this political moment: the city owns the building, the state has conditioned its bonds, and the Blazers cannot move without a new arena, and no other city has one ready. The advantage stands, and the negotiations are not over. The council’s choice over the next four months determines which of these two verdicts prevails.

In April 2000, the High Court of Justice in London ruled in Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt. David Irving had sued Lipstadt for libel after she identified him in print as a Holocaust denier. The court considered whether the documentary record of the Final Solution was open to interpretation, as Irving had insisted. Justice Charles Gray ruled that it was not. Irving had falsified the evidence. The records said what they said, and Irving had bent them past the point of any defensible reading.

The ruling established a principle that institutions across the democratic world rely on but rarely defend. Documents have integrity. Records cohere. The category of fact, when constituted by a chain of dated, signed, archived materials, is not infinitely plastic. There is a point beyond which the phrase “open to interpretation” no longer describes legitimate disagreement and begins describing evasion.

A public record is a particular kind of artifact. It is generated in the ordinary course of administrative work, retained under statutory authority, subject to release under public records law, and indexed against the time of its creation. Each email bears metadata. Each calendar entry bears a timestamp. Each meeting note bears the names of those present. The record is not a representation of an event. The record is the event, occurring in the same institutional time as the actions it documents.

Documents require reading. Contracts are construed by their terms; statutes are read with reference to their preambles and legislative history; intent is weighed against the circumstances of the act. Proper interpretation reads a document with reference to its accompanying correspondence, prior policy, statutory framework, and office practice, and renders a reading the reader is bound to honor. The interpretive pretext does the opposite. It withholds related evidence, isolates the document from its context, and declares the isolated text ambiguous beyond adjudication. Where interpretation narrows uncertainty, the pretext manufactures it. Where interpretation binds the reader to its result, the pretext requires a reader determined to remain unbound.

Hannah Arendt described this maneuver in 1971, in an essay written immediately after the publication of the Pentagon Papers. “Lying in Politics” is her account of how a bureaucracy constructs a documentary record at variance with its actions, and then, when the record is exposed, treats it as material to be re-narrated. The bureaucratic image of the event — what Arendt called “image-making” — substitutes for the event itself. The facts do not disappear. They are converted, through bureaucratic rephrasing, into a form the institution can defend. The memo becomes a draft. The decision becomes a discussion about the decision. The record is preserved, and the meaning of the record is suspended in the same act.

This maneuver, the interpretive pretext, permits an institution to acknowledge the existence of records while disowning what the records establish. It preserves the appearance of transparency while suspending the consequences of transparency. The records are released. The records are dismissed. The two acts occur in the same sentence.

The American tobacco industry sustained the pretext for nearly four decades and lost. Internal research memoranda from Brown and Williamson, R.J. Reynolds, and Philip Morris documented, in plain language, what the executives publicly denied: nicotine’s addictive properties, the carcinogenic profile of cigarette smoke, and the deliberate engineering of products to sustain dependence. Publicly, the industry maintained that the science was inconclusive. Privately, the engineering proceeded based on documented findings. When the records surfaced through whistleblower disclosure and discovery in state attorney general litigation, the defense was not that the documents had been forged. The defense was that the documents were exploratory, contextual, internal scientific dialogue, open to interpretation. The 1998 Master Settlement Agreement was, among other things, a legal verdict on that defense. The documents were read as documents.

The pretext did not end with the Master Settlement. In January 2017, on Meet the Press, Kellyanne Conway defended the Trump administration’s false claims about inauguration crowd size by telling Chuck Todd the administration was offering “alternative facts.” The phrase entered the language overnight. It named, in three words, the same defense the tobacco industry had run for forty years, and the same maneuver Arendt had diagnosed in 1971. Photographs, transit data, and attendance figures: none were contested. The administration acknowledged them and offered, in their place, an alternative reading. What had taken decades to articulate became, in three words, common knowledge.

Public institutions are bound by public records law because legislatures, over the course of the twentieth century, decided that institutions funded by the public should be answerable for what they did, not what they intended or what they later wished they had done. The basis of that accountability is the record they themselves created, retained, and now must release. The statutory scheme rests on a premise: the records will speak, not be interpreted into silence by the same office that issued them.

What the tobacco industry could not sustain in court, respondents in a public-sector grievance now attempt in personnel adjudication. The respondents are the named parties against whom the grievance has been filed. They receive a documentary record of dated, signed, archived emails that establish the chronology of decisions and name the actors. They do not claim the documents have been forged; they claim the documents are open to interpretation. They do not engage the metadata, address the timestamps, or furnish the correspondence thread that would resolve any genuine ambiguity. They isolate each document, declare its meaning unsettled, and rest. They thereby assert that the institution is not bound by its own records. They suspend the documentary regime under which public institutions operate the moment it becomes inconvenient.

The principle to defend is simple and old. Some words mean what they mean. Some sequences of events occurred in the order they occurred. Some emails were sent on the dates they were sent. Interpretation has its proper work, and its proper work is not the refusal of fact. To call the refusal of fact interpretation is to keep the form of reading and abandon its purpose. Respondents who refuse to read a record as a record forfeit the credibility to defend the institution’s actions on evidentiary grounds. An institution that permits its respondents to deny the meaning of its own records forfeits any claim to public accountability.

House Bill 4124 directs the Higher Education Coordinating Commission to study Oregon’s seven public universities, evaluate their distinct missions, and recommend changes, including collaboration, restructuring, or institutional integration. The bill targets unnecessary program duplication for elimination. It authorizes HECC to use third-party contractors to carry out all or part of the study, and sets a preliminary report due October 1, 2026, and a final report due April 1, 2027.

The Higher Education Coordinating Commission posted draft principles for the new law on its website without issuing a press release or holding a public hearing. Instead, it offered bullet points under the heading “We are committed to,” written in the careful prose of an agency that has already decided what it intends to do and now needs a process to confirm it.

One principle holds that recommendations should not rely “on major increases to public funding.” Another commits the process to “being realistic and working within the parameters that the Legislature established in HB 4124, even when it is uncomfortable.”

The Same Argument at Two Scales

Representative Pam Marsh (D-Ashland) told Oregon Public Broadcasting that the legislature did not have time to “sit around and twiddle our thumbs” and that the system had to be turned around quickly. The bill she sponsored passed the House 36 to 6 on February 27, 2026, and the Senate the following week.

Marsh cast the bill as a response to public mistrust, saying the system had lost the public’s confidence and that of legislators trying to understand why higher education costs seem so unconstrained. By recasting the political question as an efficiency issue, the legislature put the funding question off the table. The political question becomes not whether the state will fund higher education, but whether universities spend efficiently enough.

On that point, Democrats and Republicans agree: Oregon’s public universities will not receive substantially more state money in the foreseeable future. Earlier this year, the legislature gave Southern Oregon University a $15 million emergency bailout when SOU projected it could not cover payroll. It could have stopped there. Instead, Salem expanded the response into a system-wide restructuring study. Without new funding, restructuring becomes the answer.

Portland State University has been advancing the same argument as Salem for two years. The PIVOT process rests on the same premise: structural reorganization, not new revenue or reserve allocation. President Ann Cudd’s March 2026 Article 22 retrenchment declaration, naming 19 academic units for elimination, follows the same logic. At both the state and institutional levels, underfunding is being addressed not with funding but with reorganization.

The rhetoric is identical: “right-sizing,” “mission alignment,” “strategic prioritization,” “institutional sustainability.” These phrases recur in HECC documents, PIVOT materials, Cudd’s communications, and the bill’s text. HECC, the legislature, and PSU’s administration all use the same language to justify their choices.

The Portland State chapter of the American Association of University Professors and the Interinstitutional Faculty Senate, which represents elected faculty from all seven public universities and OHSU, both warned in February that any restructuring study “must be explicitly linked to a commitment to adequate and sustainable public funding for higher education” and that restructuring without new investment risks masking a funding crisis as a governance problem. The Interinstitutional Faculty Senate registered a parallel objection, insisting that faculty at each institution must retain a predominant role in decisions about academic programming and curricular change.

Two Accounts, One University

PSU’s own statements about its financial conditions contradict each other. In feedback on HECC’s January 2026 Spending and Efficiency in Oregon Public Universities report, PSU stressed that its operating expenses grew just 2.8 percent annually between fiscal year 2015 and fiscal year 2024, below inflation and the system average, and that total staff FTE fell by 106 positions over the decade, even as staffing rose systemwide.

To HECC, PSU claimed to be efficient. To its faculty, it claimed to be in crisis, with no more efficiencies to be found. Those claims cannot both be true. The administration is tailoring its story to its audience.

HECC’s own report shows PSU ending fiscal year 2026 with the largest Educational and General (E&G) reserve cushion in the state system: about $82 million, or 2.9 months of operating revenue. The university with the most reserve capacity in Oregon is also the one declaring a fiscal emergency and invoking retrenchment. Its primary reserve ratio, a standard measure of whether reserves can cover operating obligations, is 0.44, above the Board of Trustees’ aspirational threshold of 0.40, even after subtracting pension accounting effects that have no operational meaning.

Administrators may object that all-funds metrics include restricted dollars unavailable for operations. But that does not explain away the $82 million in E&G reserves, the fund that pays faculty salaries. Those figures come from PSU’s audited financial statements.

Reserves cannot cover a structural deficit indefinitely. Article 22 raises a sharper question: whether PSU has reached the point where retrenchment is the only remaining option. Employee unions say it has not. Voluntary separation incentives, attrition, reallocations across reserve categories, and time-limited reserve use are alternatives the administration has declined to adopt.

The retrenchment declaration is not a response to exhausted resources. It is a discretionary act by Oregon’s best-resourced public university, taken before the state study is complete. Cudd has chosen to treat an E&G-only problem as institutionally insoluble. Salem did not force this outcome. PSU adopted a state rhetoric that makes discretionary choices appear necessary.

The Sequence and the Stake

The bill’s compressed timeline obligates HECC to issue a preliminary report on October 1, 2026, and a final report on April 1, 2027. PSU issued its Article 22 retrenchment declaration in March 2026 and is moving toward implementation on a timeline that will conclude well before HECC delivers its findings.

Consultants arriving in autumn 2026 to assess Oregon’s public universities will find PSU in the middle of an active retrenchment, with program eliminations underway and an administrative narrative insisting that restructuring is the only available response to fiscal pressure.

That matters because PSU’s actions will set a precedent. They will shape the recommendations for Western Oregon University, Eastern Oregon University, Oregon Institute of Technology, and Southern Oregon University.

Defenders of PSU’s actions may argue that the university is an outlier: an urban university with stronger reserves whose circumstances do not apply to other institutions. But that cuts the other way. If the university best positioned to resist borrowed scarcity instead embraces it most fully, the message to less-resourced institutions is clear: retrenchment is now standard.

Eastern Oregon University Board Chair Charles Hofmann warned the legislature in February that for rural-serving universities, mandates of the kind HECC was considering could weaken access, destabilize operations, and undermine the very efficiencies the recommendations sought to achieve. Hofmann observed in the same testimony that much of the program growth at EOU and other rural-serving universities consists of low-cost concentrations, certificates, and workforce-aligned pathways built onto existing courses, often with net-neutral or positive fiscal impacts. Cutting them to satisfy the bill’s duplication target would harm the communities they serve.

Eastern Oregon University has already implemented an 8.4 percent operating budget cut and has among the lowest growth in total cost of attendance in the Oregon system. It has already undergone the kind of structural contraction HECC is now considering recommending.

When the system’s best-resourced university treats $82 million in reserves as insufficient reason for moderation, institutions with less capacity will read retrenchment as no longer optional.

PSU, whose decisions HECC’s consultants will treat as evidence, should itself be subject to the standards Oregon’s faculty bodies have demanded under the bill: explicit linkage to a commitment to public funding, a predominant faculty role in academic and curricular decisions, and meaningful consultation that is not late, formal, or pro forma. PSU meets none of them.

The Choice

HECC will conduct its study on the question the legislature chose to ask. The real question is funding. The offered answer is governance. PSU has accepted that substitution.

The next twelve months will determine which position becomes state policy. Every university that enacts retrenchment before HECC finishes its work ratifies the premise and supplies evidence for it after the fact. Every university that delays, contests, or reverses retrenchment forces the inquiry to confront the premise it was designed to confirm.

In March, an Israeli Air Force officer was interrogated about bets he had placed on Polymarket. The contracts in question covered the timing of Israeli and American strikes on Iran. Investigators alleged that one squadron member fed nonpublic operational information to a colleague, and the two had earned roughly $244,000 by trading on the war they were preparing to fight. A separate crewman, interrogated about a smaller set of trades on the same conflict, offered an explanation that no senior officer wanted to enter into the record. The entire squadron is on Polymarket, he told his interrogators. The entire air force is betting.

An air force pilot, instructed to keep operational timing secret as a condition of his oath, has discovered that the timing is a tradable asset. He can monetize his knowledge of when the planes take off, making the timing financially worth more than his role in the strike. What the airman described is not a personal failure. The prediction-market design rewards anyone with insider information the same way.

Israeli airmen are not the only ones betting on their own missions. On April 23, federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed an indictment against Master Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a United States Army Special Forces soldier stationed at Fort Bragg. Van Dyke participated in the planning of Operation Absolute Resolve, the January 3 raid that captured Nicolás Maduro in Caracas. Between December 27 and January 2, he opened a Polymarket account and placed roughly $33,000 in bets across thirteen contracts: that United States forces would be in Venezuela by January 31, that Maduro would be out of office by that date, and that the President would invoke the War Powers Act. The contracts paid out on the morning of the raid. Van Dyke netted $409,881. He moved most of the money to a foreign cryptocurrency vault, asked Polymarket to delete his account, and posted a photograph of himself at sunrise on a ship deck in fatigues, holding a rifle. Twenty days later, he closed on a $340,000 house.

The Commodification of Knowledge

The industry calls this “information finance,” and its operators expect it to be the next major asset class. Kalshi, valued at $22 billion in March, processes more than $100 billion in annualized trading volume. Polymarket, valued at roughly $15 billion in April, processed $29 billion through its books in the first four months of the year. Annual prediction-market volume across the sector climbed from $15 billion in 2024 to $63 billion in 2025, and is on pace to roughly double again in 2026. In March alone, the sector logged 192 million transactions. Coinbase, Robinhood, Kraken, DraftKings, and FanDuel have all added prediction markets in the past year. Both Kalshi and Polymarket launched perpetual futures contracts in April, allowing traders to take leveraged positions on unresolved political and military events indefinitely.

Polymarket and Kalshi, the two largest prediction-market platforms, refer to themselves as knowledge brokers. They offer a public-interest justification: prediction markets forecast public events more accurately than polls, pundits, or experts. Nate Silver, the most recognizable name in election forecasting, has signed on as an advisor to Polymarket. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission ruled in March that prediction markets are derivatives, placing them inside the federal regulatory framework that Wall Street investors require before they can invest in an asset class. CNBC sponsors Kalshi and holds a minority stake. Yet, despite their lofty claims of forecasting utility, sports betting accounts for 90% of Kalshi’s revenue, according to industry analysis. The product is, in Susan Strange’s words, casino capitalism.

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi described how capitalism advances by treating land, labor, and money as commodities even though none of the three was produced for the market. The market treats them as ordinary goods regardless. The result is the long story of the past two centuries: the dispossession of peasants from common land, the factory acts, the recurrent monetary crises, and the fights over the length of the working day. One feature of capitalism is the steady production of new fictitious commodities, driven by capital’s need to find new outlets for accumulation when existing ones become unprofitable. The first major addition after Polanyi’s three was knowledge, commodified across the centuries from the patent office to the data broker. The next was social-media data, which Tiziana Terranova calls “free labor” and Shoshana Zuboff “surveillance capitalism.” Polymarket and Kalshi are now adding public events to the list.

Shaping the World They Price

Prediction markets convert events into prices. A missile strike, a troop deployment, a head of state’s removal, a journalist’s wire story, a strait closing: each becomes a contract, each gets a price, each attracts trading volume, each produces a payout. The contract not only predicts the event, but also turns it into an asset for the investor who profits from it. The contracts pay out on the decisions of generals, presidents, and reporters. They then reshape the behavior of those same actors, by giving each a financial stake in the outcome of his own decisions.

The defense of the platforms draws on Friedrich Hayek’s theory of the price system. In The Use of Knowledge in Society, Hayek argued that markets coordinate dispersed knowledge in ways no planner can match. The argument assumes that the trader is a passive observer with private knowledge of an outcome the market is only trying to predict. The model breaks the moment a trader can affect the outcome on which his contract pays. The platforms produce the conditions under which Hayek’s theory no longer applies.

Between Sunday, April 5, and Wednesday, April 8, 413 million bets were placed on Polymarket contracts tied to the war with Iran. More than $100 million was at risk. The largest single trading day was April 8, the day after the President warned on Truth Social that a civilization would die that night. 100,000 bets were placed that day on whether American troops would enter Iran. The President’s post triggered a wave of trading, which in turn created an audience for the next post. The President’s son, Donald Trump Jr., holds an investor stake in Polymarket through 1789 Capital and serves as an advisor to Kalshi. He is positioned to profit from the price movement generated by his father’s announcements. A spokesman called the question of conflict of interest “fact-free Democratic propaganda.” But the conflict is built into the platform’s design.

The contracts also pay out on what reporters write. On March 11, Emanuel Fabian, a military correspondent for the Times of Israel, reported that an Iranian missile had struck Israeli territory. Bettors aggressively traded on the nuances of his report, with roughly $14 million wagered on the final outcome. Those who had taken the other side messaged Fabian, demanding that he reframe the missile as intercepted debris. Some offered him a cut of their winnings. When he refused, they threatened to kill him. The threats were specific, repeated, and credible enough that he reported them to police and wrote about the experience publicly. Fabian was not pressured by the Iranian government, the Israeli government, or any state actor. He was pressured by bettors on a Polymarket contract whose payoff depended on the wording of his story.

The Public Sphere as Asset Class

What makes the present platforms historically distinctive is that the contracts shape the events they price. Earlier forms of political wagering existed at the margins of the public sphere and did not reach the actors whose decisions the markets priced. The Iowa Electronic Markets, founded by University of Iowa economists in 1988 to study aggregation properties under controlled conditions, operated at a $500-per-account limit and remained a small research project. Intrade, the Dublin-based platform that ran from 2003 to 2013, attracted a small popular following during the Bush and Obama elections, but went bankrupt after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed an enforcement action against it. Neither platform was integrated with the established financial system, neither attracted Wall Street money, and neither was politically connected to a serving presidential administration. The accuracy claims that emerged from the Iowa research, demonstrating that small-stakes prediction markets outperformed polling in several presidential elections, do not survive the transition to large-stakes platforms in which participants can affect the outcomes on which they bet.

The new platforms are different on every count. They are large enough to reshape the incentives of the actors whose decisions they price, integrated enough with the financial system to attract Wall Street investors, and politically connected enough to operate in the open. The platforms have positioned themselves at the meeting point of venture capital, cryptocurrency exchanges, the brokerage industry, and the political family that controls the executive branch.

Polymarket and Kalshi enmesh the actors whose decisions determine the events being priced — pilots who fly the missions, master sergeants who plan the operations, reporters who file the stories, Presidents who post the threats. Once those actors have a financial position in the outcome of their own decisions, the decisions are no longer made the same way. The platforms are not just profiting from public life; they are reshaping it from inside. Marx called this kind of operation real subsumption, though he was describing the factory floor rather than the public sphere.

Elections, wars, policy decisions, and the speech acts of public officials become assets that pay out. The pilot whose squadron is on Polymarket flies a different mission. The master sergeant whose operation moves a contract plans a different operation. The reporter whose wire story is worth $14 million writes a different story. The President whose every threat creates a hundred thousand bets governs for a different audience, regardless of his intentions.

Shayne Coplan and Tarek Mansour describe their platforms as knowledge producers. The business is more straightforward: a fee-based exchange where bettors trade contracts on events they increasingly seek to influence, and the house takes a cut of every transaction. Coplan told Axios in November that he was glad his platform paid people to leak confidential information. He called the arrangement “super cool.” Some might consider certain data leaks treasonous.

Polanyi called the social response to commodification the double movement. Society pushes back against the market’s attempt to absorb what was never made for sale. The fights over the wage, the length of the working day, the protection of land, and the regulation of money have defined political life for two centuries. A political response to prediction markets has not yet taken shape. Six states have moved against Kalshi and Polymarket: Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Treating this strictly as a gambling issue misses the broader pathology. The platforms convert public decisions into an asset class held by a small set of politically connected state investors. The decision-maker now answers to the contract-holders rather than to the people he is supposed to govern.

Presidential announcements have become revenue events for the President's family. Classified information has become a tradable commodity. Journalists have become the targets of bettors who demand they rewrite their reporting under threat of death. Together, they are a wave of crimes in search of a prosecutor and a structural crisis in search of a regulator.

I. The Biographical Sentence

Since 2016, the opening of the American leftist candidate’s biography has settled into a recognizable form. It appears in the second paragraph of campaign websites’ “About” pages written by Democratic Socialists of America-affiliated candidates, Working Families Party endorsees, and post-Sanders insurgents in Democratic primaries at every level from school boards to the United States Senate.

Candidates phrase the claim variously — I grew up in a working-class family, my parents were working-class people, I come from a working-class background, I was raised in a working-class household — but the work the claim does is the same each time. The candidate uses the opening to assert a class identity, and the assertion is then repeated, unexamined, through the campaign material, through endorsement letters issued by aligned organizations, through press coverage in sympathetic outlets such as Jacobin, In These Times, and The Nation, and eventually in the legislative biography that follows the candidate into office. Whatever the candidate now does for a living, however much the candidate now earns, whatever class position the candidate now occupies as a matter of present economic fact, the campaign continues to assert the founding sentence. Once made in the second paragraph of the biography, the working-class membership claim does not expire. The founding sentence of the biography establishes class identity before any other fact about the candidate is introduced. It’s as if Abe Lincoln lived his whole life in the log cabin of his birth.

The persistent claim describes very little: a parent who taught middle school in a Midwestern suburb; a parent who worked a manufacturing line that has since been offshored; a parent who served 20 years in the military and retired into a mortgage paid through the GI Bill; or a parent who cleaned houses, drove a truck, ran a small auto-body shop, or carried mail. The political content is far larger. By claiming a working-class background, the candidate establishes a political identity that the American left treats as both the principal agent of left-leaning politics and the moral subject in whose name policy is conducted. Working-class identity carries political standing, and political standing carries the authority to speak for the class. The biographical claim is the credential by which the candidate establishes both the identity and the authority.

The claim also has coalitional uses. It tells organized labor, progressive nonprofits, and high-dollar left-wing donors that the candidate is one of theirs by origin, even if not by present circumstance. It tells the press that the candidate’s policy commitments proceed from authentic class experience rather than from ideological choice. And it tells voters that the candidate’s wealth, profession, education, and donor coalition need not be examined too closely, because the founding claim has discharged the question in advance.

II. Marx’s Two Senses of Class

The working-class identity these candidates invoke is incoherent, and the incoherence can be specified.

Marx distinguished two senses of class. The first, Klasse an sich, names a class in itself: a structural position in the relations of production occupied by people who share a relation to capital, whether they recognize it as such. The wage workers of nineteenth-century Manchester, Lyon, and Lowell were a single class by virtue of their shared position in the production process, regardless of how they understood themselves or which church they attended or the political party with which they identified.

The second sense, Klasse für sich, names a class for itself: a class that has come to recognize its position, organize around its interests, and act collectively on its own behalf, typically through trade unions, working-class political parties, and mutual aid societies. The transition from the first to the second was, for Marx and the entire socialist tradition that followed him, the central political problem of the modern era. A class in itself was a sociological fact. A class for itself was a political achievement, one that could not be assumed and had to be made. The German Social Democratic Party, before 1914, came closest: a million members, parallel institutions for press and education, and an explicit programmatic commitment to working-class political organization.

From a Marxist perspective, the American working class today exists as a class in itself. It does not exist as a class for itself. Its members do not share a political consciousness; they vote in different directions; they identify with different cultural formations, hold sharply different views on immigration, social issues, and foreign policy, and divide along sector, region, citizenship, language, and skill. The structural divide between the unionized minority, currently at or below ten percent of the American workforce and concentrated in public-sector employment, and the non-unionized majority cuts across all these divisions.

What constitutes the working class today is itself contested. The industrial proletariat Marx wrote about is a much smaller fraction of the American workforce than it was in 1900 or even 1970, and the literature on contemporary class composition has specified the problem: precarious service labor, debt-burdened salaried employees, gig and warehouse workers organized through channels Marx did not anticipate. The argument here does not require treating the industrial proletariat as the working class proper. “Working class” is being used in the broad sense the post-Sanders left itself uses. The point is that whatever today’s working class is, the post-Sanders left has not organized it. The class in itself exists. The class for itself does not. When the American left invokes “the working class” as a coherent political subject with shared interests and a discernible voice, it refers to a class for itself that does not exist as such.

III. The Rhetoric of the Universal Subject

The post-Sanders American left continues to use the term nonetheless, because the rhetorical work the term does is too valuable to abandon. Since 2016, the left has simplified the term through a particular rhetorical move: the working class is defined by negation against the billionaire class.

Sanders introduced the construction in its current form during his 2016 presidential campaign, and the post-Sanders left inherited, refined, and amplified it across the subsequent wave of DSA-aligned electoral efforts. For the better part of a decade, Sanders deployed a single phrase, ‘millionaires and billionaires,’ alongside more substantive references to corporate monopolies, private equity, and the broader owner class. The shorthand proved more portable. As book royalties boosted his household net worth into the millionaire bracket and public reporting increased, Sanders dropped “millionaires“ from the phrase and used “billionaires” alone. The contracted form is now the standard formulation across the post-Sanders left: the working class is defined as everyone who is not a billionaire.

Defining a class by what it is not, however, and specifically by negation against a small number of extremely wealthy individuals, collapses every other class distinction into the same undifferentiated category. The petite bourgeoisie; the professional-managerial class; salaried knowledge workers in technology and finance; public-sector professionals; university faculty; small business owners; mid-career physicians; and actual wage laborers in manufacturing, agriculture, food service, retail, and warehouse work all become “working class” by virtue of not being Bezos, Musk, or Zuckerberg. The professional-managerial coalition that dominates the American left can claim working-class identity through opposition to billionaires while remaining structurally distinct from the wage laborers in whose name their political aims are pursued.

Defining a class through what it opposes has a long pedigree in political rhetoric. Every ruling class presents its particular interests as the universal interests of society. Marx made the point in The German Ideology. The American left has carried out a smaller version of the same substitution. The category ‘professional-managerial class,’ introduced by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in 1977 and contested in the literature since, remains useful for naming the credentialed strata that dominate leftist electoral coalitions. This group presents its particular interests as the universal interests of ‘the working class’: credentialing, public-sector employment, redistributive transfers funded by taxation rather than by socialization of production, cultural recognition of identity-based grievances, and regulation of the largest concentrations of private capital. The substitution is rarely deliberate; it is structural. The people doing the substituting are mostly sincere; the sincerity does not change the substitution.

IV. Two Forms of Progressive Claim

The construction works at every scale; a local case shows what it looks like in practice. The current Oregon political cycle has two forms, both recognizable without naming any individual.

An organization can claim a constituency without ever speaking to it. The Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America presents itself, in its own published materials, as an organization devoted to “build[ing] working class power” and to constructing “an organized working-class movement big enough to take on” the ruling class. The chapter’s electoral working group describes its mission as electing “DSA champions for the working class.” The chapter repeats the phrase across its About page, its issue pages, its voter guides, and its social-media biographies. With each repetition, it names a constituency it claims to represent. The chapter does not specify on what basis it speaks for that constituency, because no one has raised the question.

A candidate can claim a class position she no longer occupies. A typical campaign biography for a DSA-affiliated or DSA-aligned candidate in the post-Sanders Oregon wave opens with the founding sentence in one of its standard variations. The candidate’s current profession is named in the third or fourth sentence, after the working-class biography has been established. The professions are recognizable as a class: physicians and nurse-administrators, software developers and product managers, university professors, hospital administrators and nonprofit executives, sitting elected officials, and a smaller number of small-business owners. The structural distance between the founding sentence and the current class position is then unexamined through the campaign material into the endorsement letters, the press coverage, and the legislative record that follows the candidate into office.

V. Lenin, Inverted

Politics, a sympathetic reader might object, is conducted by organized minorities on behalf of disorganized majorities. No political coalition has ever waited for its constituency to spontaneously self-organize before acting. Lenin himself understood that the proletariat could not attain revolutionary consciousness on its own and required a vanguard party to bring it from outside. The DSA’s electoral practice, from this view, is a modest current version of the same Leninist insight, conducted within bourgeois parliamentary forms because those are the forms currently available.

Lenin’s most relevant text on this question is “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, written in spring 1920 for the Second Congress of the Communist International, addressed against the Western European ultra-leftists who refused on principle to participate in bourgeois parliaments, to work within reactionary trade unions, or to enter tactical alliances with non-communist workers’ parties, including the British Labour Party. Lenin called the stance infantile because it confused strategic patience with ideological compromise. His argument was that revolutionary parties must work within the existing mass organizations of the working class to win over workers still within those organizations rather than purifying themselves into irrelevance outside them. The argument was about engagement with the working class as it had organized itself. Lenin’s pragmatism presupposed a working class already organized as a force and a vanguard party with a revolutionary theory adequate to lead it. The American left possesses neither: the mass organizations have collapsed, and the DSA, whatever its merits, is an electoral coalition with a labor working group, not a vanguard formation in the Leninist sense.

The DSA has, in fact, formally adopted a version of this Leninist mandate. The Rank-and-File Strategy, adopted at the 2019 national convention, explicitly calls on socialists to enter existing trade unions as workers, build relationships with non-socialist co-workers, and organize from within. The strategy has contributed to the Teamsters reform efforts that elected Sean O’Brien, in the UAW reform that produced Shawn Fain, and in elements of the Amazon and Starbucks organizing campaigns. The DSA is not refusing the work Lenin prescribed.

The problem is that the work Lenin prescribed and the work the DSA is best known for are not the same, and the relationship between them has inverted the original Leninist priority. Lenin placed engagement with authentic workers at the center of socialist practice, with electoral and parliamentary work subordinated to that engagement and accountable to it. The DSA has reversed the relationship. Rank-and-file work continues, conducted by a small fraction of the membership in the sectors where organizing is currently active. The organization’s public-facing identity (candidate biographies, endorsement decisions, electoral coalitions, the framing of leftist policy in the language of working-class representation) runs on the imagined working class rather than the organized one. The second practice dominates the first in budget, in staff time, in press attention, and in the criteria by which the organization presents itself to voters and imposes itself on unsuspecting workers with different political views.

The infantile disorder Lenin diagnosed was the refusal to engage with actual workers. The current version is more subtle. A real engagement sits alongside a much larger rhetorical practice that constructs the working class through biography and negation rather than encountering it through organization. The imagined class is more comfortable than the work of building an organized one, and the imagined class is what the broader public hears.

The empirical conditions that gave Lenin’s argument its power in 1920 no longer exist in the United States. Trade union density stands at or below ten percent and is concentrated overwhelmingly in public-sector employment. The fraternal associations, mutual aid societies, and neighborhood institutions that constituted the social infrastructure of pre-1970 working-class life have been dispersed by deindustrialization, by suburbanization, by the collapse of the parish networks that hosted them, and by the broader atomization of American civic life.

The mass institutions Lenin presupposed do not exist: trade union federations with millions of members, working-class parties with their own newspapers and schools, cooperative societies, and dense neighborhood networks. The rhetorical practice may partly be a response to that absence, a way of invoking a class one cannot reach through the channels Lenin assumed were available. The substitution is constrained more than chosen. Constraint does not make the substitution legitimate, however. A practice that constructs an imagined class through biography and negation does not become more accurate because an authentic class is harder to organize. It becomes even more misleading because the rhetoric continues to imply an organized constituency that the speaker cannot deliver on. Without doubt, the DSA’s rank-and-file work has contributed to organizing wins, but on its own, it cannot make a class for itself out of a fragmented and demobilized class whose actual interests may not align with the DSA’s. The rhetorical practice does not assist the rank-and-file work; it substitutes for it.

VI. Moving Beyond the Imagined Constituency

The post-Sanders left has substituted a class it has not organized for a politics it does not defend. A coalition of professionals, public-sector workers, organized labor staff, and leftist donors is conducting electoral politics on behalf of a redistributive and regulatory program the coalition believes would benefit a working class it has not organized and cannot, on its current scale of engagement, claim to speak for. The agenda may be good. The coalition may be effective. The candidates may serve well in the offices to which they are elected. None of those possibilities requires the working-class claim. The claim is included because the coalition believes it legitimizes the project, and because the conventions of the American left have made it a condition of admission to serious left-leaning politics.

A defender of the post-Sanders electoral approach will respond that the electoral coalitions the rhetorical practice has built have produced material gains for working people: the Teamsters reform that elected Sean O’Brien, the UAW reform that produced the 2023 Big Three strike, the Amazon and Starbucks organizing campaigns that emerged in part from networks the post-Sanders left helped sustain. The response is not wrong about the gains. It is wrong about their source. The Teamsters reform was won by Teamsters; the UAW reform by UAW members; the Starbucks campaigns by baristas. The rhetorical practice did not produce the organizing. It accompanied it, sometimes funded it, and often drew on its legitimacy. Removing the rhetorical claim would not remove the organizing. It would remove the substitution that obscures whose work actually won the gains.

A different reader will accept the diagnosis but reject the prescription. All political representation, the argument runs, involves the construction of the represented. Pitkin made the point in 1967; Mansbridge has refined it across four decades. The imagined class, on this view, is not a special pathology of the post-Sanders left but a feature of how representation works at all. In certain applications, this may be true at a generalized level, while still wrong about the specific charge. For instance, many, if not most, building trades workers tend to move to more central political views and see their worker interest hew to more traditional, even capitalist, values. A constructed constituency can still be falsely constructed, can still be invoked in ways its members would not recognize, can still be substituted for the work of building one. That all representation is partly imagined does not answer the charge that this particular imagining lacks any organizational counterpart. It only universalizes the problem.

This is the price of becoming, eventually, the kind of political force that could organize the real working class rather than represent the imagined one.

The class in whose name the program is pursued exists as a class in itself. It does not yet exist as a class for itself.

The author is a faculty member at Portland State University and writes about Oregon politics and public higher education at Academic Gadfly.

The visual symbols of May Day serve as a record of class struggle. The carnation came from the European socialist parties and the Haymarket commemorations, a flower discreet enough to wear on a lapel and unmistakable to anyone who knew what it meant. The black eagle on red came out of the Delano grape strike of 1965, designed by Richard Chavez to be simple enough to reproduce on a picket sign. The wheat predates the labor movement by millennia. It is the harvest symbol of Demeter and Ceres, of the Eleusinian rites, of every agricultural civilization that marked spring planting against autumn yield. The red rose was forged in the bread-and-roses strikes of 1912 — bread for survival, roses for the dignity that survival alone cannot provide.

None of these symbols represents the workforce that will march on the first of May. The nurse finishing a twelve-hour shift. The adjunct teaching four sections at three campuses for a fraction of a tenured professor’s salary. The warehouse picker whose bathroom breaks are timed by an algorithm. The home health aide working at poverty wages to bathe someone else’s mother. The farmworker bent over berry rows, paid by the flat, toiling under a climate change-created heat dome. The rideshare driver forced into the legal fiction of independent contractor. The graduate worker organizing her department against the institution that signs her stipend. The barista, the call-center agent, and the delivery driver, all trading physical exhaustion for an unpredictable wage. And the data labeler, paid by the task to annotate the images that train artificial intelligence, feeding the system that will eventually replace her.

The labor movement has not yet produced an iconography, a set of symbols a movement uses to recognize itself, that captures the material reality of this workforce. Where the working class once forged its own symbols, capital has supplied only the headset of the call-center agent, the apron of the service worker, and the padded delivery bag of the gig economy courier: corporate shorthand rather than working-class iconography. Until the working class gains class consciousness, capital will regard it as disposable.

The symbols of workers are being written by the workers themselves, on picket lines, in union drives, and in walkouts that the official story refuses to acknowledge. The roots of May Day run deeper than industrial capitalism. They will outlast the app-based platform economy as well. 🌹

The 2026 State of the Economy report, released by the Portland Metro Chamber and presented to the Portland City Council on April 14, frames the regional comparison as a story of two policy environments: employment in Multnomah County remains below its 2020 level, while employment in Clark County stands at 114 percent of its 2020 level. The overall divergence is documented; the income composition of the shift is not.

New arrivals to Multnomah County average $73,540 in income, while those moving to Clark County average $106,715. That $33,175 difference per new resident, across a state line just 20 minutes away by car, is not the result of different policy choices producing different outcomes. It is the signature of a region sorting itself by income, with higher earners choosing Washington and lower earners left to bear more than their share of taxes for the public hospitals, schools, and transit system concentrated on the Oregon side.

The employment data show the same pattern. In 2025, the Portland metro area lost 8,800 jobs, ranking fourth-worst among U.S. metro areas even as national employment grew. These regional losses mirror the income data. Job losses were concentrated in professional services, manufacturing, construction, and information—the higher-wage traded-sector industries where employees produce goods for external markets and work from either side of the Columbia. Conversely, the sectors that gained jobs were health care, education, and government. These are lower-wage, local-demand sectors whose jobs require physical presence in Oregon. The region is not losing jobs at random; it is shedding the specific roles that grant geographic mobility while retaining the personnel who must remain.

The housing data support the same conclusion. Multifamily permitting in Portland fell from 2,092 units in 2023 to 868 in 2024 and 656 in 2025, the lowest level since 2011, while Clark County now accounts for 57 percent of multifamily permits across the seven adjacent counties that include Portland.

The proximate causes are regulatory: permitting speed, land-use rules, inclusionary housing requirements, system development charges, and design review have raised the cost of Portland multifamily construction relative to Clark County’s. The underlying cause is the migration of higher-earning households to Clark County.

The Chamber’s framework misses the dynamic captured by the income data. It treats two jurisdictions within a single metropolitan economy as if they were two separate economies in competition, casting one as successful and the other as failing. From that framing comes a familiar agenda: restoring confidence, repairing public-private partnerships, and competing to retain and attract talent. The agenda answers a different question than the one the data raises.

The question the data raises is what such a division produces over time. The answer is consolidation. Multnomah County is becoming the residential location for the workers who staff the region’s hospitals, schools, retail establishments, and public agencies, while Clark County is becoming the residential location for the professionals whose incomes have continued to rise during the contraction. The county losing the higher earners is also the county that contains the service sector and the tax base that funds them.

Washington’s lack of a state income tax, paired with Oregon’s high one, allows higher earners to take their income from the metro economy without contributing to it. The professional class whose work is remote or Washington-based pays none of Oregon’s state income tax, nor Multnomah County’s Preschool for All tax, Metro’s Supportive Housing Services tax, or the local high-earner surcharges that fall on incomes above $125,000. Oregon loses revenue in two ways: through income sourced across the line, and through the consumption that follows the household to Vancouver.

The arrangement is available only to workers whose jobs can be sourced to the Washington side. Oregon taxes income where it is earned, not where the earner lives. Remote work from a home in Vancouver qualifies. A commute to a Portland office does not. The work-from-home rates show who is in that class.

In 2023, 21 percent of workers in the Portland metro area worked from home. The rate rises with income: 34 percent among Multnomah County residents earning more than $75,000, compared with 14 percent among those earning under $35,000. The pattern is the product of recent policy choices and a long-standing tax differential that a mobile professional class is now exercising at scale.

The Chamber recommends restoring confidence, repairing public-private partnerships, and competing to retain and attract talent. The data describes a region not competing with Vancouver but retaining the bottom tier of a two-class system across the state line.

Thanks to its history of changemakers, Portland, Oregon has long been a hotbed of progressive political activism. As one of Portland’s most controversial native sons, John Reed, would agree, however, this is a city with a split personality – supporting justice movements on one hand and struggling with entrenched racism, economic conservatism, and right-wing encroachment on the other. With apologies to Reed, the author of Ten Days that Shook the World, this essay offers an analysis of Portland’s Summer of 2020: Ninety Days that Shook the World.

The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police ignited the latest chapter in Oregon’s social justice story. Outraged citizens of all ages and races gathered in the city’s center, across from the federal justice building, to protest this latest in a string of murders by police officers of unarmed people of color. For many, his pleas for help and the haunting last words “I can’t breathe!” became a passion-inducing call for this mostly white community to demand an end to racial injustice. A broad range of self-organized groups, including a mostly white “Wall of Moms”, dads armed with leaf blowers to fend off tear gas, Black Lives Matter activists, “Don’t Shoot Portland” organizers, and the well-publicized “Antifa” youth, coalesced to demand police reform and accountability, and to call for racial justice more broadly.

Daily protests evolved into a semi-permanent encampment in front of the Justice Center, where peaceful protesters encountered daily interactions with federal officers who tear-gassed them, fired rubber bullets, and beat individuals. Additionally, they experienced violent confrontations launched by right-wing groups. Then-President Donald Trump politicized the daily uprisings and sent in Homeland Security, the FBI, and private contractors to aggressively respond. Media headlines catapulted Portland into the national and international spotlight. Escalation of violence by such right-wing groups as Patriot Prayer, Oath Keepers, and Proud Boys ultimately resulted in the deaths of two people, Aaron Danielson and Michael Reinoehl.

These Ninety Days, though contentious and politicized, brought needed change to Portland’s policing practices, including a $15 million Police Bureau budget cut that was spent instead on intervention services; the creation of an independent police oversight committee charged with investigating misconduct; and a suite of state laws designed to rein in certain policing practices (Ellis, 2020). It also stimulated, however, an exodus of officers from Portland, less responsiveness to the upsurge in criminal acts, and the proliferation of private security guards hired by Portland businesses that hadn’t moved out. In the two years after protests, more than 12,000 Portlanders had left the city altogether (Mesh, 2022).

This essay explores the social, historical, and political roots of Portland’s social justice history from which this latest movement arose. It also examines the ongoing layers of struggle Portland has faced in this period, including worsening income inequality. It will show how neoliberalism, and each side’s conscious or unconscious reaction to its excesses, undergirds ongoing strife across Oregon.

Post-Neoliberalism, Portland Style

The clashes between the antifascists and Patriot Prayer, the most violent feature of the Ninety Days, have their roots in – and are a microcosm of – a broader anti-neoliberal backlash seen across the country. Neoliberalism’s excesses, such as the free movement of unregulated capital, growing income inequality, and the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs, have ignited this movement. Portland’s strife, underlying the 2020 uprising, can be traced to what Paolo Gerbaudo (2021) describes as the limits of neoliberalism, evidenced by political polarization and manifested in culture wars prosecuted by the Right and Left. On one hand, the populist Right targets “cultural neoliberalism” (immigration policies, LGBTQA+ rights, and the supposed teaching of critical race theory in public schools). Their antipathy is laced with conspiracy theories spread through disinformation campaigns. On the other hand, the populist Left’s objections are to economic neoliberalism (focusing on housing, health care access, and fair wages).

The real upsurge in this latest chapter of struggle came after Trump was sworn in as President in 2017. Portland experienced a corresponding rise in violent and deadly clashes between anti-racist activists and Trump supporters, including Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys, two groups intimately involved in the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The pattern was already visible by May of that first Trump year, when Jeremy Christian, a self-proclaimed white nationalist, stabbed two men to death on the Portland light rail train after they intervened on behalf of two women of color, the targets of his racist rage. Two years later, in October 2019, 23-year-old anti-fascist activist Sean Kealiher was killed when a right-wing group ran him over after a dispute at a local brewery. The violence carried into the new decade: in February 2022, Benjamin Smith confronted and shot at a group of racial justice advocates walking past his house, killing one and wounding four others.

The rise of Portland’s Far Right became most acute on August 30, 2020, in reaction to the nightly racial justice protests downtown. A caravan of 600 Trump supporters from the Portland suburbs swarmed the city center, hoping to ignite a civil war. Armed with paintball guns, bats, clubs, and bear spray, they confronted the peaceful protesters and ignited skirmishes. One of their own, Aaron Danielson, was shot and killed in the resulting melee. President Trump exploited the incident by calling for the activation of the Insurrection Act of 1807 – a call for posse comitatus action that would allow him to step over state and local authorities and deploy military units to suppress the nightly protests. Ultimately, the shooter, a self-proclaimed “Antifa” activist by the name of Michael Reinoehl, was gunned down by law enforcement officers.

Meanwhile, the echoes of so-called “non-lethal ammunition” (which caused permanent brain damage in one protester) and of tear gas canisters fired into the peaceful crowds by police reverberated throughout the city and could even be heard in the northwest Portland hills three miles away. The authors were among the many Portlanders who had purchased a bike helmet, gas mask, and goggles, hoping to join the protests in solidarity. Instead, we donated the gear to a friend who had no such protection. We drove to the encampment a few times, overwhelmed by the strong, bitter smell of tear gas residue hanging in the air. We provided food and cash to the Riot Ribs outdoor kitchen concession that emerged to provide free food and bottled water to protesters, journalists, and medics. We observed a sea of tents, graffiti such as “ACAB” (which stood for “All Cops Are Bastards”) and “Fuck the Police”, and anarchist and antifa symbols scribbled on sidewalks. Doors and windows of such businesses as Starbucks – seen as symbols of corporate capitalism – were smashed and boarded up. Fliers for free self-defense training were stapled to telephone poles. A huge and colorful mural depicting George Floyd, with the phrase ‘I can’t breathe’, was painted on the gigantic boarded-up wall of the downtown Apple Store.

All of this was happening in the midst of a still-raging pandemic, epic wildfires that clogged Oregon air, and a growing homelessness crisis borne of neighborhood gentrification and a gaping income/wealth gap between rich and poor Oregonians (Bates, 2013).

When the total 200 days of action were over, police had arrested more than 1,000 protesters – 200 of whom were charged with crimes. The New York Times reported that undercover FBI surveillance teams infiltrated the demonstrations and recorded protesters, who were later identified and arrested (Baker, M., Olmos, S., Goldman, A., 2021). Critics say that these tactics amounted to domestic spying and possible First Amendment infringements. According to a 2022 Portland city auditor’s report, police officers collected information about protesters with documentation of criminal activity. This included photos and videos of protest activity, as well as recorded vehicle license plates. The auditor recommended that police intelligence cease its evident infringement on protesters’ First Amendment rights when no criminal activity was at issue.

Other disturbing activity, conducted by a Trump-deployed militarized unit, also made headlines during this time. BORTAC, the Border Patrol Tactical Unit of the federal government, created in 1984 to respond to rioting at immigrant detention facilities, showed up in military-style camouflage, driving unmarked minivans, and abducted peaceful protesters right off the streets of downtown Portland. Terrified victims were blindfolded and taken to secret locations for interrogation and imprisonment. As Harvard law professor Andrew Crespo documented, at least one high-profile example from Portland of an arrest (captured on video) clearly violated the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which forbids law enforcement officers from arresting individuals without probable cause (Vladeck, 2020).

In addition to the federal government's provocative engagement, the racial justice movement’s steam was finally diminished when political and corporate entities co-opted it to express their solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, contributing more than $10 billion to its causes (Robinson, 2022). Those effects were to reduce it to symbolic achievements, such as the removal of monuments honoring past (racist) leaders and renaming schools and military bases. Antonio Gramsci describes this tactic as “passive revolution”, involving the dominant class’s overtaking of the intellectual, political, and cultural leadership of anti-capitalist and anticolonial struggles.

The Long Local History

Portland’s Ninety Days was not an anomaly for this urban western burg. Like Minneapolis, whose police violence inspired the Summer of 2020, Portland’s history of anti-racist activism goes back decades. When, in the 1980s, a group of Minneapolis youth formed “The Baldies”, a self-proclaimed anti-racist skinhead group who clashed with a gang of neo-Nazis called the White Knights, they subsequently evolved into the Anti-Racist Action Organization, which established chapters in several cities, including Portland. Also emerging in this period were anti-racist youth groups in Portland, such as the East Side Skinheads (Flores C., Yanke, E., Crenshaw, M., 2019)

Racism remained problematic throughout this time. Portland was home to various neo-Nazi groups in the 1980s and 1990s. White supremacists and neo-Nazis saw the Northwest as the last frontier for establishing a white utopia.

On April 20, 1985, 31-year-old Lloyd “Tony” Stevenson – an African American and former Marine – was killed by Portland police who applied a choke hold, mistaking him for a suspect in a convenience store robbery (Buggy, 2016). This security guard and father of five had gone to the store to buy ice cream for his kids when he intervened in a scuffle between two store clerks and a black man accused of stealing. When the police arrived, they attempted to arrest Stevenson, who made a futile effort to explain that they had the wrong guy. In subduing him, they pressed on his carotid artery in the neck to diminish blood flow to the brain. It killed him. On the day of his funeral, Portland police officers began selling t-shirts with the message: ‘Don’t Choke ‘em; Smoke ‘em.” Co-chair of the Black United Front Ron Herndon said at the time, “This is what you would expect from police hit squads in El Salvador” (Turner, 1985). It was just one of countless documented cases of police violence against Portland’s Black community.

Among the most notorious of the activist groups was the White Aryan Resistance, whose members in 1988 murdered Ethiopian immigrant and Portland State University student Mulugeta Seraw – a crime that was provoked by WAR leader and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Tom Metzger. The Southern Poverty Law Center used an innovative legal strategy to hold Metzger and WAR liable for the wrongful death of Seraw, winning a $12.5 million verdict that effectively put the racist hate group out of business (Bennett, 2020). Out of the same period of resistance, Rose City Antifa formed in 2007, becoming the first official antifascist organization in the country. This movement joined a long and rich Portland protest culture that included anti-war protests and advocacy for a broad range of progressive social policies. When President George Bush visited Portland in 1991, for instance, he was confronted by such protesters, prompting him to dub the city “Little Beirut” (McCall, 2003).

Intimately tied to the racial justice movements of the past four decades is the concurrent and intersectional fight for income equality and economic justice. Especially in the post-protest climate, with some 5,000 homeless people sleeping on Portland’s sidewalks while rich developers erect multimillion-dollar hotels and penthouse condominiums on the same streets, the case for economic justice had never been more stark (Hasenstab, 2022). Portland’s wealth gap tracks the nation’s, with the top 1 percent owning one-third of the country’s wealth by the end of 2021. And like the rest of the U.S., Portlanders were active in the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, begun in 2011 on the heels of the financial crisis, to advance social and economic justice. Then, as in the Summer of 2020, protesters set up an encampment near City Hall that lasted only a little more than a month before the city shut it down. Over time, the group expanded to plan acts of civil disobedience and led a picket that successfully shut down the busy Port of Portland for a day. Its activists later turned attention to protesting war, supporting student debt relief, and calling out the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

This is the movement that most concerned the corporate titans, and it is in part to divert attention from questions of economic inequality that elites have long embraced a non-economic racial justice message in Portland and across the country. When necessary, partisans have no problem with more heavy-handed tactics, of course – such as the use of the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service (FPS), which has contracts with more than 50 private security firms, including “Blackwater” (Conroy, 2020). FPS, with its $1 billion budget, hires 13,000 security guards to support federal law enforcement with crowd control. In “protecting” federal buildings, armed FPS-hired security guards confronted protesters in Lafayette Park in Washington, DC, in June 2020, lobbing flashbang grenades and tear gas to disperse them. These units were deployed despite a 2019 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office that called out the guards’ insufficient training and noted that several guards were felons. Today’s army of ICE officers is similarly unqualified.

Moreover, through the state apparatus, the ruling classes began deploying new surveillance technologies, arming local police with advanced military-grade weapons, and pouring millions of dollars into private security to institute social control and sustain capital accumulation amid the enduring financial crisis facing capitalism. William Robinson (2022) calls this the “accumulation by repression,” and it is an instructive lens through which to view the widespread protests of 2020 and the disproportionate federal law enforcement and government response. In dealing with the visible face of economic inequality, the government’s response, even in liberal Portland, has at times veered toward control rather than problem-solving. Portland’s mayor at the time, Ted Wheeler, leaned on his advisor and former mayor Sam Adams, who proposed warehousing thousands of homeless tent dwellers in temporary shelters supervised by unarmed Oregon National Guardsmen (Kavanaugh, 2022). A business-funded group, People for Portland, attempted a parallel ballot measure in November 2022. Critics of both plans identified criminalizing homelessness and disregard for people’s unmet needs as reasons to block the proposals, which they did, successfully.

Portland in 2022

Though the nightly protests waned to nearly nothing in the year-plus since they were officially ended, young “Black Bloc” anarchists roamed Portland’s streets for a time, sometimes vandalizing businesses and vehicles and generally stirring up trouble. They seemed to have no political agenda, having sprung from a white youth brigade that essentially hijacked Portland’s black-led racial justice cause. Though most of the plywood had come off by 2022, and businesses were returning to profitability, evidence of the Ninety Days remained. For months, a huge, imposing fence wrapped around the front of the federal building, the county courthouse across the street has subsequently moved, and the nearby police headquarters remained boarded up. Graffiti marred many buildings. Pandemic-related protocols lifted, tourism began to revive, and nightlife returned. Mayor Wheeler fought off a small Leftist recall effort, a few officers were held accountable for assaulting protesters, and, as noted before, both the city council and the state legislature enacted police oversight and legal restraints (Zielinski, 2021).

According to the “Oregon Values and Beliefs” survey, a majority of Oregonians polled supported the Black Lives Matter movement at the time, but they were split on whether society had improved because of it (OVBC, 2022). Surveyors noted a lingering political divide among Oregonians regarding perceptions of the social justice movement, with 87 percent of Democrats in support and 69 percent of Republicans opposed. Antifascist protesters drew “strong criticism for demonstrations that ended in repeated damage to downtown businesses.” Some noted that this vandalism “drowned out the overall message and overshadowed the need for police reform” (Vaughn, 2022). In short, we remained a divided state and city whose government, nonprofit, and academic institutions adopted full-throated equity and diversity language and plans, but few solutions to enduring economic and political chasms. But as the City Most Known for Its Protests, Portland will surely rise up again.

Postscript: 2026

Three and a half years on, the original paper’s hint that Portland would rise up again has been borne out, though not in the form anyone would have wanted. In the spring of 2025, Donald Trump’s second administration deployed federal forces to the South Portland Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, where months of nightly protests drew a federal response familiar from the Summer of 2020. Portland police officers eventually testified in federal court against the actions of federal officers at the site, in what Mayor Keith Wilson described as a principled stand against federal overreach. The “No Kings” rallies of 2025 and 2026 have once more put thousands of Portlanders into the streets.

The political map shifted as well. Ted Wheeler did not seek re-election. In November 2024, Portland voters used a new ranked-choice system to elect Keith Wilson, a freight company executive and political outsider, as the 54th mayor under a restructured Council-Mayor form of government. The change abolished the commission system that had governed the city for more than a century, expanding the council to twelve members elected from four geographic districts.

Other elements of the 2022 portrait have shifted. The fence around the Hatfield Courthouse came down. Some of the criminal cases against protesters resulted in convictions, others in acquittals. The independent police oversight committee remains tangled in disputes over implementation. Portland’s homeless population has more than tripled in four years: Multnomah County now estimates nearly 18,000 people are experiencing homelessness in the region, with roughly 9,000 unsheltered, up from about 6,000 unsheltered when Wilson took office in January 2025. Mayor Wilson, who campaigned on ending unsheltered homelessness within a year, has publicly disputed the county’s methodology while reassuring Portlanders that the city is in a “resurgence.” In late 2025, his administration resumed enforcement of the public camping ban, a criminalization-of-homelessness measure that the 2022 critics had successfully blocked in earlier forms.

The city now faces a budget deficit of more than $160 million in the 2026-27 fiscal year. The named forces of cooptation, surveillance, and accumulation by repression have not weakened; if anything, they have grown more entrenched. Division among Portland’s city councilors threatens to reduce the body’s productivity and has already engendered internecine policy struggles. Whether the political shift to a new mayor-and-council form of government will produce solutions to the underlying economic and political chasms, or only manage them more efficiently, remains an open question.

References

Baker, M., Olmos, S., Goldman, A. (2021, December 22). The FBI deployed surveillance teams inside Portland protests. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/22/us/portland-protests-fbi-surveillance.html

Bates, L. K. (2013). Gentrification and displacement study: implementing an equitable inclusive development strategy in the context of gentrification. City of Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. https://www.portland.gov/sites/default/files/2020-01/2-gentrification-and-displacement-study-05.18.13.pdf

Bennett, B. (2020, October 25). Remembering Mulugeta: 30 years after SLPC lawsuit, life and legacy of man killed by hate group memorialized. The Southern Poverty Law Center. https://www.splcenter.org/news/2020/10/25/remember-mulugeta-30-years-after-splc-lawsuit-life-and-legacy-man-killed-hate-group

Buggy, K. (2016, April 19). It’s been 31 years since Lloyd “Tony” Stevenson was killed by Portland Police at age 31. The Willamette Week. https://www.wweek.com/news/2016/04/20/its-been-31-years-since-lloyd-tony-stevenson-was-killed-by-portland-police-at-age-31/

Conroy, B. (2020, July 22). The lead federal agency responding to protesters in Portland employs thousands of private contractors. Medium. https://wkc6428.medium.com/the-lead-federal-agency-responding-to-protesters-in-portland-employs-thousands-of-private-db137349f8b0

Ellis, R. (2020, June 11). Portland poised to cut $15 million from police budget, Eudaly says it’s not enough. Oregon Public Broadcasting. https://www.opb.org/news/article/defund-portland-police-budget-eudaly/

Flores, C., Yanke, E., Crenshaw, M. (2019). It did happen here. https://itdidhappenherepodcast.com/transcripts/episode1_transcript.html

Gerbaudo, P. (2021). The great recoil: Politics after populism and pandemic. Verso Books.

Hasenstab, A. (2022, May 5). Multnomah County releases first homeless ‘point-in-time’ count in two years. Oregon Public Broadcasting. https://www.opb.org/article/2022/05/05/multnomah-county-oregon-releases-first-homeless-count-point-in-time-two-years/

Kavanaugh, S. D. (2022, February 11). Portland mayor’s top advisor proposed massive, militarized group shelters as step in ending homeless camping, records show. The Oregonian. https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2022/02/portland-mayor-wants-to-create-1000-person-group-shelters-then-outlaw-camping-by-homeless-people-records-show.html

Mesh, A. (2022, March 24). Portland metro population declines amid American flight from major cities. The Willamette Week. https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2022/03/24/portland-metro-population-declines-amid-american-flight-from-major-cities/

McCall, W. (2003, August 19). Portland police, activists get ready for Bush’s visit. The Seattle Times. https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=20030819&slug=protests19e

Oregon Values and Beliefs Center (2022, March 16). Equality and the Black Lives Matter movement in Oregon. https://oregonvbc.org/equality-and-black-lives-matter-movement-in-oregon/

Portland City Auditor (2022). Police intelligence-gathering and surveillance: better management needed to protect civil rights. https://www.portland.gov/sites/default/files/2022/police-intelligence-gathering.pdf

Robinson, W. I. (2022). Global civil war: Capitalism post-pandemic. Kairos.

Turner, W. (1985, May 5). Blacks protest choke-hold death in Oregon. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/05/us/blacks-protest-choke-hold-death-in-oregon.html

Vaughn, C. (2022, March 23). Oregonians support Black Lives Matter, few think it has helped. The Portland Tribune. https://pamplinmedia.com/pt/9-news/539921-432446-oregonians-support-black-lives-matter-few-think-it-has-helped

Vladeck, S. (2020, July 25). Are the Trump Administration’s actions in Portland legal? Are they constitutional? The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/25/are-trump-administrations-actions-portland-legal-are-they-constitutional/

Zielinski, A. (2021, November 8). The campaign to recall Mayor Ted Wheeler is officially over. The Portland Mercury. https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/2021/11/08/36852057/the-campaign-to-recall-mayor-ted-wheeler-is-officially-over

Note: Illustration by Ramin Farahmandpur, after Reuters coverage of federal officers in Portland, summer 2020.