During the April 2026 Faculty Senate meeting, a senator posed the question that should have framed the entire discussion: whether the formula governing the university’s reserve buckets remained appropriate and required periodic review as conditions change. The senator observed that institutional failure would spare no department, making it necessary to examine whether the reserve buckets are funded sustainably. The administration provided no answer.

The Senate received instead a prepared address on the inviolability of fund accounting, tied to an organization most faculty have never heard of: the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO). President Ann Cudd described NACUBO as “the primary authority for higher education financial management.” She stated that the university “relies on standards set by” the organization, invoking its name to explain why non-Education and General (E&G) reserves could not be redirected to cover academic operations. This framing presented fund segregation as a matter of strict institutional compliance rather than administrative choice. The claim carried weight. It was delivered with the cadence of settled law. And it was misleading.

The Illusion of Authority

NACUBO is a membership trade association founded in 1962. It represents more than 2,500 colleges, universities, and higher education service providers by publishing the Financial Accounting and Reporting Manual, running professional development programs, conducting endowment surveys, and lobbying Congress on behalf of campus finance officers.

NACUBO is not a regulatory body, a standard-setting authority, or an enforcement agency. It does not issue binding rules, audit institutions, or possess the power to sanction a university that departs from its recommendations. The actual standard-setting authorities for a public university like Portland State are the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB), which governs accounting standards for state and local entities, and the state legislature and Board of Trustees, which set governance and fiscal policy.

Within the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) hierarchy for public institutions, NACUBO guidance is classified as nonauthoritative literature. The University of Colorado’s Controller’s Office, for instance, lists NACUBO alongside several other nonauthoritative sources, noting that the appropriateness of such literature depends on its relevance, specificity, and the general recognition of the issuer. Calling NACUBO “the primary authority” for university financial management is akin to calling the American Medical Association the primary authority for federal drug regulation. The AMA publishes guidelines. The FDA makes rules.

The Prepared Text

The Senate record captures an abrupt shift in register. In the minutes preceding the NACUBO passage, President Cudd spoke in a conversational mode, noting that tuition revenue and state appropriations fund the E&G reserves. Without transition, the language changed: “The university relies on standards set by the National Association of College and University Business Officers, often referred to as NACUBO, which serves as the primary authority for higher education financial management.”

That statement is not extemporaneous speech; it is a prepared text read into the record. It was deployed to answer a question no one asked. Senator Peters had inquired about self-support courses as an alternative revenue source for departments. President Cudd dismissed the idea as “not best practice” and immediately pivoted to the NACUBO address, which concerned fund transfers rather than revenue generation. The script awaited a prompt, but it did not wait for the right one.

The Buried Admission

The NACUBO statement constructed a layered argument against using non-E&G reserves for academic operations. According to the administration, NACUBO standards prohibit it. Fund accounting methodology prohibits it. Clifton Larson Allen (CLA), the external auditor, prohibits it. Student Fee Committee guidelines, the Board’s reserve management policy, and the January 2025 Executive and Audit Committee memo all ostensibly prohibit the action.

Then, in a single subordinate clause near the end of this litany, President Cudd stated: “While no specific law forbids a one-time reallocation, it is the judgment of the administration and the board that doing so would be fiscally irresponsible.”

After several minutes of constructing the impression that external authorities, professional standards, and legal constraints foreclosed the option, the president conceded that no law actually forbids the transfer. The entire preceding structure was erected to make an administrative preference sound like a regulatory prohibition.

The Internal Concession

The administration’s own finance officer offered a second concession. Before President Cudd launched the NACUBO address, she asked the Vice President for Finance to speak to the risk management reserve. The Vice President confirmed the reserve is funded primarily through a charge on the general fund and volunteered: “That is the one reserve that we can absolutely revisit how we do it.” She noted the risk management fund is the smallest reserve, totaling $2.5 million.

Minutes later, President Cudd characterized any reallocation of non-E&G reserves as “a breakdown of that integrity and a diversion of resources from the specific services they were intended to support.” The university’s finance officer had just told the Senate that one of those reserves could absolutely be revisited. The president then told the Senate it could not.

The Purpose and the Weaponization

Governmental Accounting Standards Board and GAAP frameworks require public universities to segregate funds to prevent fraud, ensure restricted funds are spent for their intended purpose, and maintain accountability to revenue sources. Student fees collected for health services should fund health services, just as housing revenue should fund housing. Bond covenants and state law create genuine statutory firewalls between certain categories of funds.

The issue at Portland State is not whether fund accounting is legitimate, but whether the administration uses the practice as a shield against scrutiny of its own allocation decisions. E&G reserves are generated by tuition and state appropriations; using them to cover E&G operations such as faculty salaries is legally permissible, even if fiscally imprudent, as a recurring practice. Non-E&G reserves, including auxiliary funds and designated student fees, are subject to restrictions that may limit their use for general academic purposes.

However, President Cudd did not argue that statutory restrictions prevented reallocation; she conceded that no law forbade a one-time transfer. The Vice President for Finance volunteered that the risk management reserve, a non-E&G fund, could be revisited. If statutory firewalls were the actual barrier, neither official would have made those concessions.

The true barrier is administrative judgment. The unanswered question is whether the formulas governing the flow into each reserve bucket are appropriate or whether they create artificial scarcity in the academic budget while padding non-E&G accounts that the administration then declares untouchable.

The Circular Authority

President Cudd’s argument rested on multiple ostensibly independent sources: NACUBO guidelines, CLA audit opinions, the Board’s reserve policy, the January 2025 Executive and Audit Committee memo, and the Student Fee Committee charter. These citations created the impression of convergent external oversight.

In practice, these sources lack independence. The Board sets its own reserve policy and hires its own auditors. The administration drafts the memos the Board reviews. CLA audits the financial statements the administration prepares. NACUBO provides best-practice literature the administration selects and interprets. Five apparent external checks on a single decision functioned as a single administrative apparatus citing itself through different institutional voices—a closed loop of self-authorization.

Furthermore, the external authority President Cudd cited most forcefully, CLA, does not say what she claimed it says. CLA’s published guidance on reserve policies states that deploying reserves “does not imply spending without discipline,” that organizations should consider using reserves for “risk management,” including “restructuring efforts for sunsetting programs,” and that the deciding factor is whether “leadership can clearly articulate the why behind them.” President Cudd cited CLA as prohibiting the use of reserves to cover operating deficits. CLA’s published position remains conditional: reserves can be deployed if the rationale is sound, the drawdown is planned, and the governing body exercises informed judgment.1

The Selective Principle

The Board has already approved the use of $12.3 million from E&G reserves to support the E&G operating budget. This drawdown will bring the projected reserve balance below the Board’s required 25 percent minimum by June 30. Using E&G reserves for E&G operations is a categorically different action from transferring non-E&G funds across fund boundaries.

However, the underlying principle President Cudd invoked was not limited to the fund’s boundaries. She argued that “ongoing expenses such as salaries and benefits require ongoing revenue,” that “reserves are a one-time bucket of funds,” and that using them to pay recurring costs “merely delays the point at which funding runs out.”

That principle applies with equal force to the $12.3 million E&G drawdown. The administration applied the principle selectively: reserves cannot cushion retrenchment, but reserves can cover the operating deficit the administration has already authorized.

The Questions Ignored

Throughout the meeting, senators asked about financial flexibility, and the administration answered with bureaucratic roadblocks. A senator asked whether the university could evaluate contribution margins across all revenue streams, noting that all departments sink or swim together. President Cudd deflected to capital funding and housing revenue without engaging the concept. Senator Peters asked about self-support courses; President Cudd dismissed the idea and launched the NACUBO address. The senators asked whether the current financial structure served the university’s mission. The administration responded by explaining why the current arrangement is non-negotiable.

The Verdict

NACUBO is a professional association that publishes guidance; it does not set binding standards for public universities. Invoking the organization as “the primary authority” to foreclose a policy option overstates its institutional role and obscures that reserve allocation at Portland State is governed by Board policy and administrative discretion, not external regulatory constraints. The president’s own finance officer confirmed as much on the record, minutes before the president’s prepared text stated otherwise.

The NACUBO defense is not a financial argument. It is a governance failure dressed in the language of fiduciary responsibility. The administration has chosen to protect reserve balances over faculty positions and has invoked a trade association manual to avoid accounting for that choice. Faculty facing elimination are entitled to know that the supposed authority cited against them is a trade association’s recommendation, the legal prohibition cited against them does not exist, and the principle invoked against them was waived when the administration found it convenient.

In 2018, several U.S. universities began piloting Alexa-enabled classrooms, allowing faculty to control projectors, temperature settings, and room configurations through voice command. Students could ask Alexa for office hours, financial aid information, and library schedules—the promotional materials framed this as convenience.

What the materials did not say is that every voice command, every query, every pause was being logged, processed, and stored on Amazon’s servers, governed not by FERPA but by institutional policy and Amazon’s terms of service. That arrangement was the opening bid. What has followed makes the Alexa classroom look modest: by 2026, Amazon Web Services had transitioned from a smart-speaker novelty to the invisible cloud infrastructure powering everything from campus financial-aid portals to AI-driven student advising.

The Fiscal Architecture of Modern Surveillance

Between 2008 and 2018, state legislatures cut per-student funding to public universities by an average of 16 percent in inflation-adjusted terms. The apparent recovery since then is largely an accounting artifact: enrollment declines during the pandemic reduced the per-student denominator, and federal stimulus funds temporarily inflated state budgets. As of 2024, twenty-two states have not yet restored per-student funding to 2008 levels, with Arizona remaining more than 40 percent below its pre-recession baseline.

Public universities did not respond to this sustained fiscal strangulation by lobbying aggressively for restoration. They responded by adopting the vocabulary and the logic of their adversaries: efficiency, accountability, market discipline, and revenue diversification. Adjunct labor replaced tenure lines. International and out-of-state students, who pay premium tuition, were recruited to subsidize domestic programs. Online learning platforms (Blackboard, Canvas, Desire2Learn) were adopted not because they produced better learning outcomes, but because they reduced the cost per credit hour.

This same rationale extended to surveillance platforms: proctoring software, AI advising chatbots, and predictive analytics tools were purchased not to improve learning but to automate functions previously performed by full-time faculty and professional advisers, displacing academic labor while generating data as a secondary revenue stream. Each of these moves indexed the university to market imperatives and opened the door to the next vendor, the next platform, the next surveillance tool sold as an educational service.

The pandemic accelerated what was already underway. When campuses closed in 2020, the data-collection apparatus that had been building for a decade suddenly operated at full scale, on every student, in every course. When campuses reopened, the apparatus remained in place. The emergency measure became permanent architecture.

Surveillance Capitalism Enters the Classroom

Shoshana Zuboff’s concept of surveillance capitalism defines the underlying framework of the modern university. In her 2019 analysis, Zuboff argues that the dominant mechanism of platform capitalism is not the sale of products but the extraction of behavioral data from human experience: voice recordings, search queries, purchase patterns, location data, all processed into predictive products and sold to vendors who wish to shape future behavior. Google, Facebook, and Amazon built their fortunes on this model. Universities adopted it, often without examining the cost of adoption.

Zuboff’s original account describes behavioral data extracted to sell targeted advertising. Universities are not in the advertising business. They extract and hoard behavioral data for distinct purposes: risk management, retention metrics, credentialing power, and institutional control. The vendor accumulates records of student behavior, learning patterns, academic engagement, and personal circumstances. The student accumulates course credit. One party to this transaction gains the knowledge to predict, intervene in, and shape the other’s future, while the other party is awarded a degree.

Ivan Manokha’s application of Foucauldian analysis extends this framework. Manokha argues that digital platforms have created a condition of permanent visibility, a digital panopticon, in which individuals are not coerced into surveillance but induced into it. Users surrender personal data in exchange for access to services—a transaction that, for university students, carries no genuine option to refuse: declining the LMS, the proctoring platform, or the AI advising tool means forfeiting access to education itself.

The transaction masquerades as consent. Haggerty and Ericson’s concept of the surveillant assemblage further describes how this extraction operates: not through a single observer monitoring physical bodies, but through distributed, decentralized data collection across internet searches, credit card transactions, smartphone signals, and facial recognition cameras. No single observer is necessary. The system surveils by aggregation.

Universities have embraced this model completely. What the current generation of artificial intelligence tools has done is accelerate the extraction and deepen its reach.

Proctored, Profiled, and Presumed Guilty

The most aggressive surveillance platforms in universities are those produced by the online proctoring industry. Companies such as ProctorU, Examity, and Proctorio grew substantially during the pandemic years and have retained significant market share.

These platforms require students to grant access to their computer screens, webcams, and microphones before taking examinations off campus. The invasiveness is extensive. Students must display their student identification and pan their webcams across their physical workspace before an examination begins. During the exam, software monitors browser activity and flags copying or the opening of additional tabs. Eye-tracking algorithms log instances of off-screen gaze, treating sustained off-screen focus as a behavioral indicator of potential cheating. Facial recognition matches the student’s face to identification photographs and performs random identity checks throughout. Keystroke dynamics (the speed and rhythm of typing) are recorded at the start of the semester and compared to examination behavior to verify identity.

The racial bias in these systems has been documented. The University of California, Los Angeles, discontinued its campus facial recognition program, which used Amazon’s Rekognition software, after the system misidentified 58 of 400 photographs, with false positives concentrated among students and faculty of color. The surveillance apparatus operating in the online examination is not race-neutral. Neither are its consequences. A flagged exam triggers further scrutiny, and further scrutiny in a system built on algorithmic misfires does not fall equally on all students.

The disability justice dimension compounds this record. Proctoring algorithms are programmed to flag behavior that deviates from a narrowly defined norm, such as extended off-screen gaze, irregular typing rhythms, and audible vocalizations. Students with autism, ADHD, physical disabilities requiring mobility adjustments, or conditions that involve reading aloud are flagged by these criteria as a matter of course. The accommodation letter that grants a student extended time in an in-person examination offers no protection against an algorithm that treats the student’s disability as evidence of dishonesty. Several institutions have faced ADA compliance challenges as a direct result of deploying proctoring software, a consequence that vendors’ promotional materials do not mention.

Automated Accusation

The arrival of ChatGPT in late 2022 introduced a new front in the surveillance of student work, and universities responded with a familiar reflex: purchase a technology product to manage a technology problem. Turnitin, already deployed at more than 16,000 academic institutions globally to detect plagiarism, launched an AI writing detection tool in April 2023. The deployment was swift and executed without institutional oversight.

Turnitin activated the feature with less than 24 hours’ advance notice to institutional clients, with no option to deactivate it and no disclosure of how the detection algorithm functioned. Vanderbilt University, after months of testing, turned off the tool entirely, citing unresolved concerns about accuracy and false positives. Several University of California campuses declined to adopt it. Even OpenAI, the company that produces ChatGPT, shut down its own AI detection product after it correctly identified only 26 percent of AI-written texts while falsely flagging 9 percent of human writing as AI-generated.

Research compiled by UCLA’s Humanities and Technology program indicates that ESL submissions are up to 30 percent more likely to be falsely flagged compared to those of native speakers. This bias is not an anomaly. Stanford researchers found that AI detection tools flagged writing by non-native English speakers as AI-generated 61 percent of the time, while native English speaker papers were flagged at near-zero rates.

Neurodivergent students face the same exposure: researchers at the University of Nebraska’s Center for Transformative Teaching have documented that students with autism, ADHD, and dyslexia face elevated false positive rates because their writing patterns, characterized by consistent terminology and repeated phrasing, superficially resemble the statistical signatures that detection algorithms associate with artificial intelligence. Turnitin acknowledges a variance of plus or minus 15 percentage points in its detection scores, placing a result of 50 percent AI-generated anywhere between 35 and 65 percent.

Universities and colleges are nonetheless deploying this instrument in academic misconduct proceedings. The University of Kansas, MIT Sloan, and a growing number of other institutions have concluded that AI detection scores cannot serve as stand-alone evidence of academic dishonesty: the error rates are too high and the biases too well-documented. The institutions that continue using these tools without safeguards are not protecting academic integrity. They are automating accusation.

Administrators who deploy these tools invoke academic integrity as justification: without surveillance, the value of the degree is debased by unchecked cheating. The argument deserves a direct answer. The evidence does not support the premise. Studies of remote examination conditions have not established that cheating rates are significantly higher than in proctored in-person settings. What the integrity argument accomplishes is to shift the burden of proof onto students, presuming dishonesty until the algorithm clears them, while insulating the institution from accountability for the racial and disability biases the tools demonstrably produce. Integrity, in this framing, is a justification for surveillance rather than an educational value.

Algorithmic Triage: Who Gets Flagged Before They Fail

Predictive analytics platforms extend the surveillance apparatus into academic advising, encoding racial inequities into automated triage decisions. The predictive analytics industry uses machine learning to identify students deemed “at risk” of dropping out and to direct advising interventions accordingly. This model is represented by platforms such as EAB Navigate and Civitas Learning, which are currently deployed at hundreds of institutions.

Investigative reporting by The Markup, drawing on documents obtained through public records requests, found that at least four of seven universities examined had incorporated students’ race as a variable in EAB Navigate’s predictive models. Two of those institutions designated race as a “high-impact predictor,” meaning it accounted for more than 5 percent of the variance in a student’s predicted risk score.

Researchers have documented that predictive models in higher education consistently overestimate failure rates for racially minoritized students. The algorithms are trained on historical data that reflects existing institutional inequities. Encoding those patterns into automated risk scores perpetuates and systematizes them. The premises underlying these platforms frame historically underrepresented students as individually deficient rather than institutionally challenged. A student flagged for infrequent library visits or irregular LMS logins receives an automated intervention message. What the algorithm does not account for is whether that student is working two jobs, caring for a family member, or navigating a campus climate that triggers disengagement. The student bears the blame, and the institution remains unexamined.

Generative AI and the Division of Learning

Zuboff’s concept of the division of learning is fully realized in the era of generative artificial intelligence. Large language models (ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini) are now being integrated into learning management systems, advising platforms, and academic support tools at a pace that has outrun any serious institutional deliberation about their implications.

When a generative AI system produces course content, summarizes readings, drafts feedback on student work, or simulates advising conversations, the knowledge being produced is not neutral. It reflects the training data on which the model was built, the priorities of the company that built it, and the contractual terms under which the university licensed it. Students and faculty receive outputs whose provenance they cannot audit and whose parameters they did not set. They have no meaningful access to the inputs, the model architecture, or the decisions that shaped what the system will and will not say.

Moreover, the promised labor-saving is illusory. The extraction does not stop at the point of interaction. When universities license generative AI tools embedded in their learning environments, the student work processed by those systems—essays, discussion posts, advising conversations, assessment responses—feeds back into the model’s training data. The student’s intellectual labor serves as raw material for the next version of the product that the university purchases. Zuboff identified this circuit in its early form: behavioral data extracted from users is processed into products sold back to shape those same users. In the university, the circuit is complete. The student writes. The platform learns. The institution pays for the upgraded model.

To this point, Silicon Valley has lately rediscovered a complication from Victorian economics: the Jevons paradox. Writing in 1865, the economist William Stanley Jevons observed that efficiency improvements in steam engines did not reduce coal consumption. They lowered production costs, expanded the industry’s reach, and drove demand higher.

The same pattern governs AI surveillance in the university. Detection tools sold as labor-saving devices do not reduce the burden of academic integrity review. They flag more students, generate more cases, and create more demand for the human oversight they were marketed to replace. Each efficiency gain becomes a justification for broader deployment, deeper data collection, and tighter vendor contracts. Data collection and market saturation are the goals of surveillance capitalism, and the Jevons paradox ensures both will intensify. The result is Zuboff’s division of learning at an institutional scale: the student and the faculty member interact with outputs whose provenance they cannot audit and whose parameters they did not set, while the platform relentlessly accumulates the data.

Because this system is designed to perpetually expand, it will not contract on its own. The cycle of surveillance must be broken from the outside; the only available remedies are regulatory and fiscal.

Defunding Created This. Reinvestment Can Dismantle It

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) requires meaningful strengthening. FERPA, enacted in 1974, was not designed to govern the extraction of behavioral data by machine learning systems, biometric proctoring platforms, or generative AI tools embedded in learning environments. Its protections for student records do not map cleanly onto the data flows generated by these systems. Updating FERPA to cover behavioral and biometric data, to require affirmative consent for third-party data sharing, to mandate algorithmic transparency from vendors, and to establish enforceable penalties for violations would impose real accountability on an industry that has operated in a regulatory vacuum.

Students at CUNY, UC San Diego, and other institutions have already organized successfully against Proctorio contracts, demonstrating that the surveillance apparatus is neither inevitable nor irreversible when students and faculty act collectively to contest it.

Several states have moved further than federal law on biometric data protection. Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), enacted in 2008, requires affirmative written consent before any private entity collects biometric identifiers—fingerprints, facial geometry, voiceprints, keystroke dynamics. Courts have found that proctoring platforms collecting this data without consent are liable under BIPA, and several class-action suits against ProctorU and Proctorio are currently working through Illinois courts. FERPA reform modeled on BIPA’s consent-and-liability framework would extend these protections nationwide.

However, regulatory reform only treats the symptoms. The more fundamental intervention is fiscal. State legislatures defunded public higher education and forced institutions into a market logic that made surveillance technology attractive. Administrators adopted proctoring software because remote instruction at scale, driven by enrollment pressure and cost-reduction imperatives, made monitoring a market solution. Reversing this trajectory requires restoring state investment so that institutions are no longer structurally dependent on data-extracting vendors to manage their operations. The watched classroom is the product of political choices. When those decisions harm students, they can be reversed.

This essay is a substantially revised and expanded adaptation of a paper I originally presented at the 2020 SASE conference: "Neoliberalism, Surveillance Pedagogy, and the Corporatization of Higher Education." Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE). University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, July 18-20, 2020. [Virtual Conference]

Within hours, a social media post circulated calling the arrest proof that Portland needs a mask ban. “Wow,” the account wrote, “we could really use a mask ban or something!”

The post is wrong. Right in its general politics, and right to be alarmed by what is happening in this city’s immigrant communities — but wrong in a way that does damage: it treats a robbery committed without a mask as proof that masks are the problem. With the state legislation already facing a federal legal challenge, this kind of rhetoric has real-world consequences.

The post does not even name the legislation it claims to defend—a redundant mask-ban ordinance recently advanced by some Portland City Councilors that merely duplicates existing state law. Legal observers have warned that the city’s proposal not only creates redundancy but also risks interfering with police collective bargaining agreements. Conflating the proposed local ordinance with the state’s HB 4138, or treating both as vindicated by a single robbery, only deepens the distortion.

Mason Thomas Clark did not wear a mask. He carried a toy gun on his hip and spoke four words: “I am Immigration and Customs,” words that carry their own terror in a city where federal agents have smashed car windows, dragged people from their vehicles, and conducted operations outside schools. Clark needed no disguise. The threat was in the words. Any 19-year-old in Portland understands this in 2026. He needed only to invoke ICE, an agency that has made concealment its standard tactic.

None of this context appears in the post. By erasing ICE’s tactics, the poster misrepresents the actual stakes of Oregon’s current legislative battle. House Bill 4138, the Law Enforcement Accountability Act, passed by the Oregon Legislature in its 2026 session, restricts facial coverings for law enforcement officers executing official duties. It requires agencies to post policies. It allows individuals and oversight bodies to file objections when those policies are violated. It is accountability legislation drafted with a federal legal challenge already in view.

What it cannot do, what no mask ban can do, is address the terror ICE has inflicted through its own operations. The balaclava is not the source. It took a year of enforcement — broken windows, pre-signed warrants, officers posted outside schools — to teach immigrant communities that any person claiming federal authority has the power to destroy a family before any court can intervene.

In October 2025, the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition confirmed 329 arrests in Oregon in a single month, a figure its board members described as likely an undercount. An enforcement effort known as Operation Black Rose, which began in mid-October, sent federal officers into communities with large immigrant populations to run license plates and cross-reference names against deportation databases. Most detentions were reported along highways, where people were driving to work or to school. Officers in Washington County approached a woman’s car with a stack of pre-signed arrest warrants, broke her window, wrote her name into one, and took her into custody. A construction worker was escorted by eight officers into a white van in a Southeast Portland strip mall parking lot. Immigration officers are posted outside schools in Woodburn and Wilsonville. A bedroom door was broken down with weapons drawn while a baby cried in the background.

From fewer than 250 arrests in the Northwest between October and December 2024, ICE arrests climbed to nearly 2,250 in the final three months of 2025 alone, according to data obtained by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Oregon now ranks among the top five states with the largest year-over-year increase in ICE arrests.

The social media post ignores that distinction. The post treats the clerk’s fear as a mask problem when, in fact, it is a terror problem.

The state law, by contrast, addresses the mask problem directly. Requiring all law enforcement agencies operating in Oregon to display their name, badge, and agency during enforcement actions addresses a gap in oversight: the documented difficulty, across dozens of operations in this state, of determining which agency conducted an operation and which officer was responsible for each action. The OPB reporting on arrests at the Portland ICE facility found at least six different federal agencies cycling through, with no consistent procedures, no consistent documentation, and no consistent identification. One ICE officer, when told that a detained person might have temporary protected status (TPS), said he guessed the initials stood for “Third Party Spaghetti” and closed the door. In that environment, requiring visible identification is the minimum condition for accountability. That officer’s contempt is what the new state law targets.

A pending challenge by the federal government threatens even this commonsense approach. The Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution holds that federal law supersedes conflicting state law, and the federal government has invoked it aggressively to challenge state-level accountability measures. California enacted the nation’s first law restricting facial coverings for federal law enforcement, and the Department of Justice sued the state in November, arguing that the law unconstitutionally interferes with federal agents’ ability to execute their duties. A federal judge blocked enforcement while the case proceeds.

Oregon’s legislation takes a different approach from California: rather than imposing criminal penalties on individual officers, it requires agencies to adopt and publish compliant policies and allows objections to be filed when policies fall short. Federal courts will ultimately decide if that distinction holds. Tung Yin, a professor of law at Lewis and Clark Law School, has warned that comments by Oregon legislators could be used by the federal government to argue that the law targets federal agents specifically, regardless of its neutral language. The bill’s survival in court depends, in part, on whether its public advocates argue it as a general accountability measure rather than as a rebuke of federal immigration enforcement.

The proposed Portland “me too” ordinance compounds the state law’s legal jeopardy. Linking HB 4138 to evidence it cannot support — a robbery committed by an unmasked teenager with a toy gun — hands the federal government exactly the argument it needs to strike the law down.

Meanwhile, back at the Montavilla 7-Eleven, the actual dynamics of fear had nothing to do with masks. The clerk looked at Mason Thomas Clark and knew immediately that Clark was not ICE. He did not have money. He said so, and Clark left. The clerk was not afraid of Clark. He was afraid of what those four words could set in motion — a call, a van, a door broken before dawn.

Clark’s arrest does not diminish the fear, and HB 4138 was never designed to do so. Oregon’s legislative remedy deserves defense, but it is a narrow law aimed at a specific blind spot. It was never intended to solve the broader terror ICE has inflicted over the past year. Nor will the city councilors’ redundant proposal serve that end. Conflating the two objectives does not serve the communities the social media poster claims to defend. It serves only the poster.

Rozie Ramati is not yet a household name, drawing roughly 59,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and 60,000 followers on Instagram. Her breakout track, “Orange Juice,” went semi-viral on TikTok in 2022, after which she taught herself ukulele, guitar, songwriting, and production in her bedroom. Having studied Chicano literature and Holocaust testimony at UCLA, she released “Blinking Aisles” in September 2025, following a full year of delays marked by creative doubt and a fraught political climate. The song lifts directly from Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “America” and grafts it onto our current fractured reality. The result is a remarkably trenchant lyrical indictment of American imperial life in recent popular music.

The Fluorescent Scroll

In the chorus, Ramati sings:

I dig my hands in bags of paradise / I squeeze until I find the noose / We search for meaning between blinking aisles / But can’t turn them off to find the truth

The phrase “bags of paradise” evokes both grocery bags and the consumer promise of abundance and choice, framing the American supermarket as a secular Eden. Yet, inside this bag lies a noose, suggesting the promise of plenty contains its own instrument of death.

The phrase “blinking aisles” operates on two levels: the fluorescent-lit corridors of the supermarket—Ginsberg’s territory—and the glowing screens through which most Americans now consume information, entertainment, and each other. Ramati herself has explicitly confirmed this reading. In a recent essay, she noted that the algorithmic feed “is more true to a ‘blinking aisle,’ which allows us to endlessly scroll without seeing an obvious pattern in what we consume”. The imagery of “blinking” captures how these aisles do not illuminate but rather flicker with intermittent, inescapable stimulation. The subsequent lines reveal this dynamic:

All my humanness is numbed in absent hours / And my youth is slipping off the monkey bars

Herbert Marcuse would have recognized this sentiment immediately. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse argued that advanced capitalism replaces genuine needs with manufactured desires, leaving people comfortable but pacified, unable to articulate what they have lost because the loss itself has been administered away. Ramati actively diagnoses this exact modern machinery, stating that these platforms set the public up to be “controlled, divided, and profited off of by algorithms and billionaires,” with a core goal to “make us insecure, overwhelmed, and divided.” These “absent hours” are not leisure; they are time subtracted from lived experience, spent scrolling, consuming, and dissociating. The colonization of interiority by consumer capitalism does not announce itself as conquest. It masquerades as convenience, as content, and as the soft glow of the fluorescent scroll. Youth does not simply conclude—it slips away. It mimics a child losing their grip on a playground fixture, the body giving out before the mind registers the fall.

The song then asks:

Will I live for love? Or live for blinking aisles? / Who can afford the first? Not me or you

The dilemma is strictly economic. Love, connection, and a life lived rather than consumed require time, stability, housing, and freedom from the grind of not knowing whether rent will clear. Ramati frames the choice between love and consumption not as a matter of character, but as a structural failure. Nobody can afford love, and the aisles keep blinking because the alternative has been priced out of reach.

The Verse as Testimony

The second verse delivers dispatches from these systemic failures. “There’s a landlord burning dollars on my chin” renders the housing crisis as a bodily assault. The landlord does not merely extract rent but weaponizes wealth by burning currency against skin, allowing capital to write its name on the tenant’s body. In the line “There’s a raven on an olive branch,” the universal symbol of peace is occupied by a bird traditionally associated with death, war, and ill omen. Peace has been colonized by its opposite, effectively describing an American foreign policy where the language of diplomacy is deployed to authorize destruction. When “the dairy man tells the girl to bring a smile / So she spits on him to feel like it,” workplace harassment is met with a defiance born of exhaustion rather than strength. She spits to simulate the sensation of agency; resistance here amounts to pantomime.

The moral center of the track is laid bare with the lines:

There’s a divot on my pinky, I’m in style / While there’s babies belly deep in wells of sand

Here, a minor cosmetic blemish is elevated to a fashion statement and set against the visceral image of children buried in sand. Ramati has stated publicly that the ongoing Palestinian plight catalyzed the creation of “Blinking Aisles”. While she has not glossed every line, these lyrics—written by someone who explicitly named Gaza as the song’s catalyst—suggest that entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble with children trapped beneath. Ramati places American vanity and Palestinian death in the same sentence, letting the stark juxtaposition serve as the editorial itself.

The artist then turns inward:

Well I’ll tell you, Plum, there’s more than blinking aisles / There’s a man you haven’t spit on yet

“Plum” is Ramati’s moniker, drawn from her Plum Enthusiast testimony archive, a project she built during the Los Angeles fires of January 2025 using principles learned in her Holocaust studies at UCLA. Her professors impressed upon her the idea that witnessing is essential because authoritarian regimes destroy both people and the record of their experience. Watching misinformation flood platforms during the fires, Ramati recognized this historical amnesia and built the archive to collect first-person accounts, pairing them with a reading list. Without institutional support, this bedroom pop artist provided a space for people to bear witness. This act of documentation is not merely parallel to her music; it is the engine driving it. In her newsletter, she explicitly linked the release of the track to the archive, urging her audience to share their own testimonies. The lyric functions as a self-instruction reminding her that the aisles are not the whole world, and there remain targets for legitimate fury that have not yet been confronted.

The Ginsberg Inheritance

The song expands as Ramati quotes nearly verbatim from Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “America”:

America, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing / America I can’t stand my own mind / America when will we end the human war?

Although Ramati has not explicitly cited Ginsberg as a source, the intertext is unmistakable, mimicking the exact opening words of Ginsberg’s poem. Ginsberg wrote his version during the Cold War, addressing America as a lover who had betrayed him and a body politic that consumed its citizens. Ramati’s adoption of these lines is an inheritance rather than a pastiche, claiming Ginsberg’s tradition of direct address and extending it into a present in which wars have multiplied, and supermarket aisles follow us everywhere we look.

Yet Ramati adds lines Ginsberg never wrote. “America why are your libraries full of tears?” points toward the defunding of public institutions and the book bans sweeping the country. “America why don’t you take off your clothes?” demands transparency from a nation concealing the machinery of its violence. She separates herself from Ginsberg entirely with the closing line: “America the plum blossoms are falling”. Where Ginsberg concluded “America” with a sardonic resolution to put his “queer shoulder to the wheel,” Ramati ends with an image of natural beauty in decay. In East Asian traditions, plum blossoms signify endurance surviving frost, but here, the symbol of resilience is giving way. The laughter that closes the song carries no defiance or program for the future; it is the involuntary sound of someone watching every symbol of resistance fail.

Naming the Anesthetic

The hypocrisy Ramati identifies is an indictment of the civilization itself, measuring America’s claims of democracy, liberty, and sanctuary against realities like ICE raids, children in rubble, unaffordable housing, and a totalizing screen feed. The aisles keep blinking because the stimulation is the imperial project. Compliance is produced and attention captured before it can be directed toward the falling plum blossoms or the very real suffering in the world.

Ramati joins a tradition of artists, from Whitman to Ginsberg to Kneecap and Bob Vylan, who address America in the second person to indict its imperial hypocrisy. While one might object that Ramati’s audience of 59,000 listeners risks preaching to the choir, or that a younger artist quoting a dead poet seems to be appropriating authority instead of establishing her own, these criticisms miss the power of her original verse images. The landlord burning dollars, the raven on the olive branch, and the babies in sand prove that while the Ginsberg lines provide the frame, the original imagery forms her deeply earned argument.

While this textual analysis does not comprehensively address the musical composition, such as Ramati’s 1930s vibrato or the shift in vocal register that accompanies the raw direct address of the Ginsberg section, the words alone perform a critical function. “Blinking Aisles” succeeds where much political music fails by exposing the anesthetic. It identifies how imperial violence is made tolerable to those who fund it with their taxes and complicity. Ultimately, the song asks who can afford love in a civilization organized around the blinking aisle. While the track itself leaves the listener with the unsentimental verdict of “not me or you,” Ramati views this bleakness as a prerequisite for resistance. As she writes of the song’s underlying demand: “We might not be able to afford the first, but that simply means we need to defend our right to.”

I coordinate the Postsecondary, Adult, and Continuing Education (PACE) program and teach graduate courses in education policy, philosophy of education, and organizational theory at Portland State, where I have been a faculty member since 2002. I read PIVOT as someone who participated in the process it describes, who submitted a self-study, and who observed the university label various programs as “grow,” “sustain,” “revitalize,” “sunset,” and “start,” with preliminary classifications circulating through my college. That review produced program self-studies, unit vitality profiles, and a classification system PSU did not previously possess, assembled under extraordinary time pressure—a record that would not exist without it. What follows is an accounting of what the record omits.

A $16 million question the report does not answer

PIVOT prescribes institutional actions to achieve $18.6 million in cumulative savings. The deficit target is $35 million. The gap between those two figures is $16.4 million, a shortfall of nearly half the required reduction. The report addresses this gap obliquely, through references to “conservative estimates” and the assurance that “actual savings are likely to exceed these projections as additional pathways are developed.” No mechanism is named. No timeline is specified.

Responsible deficit-reduction planning in higher education requires accounting for implementation costs, including severance obligations, teach-out expenditures, legal costs associated with program discontinuation, and accreditation review fees. PIVOT’s financial model considers none of these against the gross savings figures it presents. Research on program elimination in higher education has consistently found that hidden implementation costs substantially erode projected gross savings in the first two fiscal years following closure decisions. PIVOT's financial model presents no net savings calculation, leaving the Board without a reliable estimate of what the institution will actually realize.

Phase 2 savings of $6.4 million depend on “workload management adjustments” and “potential faculty reductions” that the report never establishes as contractually permissible. The invocation of Article 22 in March 2026 is the institution’s own acknowledgment, in contractual form, that a consensual pathway to these savings was not feasible. Board members reviewing PIVOT’s financial projections should understand that those projections depend on extraordinary measures that the report’s collaborative framing fails to disclose. The workforce reductions those measures require carry consequences the financial model does not account for—consequences that are both fiscal and racial.

Equity on paper, silence in practice

PIVOT’s equity commitments are out of alignment with the report’s own appendices. The report repeatedly references PSU’s values of access and inclusion, describes equity-disaggregated student success metrics as a core evaluation criterion, and commits to monitoring equity impacts during implementation—all of which are appropriate for an institution with PSU’s urban research mission and student demographic profile. The appendices, however, show that the institution has not applied these standards to its own restructuring decisions.

The College of Education dean’s reflection in Appendix G states that, given the college’s already small number of Black faculty members, the collective bargaining agreement’s seniority-based layoff sequencing may result in the loss of most Black faculty. The dean’s use of conditional language should not obscure the gravity of the observation. The concern is not speculative. The college’s Black faculty population is already small. The proposed workforce reductions are substantial. The layoff sequencing mechanism is rule-based and predictable. The outcome the dean describes is foreseeable, and the institution has done nothing to address it.

The disparity does not originate with the seniority rule. It originates with the classification decisions that determined which programs would be cut — decisions made by administrators who had access to the college's faculty demographic data and chose not to conduct a disparate impact analysis before proceeding.

The seniority provisions of the CBA exist for important reasons. They remove subjective and potentially discriminatory discretion from layoff decisions, protecting faculty from arbitrary termination. The accountability for what follows does not rest with the agreement. It rests with an administration that designed a restructuring plan producing a racially disparate outcome and declined to acknowledge it.

The PSU 2025 Campus Climate Survey documented a 21-point racial inclusion gap among administrators and a significant trust deficit in institutional leadership direction. No disparate-impact review has been conducted or is planned. The Board should ask, before implementation proceeds, whether an adverse impact analysis has been completed, what its findings are, and what alternative reduction strategies have been considered that would achieve the fiscal goal without producing a racially disparate workforce outcome. That question cannot be separated from the next one: whether the programs the report proposes to eliminate serve public obligations the institution has not analyzed.

Mission alignment ends where the analysis ends.

The report’s internal commitments—teach-out plans, Faculty Senate curricular review—address closure as an administrative process. They do not address it as a regulatory event. PIVOT recommends 71 programs for phased discontinuation, including 17 of 31 programs in the College of Education, 18 of 43 programs in the College of Urban and Public Affairs, and 19 graduate certificates university-wide. For programs in education, public health, social work, and behavioral health, the external regulatory and accreditation dimensions of those closures are substantial.

For the College of Education, program discontinuation triggers review by the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation. CAEP requires institutions to notify the accreditor of significant changes to the approved educator preparation program portfolio, and its standards require that program closures be conducted in a manner consistent with the institution’s accreditation commitments throughout any teach-out period. Oregon educator preparation programs must also maintain approval from the Oregon Teacher Standards and Practices Commission, which conducts its own review of program modifications and closures on a timeline independent of CAEP’s. PIVOT is silent on both requirements. The Board should ask whether CAEP and TSPC have been notified, what their preliminary responses are, and whether the proposed closure timeline is consistent with the institution’s accreditation obligations.

The workforce consequences of the proposed educator preparation discontinuations extend this concern from an accreditation question into a public mission question. Oregon's teacher shortage is extensively documented across state and federal reports. The Oregon Educator Equity Report, published by the Educator Advancement Council in collaboration with the Oregon Department of Education, has documented persistent shortfalls in teacher supply across multiple subject areas and geographic regions, with rural and high-need districts facing the most severe deficits. Oregon already struggles to recruit and retain teachers in special education, bilingual education, and STEM fields. The College of Education’s Sunset classifications are concentrated in graduate certificate and master’s-level programs that serve as direct workforce preparation pathways for candidates entering the classroom. Eliminating these pathways does not simply close programs with low enrollment. It removes supply from a pipeline that the state has identified as critically insufficient.

The analysis stops precisely where the public mission obligation is most acute. The same failure extends to behavioral health and public health. Oregon's behavioral health workforce shortage is on the state legislative record. House Bill 2235, passed by the Oregon Legislature in 2023, declared a state of emergency in Oregon's behavioral health system due to severe shortages of licensed counselors, clinical social workers, and mental health practitioners — a shortage that predated the pandemic and has worsened since. Several graduate certificate programs classified for “sunset” support licensure pathways in these fields. Eliminating them without a downstream workforce consequence analysis is not a mission-aligned decision. It is a fiscal decision dressed in mission language. This oversight, which survived six months of review without correction, is itself a governance question.

Extensive engagement is not shared governance.

What the report calls shared governance was, by its own evidence, consultation with no binding effect. Nearly 200 program and unit self-studies were prepared and submitted. Multi-day working sessions among deans were convened. A newsletter and dedicated website maintained communications across a six-month process. The Transition Monitoring Team provided ongoing feedback to academic leadership.

The report describes this effort as producing “meaningful opportunity to respond,” a phrase that implies faculty input shaped outcomes. The evidence in Appendix G does not support the claim. Of the eleven schools and colleges that submitted reflections, six reported no changes to preliminary classifications following faculty engagement. The dean of the School of Business reports that faculty affirmed all classifications. The MCECS dean reports no changes. The Honors College dean reports no changes. The University Studies Interim Executive Director reports that faculty who suggested alternative classifications were provided with explanations for why the existing ones were correct. Across the entire institution, fewer than ten programs changed classification because of faculty input, a modification rate below four percent.

The faculty engagement process was consultative. Administrative leaders retained decision-making authority throughout. While this may be argued to be a defensible choice under conditions of financial urgency. It is not shared governance. Describing it as such undermines the credibility of the report’s other claims.

What the Board should ask

The $35 million deficit is real. The enrollment decline has been a decade in the making. Difficult decisions about the academic portfolio are unavoidable, and some of PIVOT’s recommendations are sound. The Board’s obligation is not to dispute that judgment but to ensure the plan’s gaps are closed before implementation proceeds.

Four questions deserve answers before the Board endorses implementation.

1. Has an adverse impact analysis been completed for workforce reductions in the College of Education, and what are its findings?

2. Has the institution notified CAEP and TSPC of the proposed discontinuations of educator preparation programs, and what are the accreditation implications?

3. Has the financial model been revised to reflect implementation costs, calculating net rather than gross savings, and does the revised model account for Article 22’s role in achieving projected reductions?

4. For each center and institute classified as Phase Out, has an individualized assessment of external revenue capacity been conducted, or were the classifications applied categorically to units with general fund dependence?

PIVOT produced a planning framework that PSU will use for years to come. The framework’s gaps, however, are not minor procedural oversights. These are failures of the process that promised to deliver sound analysis, and they carry legal, accreditation, and workforce consequences that the Board of Trustees must understand before implementation proceeds.

I. The Financial Analysis Presented on March 16 Does Not Satisfy the Requirements of Article 22

Article 22 of the PSU-AAUP Collective Bargaining Agreement requires the Administration to present a “full description and analysis of the financial condition of the University” before issuing any provisional plan for retrenchment. The March 16 presentation outlined the E&G structural deficit and projected an approximately $35 million shortfall by FY28. However, the presentation addressed only one funding stream—the Education and General fund—while explicitly excluding auxiliary and restricted funds.

The University’s 2025 Financial Profile reports a Primary Reserve Ratio of 0.44, well above the Board-mandated minimum of 0.25. When Faculty Senator Kinsella raised the question of whether excess reserves above Board-mandated minimums could be used to mitigate layoffs, President Cudd’s response was that “best practice” precludes such reallocation. That answer is insufficient on its face. The Faculty Senate’s Question for Administrators, submitted for the April 6, 2026, meeting, appropriately presses this point: the campus community deserves to know whether the Administration’s position reflects a legal or regulatory requirement, a binding Board policy, or an internal administrative judgment that is, in principle, revisable. Until that question is answered with specificity, the claim that all available avenues have been exhausted cannot be accepted.

I urge the Administration to provide, prior to the issuance of any provisional plan, a clear written response that distinguishes between legally binding constraints, Board policy-imposed constraints, and discretionary administrative choices. Faculty have a legitimate governance interest in knowing which limits are fixed and which are chosen.

II. The PIVOT Methodology Has Not Been Made Sufficiently Transparent to Permit Substantive Faculty Evaluation

The March 2 Faculty Senate meeting led to an extended discussion of the criteria and processes used to determine PIVOT classifications. President Cudd identified five domains of evidence — student success, graduation rates, market demand, mission fit, and organizational vitality — and described the process as iterative and collaborative. When pressed to explain how programs that fell below the 77% contribution margin threshold were nonetheless permitted to continue, and how those determinations were reached, the Administration acknowledged that no formula or transparent scoring rubric governed the outcome. The recorded answer was that “there comes a point where formulas are unavailable” and that the decisions involved “lots of discussions.”

Faculty are not asking for algorithmic certainty. They are requesting a reconstructible record: who participated in the evaluations, at which stages, with what information, and according to what criteria. The minutes of the March 2 meeting document that units received data, wrote vitality reports, and that deans conducted conversations in ways that differed “in their own way” across colleges. That description is insufficient as an account of a process that will determine which faculty positions are eliminated and which programs survive.

I request that the Administration make available, before a provisional plan is released, a written reconstruction of the PIVOT evaluation process at the college and department level, including the dates of key deliberations, the parties involved, the role played by each domain of evidence in final classifications, and, where classifications were changed from initial recommendations, the stated rationale for those changes. The Faculty Senate’s capacity to provide substantive consultation, which Article 22 explicitly anticipates, depends on having access to this information.

III. The Entanglement of PIVOT, Article 22, and the General Education Review Requires Explicit Acknowledgment

The March 16 meeting minutes record President Cudd’s statement that maintaining a separate General Education unit, University Studies, “is no longer financially viable.” This statement was made in the context of the Article 22 presentation. The General Education Task Force’s own Steering Committee has acknowledged in its final report that the Article 22 process and the GenEd review are “formally separate matters” whose outcomes may nonetheless intersect in significant ways.

The Faculty Senate’s authority over curriculum, including the structure of general education, is not contingent on the Administration’s financial determinations. The elimination of University Studies as an academic unit is a matter properly subject to the full procedural protections of Article 22, including consultation, comment periods, and departmental review, and may not be resolved by administrative declaration. Furthermore, Senator Osborn’s point at the March 16 meeting, that the GenEd Task Force’s own model may cost more to implement than the current University Studies structure, remains unanswered. Before the Faculty Senate votes on a general education proposal, the Administration should provide a clear accounting of any financial commitments it is prepared to make to support implementation.

IV. Conclusion

I urge the Administration to take the following steps before issuing a provisional plan under Article 22:

First, provide a written accounting of excess non-E&G reserves and a clear, legally and policy-grounded explanation of whether and why those reserves may not be used to cushion the impact of retrenchment.

Second, provide a written reconstruction of the PIVOT evaluation methodology at the program and college level, including the basis for classification decisions in cases where programs fell below the stated contribution margin threshold but were not placed in the sunset category.

Third, clarify, in writing and in advance of any Faculty Senate vote on general education, what financial support the Administration is prepared to commit to any reformed general education model, and confirm that the elimination of University Studies as a unit is subject to the full procedural protections of Article 22.

The faculty of Portland State University has engaged the PIVOT process and the Article 22 proceedings in good faith. That engagement has a cost — in time, in labor, and in institutional trust. The Administration’s obligation is to meet that engagement with commensurate transparency and procedural rigor. I submit this comment in that spirit and expect a substantive response.

Respectfully submitted,

Ramin Farahmandpur

On April 3, 2026, Portland State University’s Board of Trustees convened to hear testimony on PIVOT, the administration’s plan to eliminate 71 academic programs and reduce the university’s workforce in response to a $35 million structural deficit.

Faculty testified. Students testified.

This is what oversight looked like from the other side of the table.

Forthcoming is the full accounting of what PIVOT does not disclose on finances, equity, accreditation, and governance.

It was an ideological staging: the state presenting a class interest as a universal interest, wrapping the objectives of imperial capital (the energy companies, financial institutions, and defense contractors whose profit models require geographic control) in the language of civilizational defense. Trump’s own phrasing betrayed the staging: the dead soldiers were recast as moral authorization, the destruction of a sovereign state’s military capacity as the defense of a free world, the seizure of energy infrastructure as the protection of global commerce. Every invocation of American safety or free-world security substitutes the interests of that capital for the interests of humanity.

The United States has been rehearsing this address since 1953, when the CIA and British intelligence removed Mohammad Mosaddegh from power for the offense of nationalizing Iranian oil.

The Confession of Intent

In this address, Trump was more candid than his predecessors. He stated without embarrassment that the United States “imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait” and has no material need for Middle Eastern petroleum. He announced a “joint venture” with Venezuela, a country the United States military recently “took,” in the same paragraph as the Iran update, as if resource extraction by force were a standard business arrangement. He threatened to destroy Iran’s electrical grid and oil infrastructure simultaneously if no deal is reached. He told other nations to “build up some delayed courage” and secure the strait for themselves.

The territorial seizure of Venezuela’s oil production, the destruction of a sovereign nation’s military and civilian infrastructure, the coercive reorganization of global energy transit: these facts constitute not a series of discrete policy decisions but a single coherent imperial project. The accumulated action—Venezuela taken, Iran eviscerated, the strait placed under informal American suzerainty, NATO threatened, a 15-point restructuring plan for surviving Iranian leaders—all point in one direction.

The project is the consolidation of American control over the material conditions under which rival economies (Chinese, European, Japanese, and South Korean) can function. China imports approximately 40 percent of its oil through the Hormuz Strait. Japan and South Korea import most of their goods through the same passage. European refineries dependent on Gulf crude operate on supply chains that run through the strait. Control of Hormuz is not about American energy needs. It is about the stranglehold American capital holds over everyone else’s energy needs.

The Mechanics of Disavowal

Imperial statecraft keeps the declared mission and the operational target separate, so that when the target is reached, the mission can be disavowed. Trump demonstrated the procedure with precision. “Regime change was not our goal,” he stated, in the same sentence in which he announced that all of Iran’s original leaders are dead and a new, more compliant government is in place. The disavowal is not for the American public. It is a preemptive cover against war crimes tribunals, UN resolutions, and the judgment of history.

What the bombing campaign dismantled, piece by piece, was a state’s capacity to govern itself: its nuclear program (a sovereignty claim as much as a weapons program), its navy (its capacity to control adjacent waters), its air force (its capacity to deny airspace), its defense industrial base (its capacity to produce rather than import the means of its own defense).

The new government inherits a country militarily prostrate, economically strangled by oil price disruption, and diplomatically isolated. That government will come to the table without a military, without recourse, and without alternatives. They are conditions of surrender dressed as diplomacy.

The 13 dead American service members are invoked in the speech as moral authorization for continued war, their sacrifice recast as the rationale for escalation rather than withdrawal. Their families, Trump reports, said “please finish the job.” The costs of imperial war are always socialized: borne by working-class soldiers, by consumers absorbing 40-percent fuel price increases, by indebted governments financing military operations through bond markets.

The benefits are always privatized: accrued by defense contractors, energy companies, and the financial institutions that will structure Iran’s post-war reconstruction debt. The precedent is not hypothetical. After 2003, Iraq’s reconstruction was financed through a combination of oil revenue seizure, World Bank structural adjustment lending, and private contracts awarded overwhelmingly to American firms, among them Halliburton and Bechtel, under terms that bound the successor state to debt service arrangements lasting decades. The dead underwrite the dividend.

Fracturing the Postwar Consensus

What the Trump address exposes, beyond Iran, is an imperial order attempting to arrest its own relative decline through increasingly coercive means, and in doing so, dismantling the multilateral compact it spent eighty years building. The threat to withdraw from NATO is a unilateral renegotiation of the terms under which the United States has guaranteed European and East Asian security since 1945. Every ally watching the broadcast understood the ultimatum.

China is the primary target of the Hormuz closure in ways the speech did not acknowledge. Beyond the oil import figures already noted, Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure project threading rail, port, and pipeline investments across Central Asia, the Middle East, and East Africa) depends on the regional stability that American airpower has now destroyed. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which anchors Belt and Road’s western axis and routes Chinese goods toward Gulf and African markets, runs through territory whose political economy is now being restructured by American military force. The Gwadar port complex in Pakistan, developed with significant Chinese investment as an alternative transit node to Hormuz, faces route disruption as the conflict reshapes the Gulf’s operational geography. The economic damage inflicted by Iran’s effective closure of the passage falls disproportionately on Chinese industry, Chinese consumers, and the economic development ambitions of every country in China’s orbit. The war against Iran is simultaneously an act of economic coercion against Chinese capital, conducted through military means against a third party, while maintaining formal deniability.

Beijing’s response in the coming months will determine the course of the conflict far more than any Iranian negotiating position. Dedollarization is already accelerating as the primary Chinese counter-move, not military confrontation: the construction of yuan-denominated oil trading mechanisms, the expansion of swap agreements with Gulf states, and the deepening of BRICS payment infrastructure. The goal is not to defeat American power directly but to erode the dollar’s grip as the universal medium of imperial extraction. Every percentage point of global oil trade settled outside the dollar system is a defeat for the imperial order that Trump believes he is consolidating.

Europe is the most dependent on Hormuz among the war’s collateral parties and the least consulted about it. The continent has been denied meaningful participation in the war’s conduct and is now being told to fend for itself in securing the strait or purchase American oil at American-set prices. The ultimatum is not alliance management. The damage it inflicts on Atlantic capitalism will outlast the Iran operation by decades.

NATO threatened, Iran restructured, Venezuela absorbed, China pressured, European allies reduced to supplicants: the list does not describe a confident imperial power consolidating its dominance. It describes a declining power sustaining dominance through destruction rather than consent. That is not hegemony.

The Farce of Annihilation

Marx observed that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. The tragedy was Iraq 2003: a war of choice built on fabricated intelligence, prosecuted with overwhelming force, followed by decades of regional destabilization, the rise of ISIS, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. The farce is the doctrine that emerged from that failure intact: the belief that destruction at sufficient scale produces order, that if the B-2 bombers are magnificent enough, if the enemy’s navy is thoroughly enough sunk, if the errand is sufficiently lethal, a compliant successor state will emerge on the other side. What the doctrine refuses to account for is the political economy of the rubble it creates.

Colonial intervention, resource extraction, developmental subordination (the systematic blocking of indigenous industrial capacity in favor of export-oriented extraction), and foreign-imposed leadership: these conditions produced the Islamic Republic and will produce its successor.

The shah’s government, installed after the 1953 coup and sustained by American arms and intelligence, generated the conditions of political economy (compressed wages, suppressed political organization, captive oil revenue flowing outward) that made 1979 not only possible but inevitable. Those conditions will be reproduced, under new management, in a country whose infrastructure has been destroyed, whose sovereignty has been extinguished, and whose population has been handed a government selected, in practical terms, by American airpower.

The Stone Age doctrine does not prevent resistance. It manufactures it. Trump’s promised Stone Age is an incubator for the next generation of organized opposition, and history will record not the errand, but what the errand made.

The chorus is an inventory with a beat drop attached. Meek names them all: heartbreak, therapy, tax bills, and then shrugs. “I just got my heart broken but I look fucking fabulous” is not a confession; it is a settlement. The verse places her in a specific tradition: Liberace, Mata Hari, Versace, figures whose glamour was inseparable from their destruction. The song is not naive about its own lineage. “Tragedy in Versace” is a three-word phrase that contains the entire argument. Working-class pain is welcome in the song. Working-class politics are not. What looks like resilience is the refusal, packaged in pop production, to ask the obvious question.

Ideology works best when it masquerades as self-expression. Freire called this process internalization: the oppressed adopt the oppressor’s values so completely that the oppressor’s work is eventually done for them. “Fabulous” is internalization set to a four-on-the-floor beat. BMG does not need to instruct Meek to avoid politics. The form of the pop song does it for them. What the song offers in place of analysis is the defeat of structural critique, dressed in sequins and performed as triumph.

Adorno and Horkheimer identified the culture industry in 1944 as the apparatus that launders genuine suffering into entertainment. Blackpool is the case study. One of the most economically immiserated towns in England, it has shed its tourist economy across decades of austerity and managed decline, producing the conditions of precarity it then declines to name. Blackpool is that refusal made scenic.

In the “Fabulous” video, Blackpool is a runway. The culture industry’s primary skill is precisely this alchemy: rendering evidence of economic abandonment into aesthetic raw material. The chant-ready chorus, the two-minute runtime, the promenade — each is a gear in the same machine. Deindustrialization does not disappear from the frame. It is simply reframed as charm. The best way to bury the evidence, Adorno understood, is to make it dance.

What the eye registers in the video, the body processes through the music before a single word lands. The beat, the key, the resolution: all of it instructs the listener how to feel before meaning arrives. “Fabulous” is engineered for release. The verse builds tension through a minor-key progression that names the damage: heartbreak, therapy, tax bills. The chorus resolves it, every time, into a major-key release that the body reads as triumph.

The musical structure does not reflect the lyrical content — it contradicts it, confining the suffering to the verse while the chorus instructs the body to forget. The contradiction is what Adorno meant when he argued that musical form is never innocent: the euphoria is not a byproduct of the production. It is the production’s primary instruction. The result sounds like empowerment. It functions as containment.

“Fabulous” teaches that the appropriate response to economic hardship is a better outfit. In the first verse, the transaction is stated plainly: “The bigger my tears, the bigger my lashes.” The lesson is not that pain ends but that pain sells. Working-class pain, the song insists, is most valuable when it travels light: compressed, melodic, sync-licensable. Within the constraints of the form, the song cannot ask what matters most: why the therapy was necessary, who benefits from its cost, or what would change if the question were raised aloud. Every cultural form either challenges existing relations of power or reproduces them. “Fabulous” reproduces them and makes it look like resistance. Style, in the absence of structural change, is not resistance. It is compliance on a night out.

Meek did not create the conditions that shaped the song. BMG did not sign her because her work challenges the arrangements that produce heartbreak, debt, and the need for therapy among working-class women. BMG signed her because genuine feeling, properly packaged, is the culture industry’s most valuable commodity. It does not coerce because seduction is more efficient. Meek is not the cause. She is the symptom.

Meek brought her own sequins. The clothing in the video did not come from a BMG styling budget but from her family’s dress shop. She interned in music PR, learned contracts, taught herself sound engineering and promotion, completed a master’s degree in music production, and waited until the terms favored her before signing. She refused, publicly, to lie about her age, framing it as a debt to other working-class kids who needed to know how long and how hard the road is. She put the knowledge in the lyric itself: “Slay to be slayed.”

Knowing you will be consumed does not prevent the consumption. It is a more lucid way to enter it. The apparatus functions most efficiently when it signs people who understand it, because the participant’s sophistication does not alter the product’s function. The apparatus consumes critique as readily as it consumes suffering: not a failure of Meek’s intelligence, but a measure of the apparatus’s reach. The apparatus's reach, however, has never been total.

Camp is a queer survival strategy: the deliberate choice to be spectacular because the conditions demand otherwise. A working-class woman in thrifted Vivienne Westwood storming a faded promenade flanked by drag performers is not only the culture industry’s raw material. It is also camp, and camp has never been naive about the conditions it operates within. From the drag balls of Harlem to the sequined defiance of queer nightlife, camp has always known the damage is there. It performs magnificently in full view of it. “Tragedy in Versace” is not only the essay’s argument. It is an act of defiance: knowing, furious, and aimed at the world that produced the tragedy. Inside the apparatus, defiance and compliance are not opposites. They are the same gear, turning in the same direction, generating the same product. The apparatus will absorb that laugh, package it, sync-license it to a streaming service, and sell it back to the people who needed it most. Meek knows the mechanism. She performs anyway.

The song that asks “why” is not played at Mighty Hoopla. Freire called the alternative conscientization: the development of critical awareness that refuses the terms the powerful have already set. Conscientization does not ask Meek to stop being fabulous. It asks why fabulousness became the only available response, and it demands that the crowd stop chanting long enough to hear the answer. The industry permits everything except the one thing that would matter: politics.

“Fabulous” is a formidable pop song. That is not a concession. It is the indictment: the culture industry has no use for bad art. What the culture industry requires is genuine feeling, expertly packaged, politically neutralized. Meek has an abundance of genuine feelings. What she has been given in exchange is a chorus the crowd can chant without once asking why the tax bills arrived, why the therapy was necessary, why the conditions that produced the damage have not been changed. The sequins catch the light. The therapy bills, the debt, the broken heart underneath them do not. Only one of those things is allowed in the song. Meek knows every mechanism at work and remains subject to it regardless. That is not false consciousness. That is tragic lucidity, and it is the most honest thing the song contains.

I have witnessed administrative conduct that fails the Code’s terms. Courses are cancelled outside established procedures and without transparent policy justification. When program decisions are made unilaterally, circumventing shared governance structures, the educational mission incurs not only a procedural cost but also a substantive one. Educational continuity fractures. Program integrity erodes.

The Code is explicit that no reprisals shall be taken against faculty who participate in governance proceedings or raise formal concerns. Yet the experience of filing formal, specific procedural objections becomes the occasion for adverse treatment. Assignments shift. The atmosphere of collegial respect that the Code demands gives way to coordinated institutional exclusion. The Code calls it misconduct. Administrators call it discretion.

The Code provides the remedy precisely because its drafters understood that authority is not self-correcting. Screening panels, hearing committees, evidentiary standards, and prohibitions against marking a faculty member’s record for complaints that were never formally investigated constitute safeguards, not bureaucratic formalities. They guard against the particular harm that occurs when those with administrative authority treat their positions as licenses rather than as obligations.

The standards of faculty conduct apply upward as well as laterally. An administrator who retaliates against a faculty member for filing a grievance has not merely violated a workplace policy. That administrator abandons the responsibilities of academic membership and undermines shared governance. Administrative title confers no exemption. The Code was written knowing that rank would try to claim one.

Accountability that flows only downward is not accountability. It is hierarchy dressed in procedural language, and every institution that selectively enforces the Code has already revealed its priorities.

On the morning of March 16, 1968, United States Army soldiers entered the South Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai and killed between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians. Among the dead were 173 children, including 56 infants. The soldiers encountered no enemy fire. They found no weapons. They executed women, elderly men, and children at close range, and then they filed a report of enemy killed and called the operation a success.

The Army covered up the massacre for more than a year. When Seymour Hersh finally published his investigation in November 1969, the President called it an aberration. A failure of individual soldiers, not of the Army. Lieutenant William Calley was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. He served three and a half years under house arrest.

The government declared the matter closed. It called My Lai a wound, a lesson, a verdict. It was none of those things. It was a rehearsal.

On February 28, 2026, a Tomahawk cruise missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls’ School in Minab, a small city in southern Iran, during the first wave of American and Israeli airstrikes. The school was a two-story building painted with pink flowers and green leaves. At the moment of impact, classes had just changed periods. At least 175 children were killed when the roof collapsed. Ninety-six more were wounded.

The Pentagon said it was looking into it. For eleven days, that was the government’s answer.

On March 11, 2026, The New York Times reported that a preliminary U.S. military investigation had determined American forces were likely responsible. The school had been struck because the Defense Intelligence Agency was using outdated target coordinates; its files still classified the building as part of an adjacent military compound from which the school had been separated for nearly a decade. By 2016, the separation was visible in satellite imagery: a perimeter fence, three public entrances, a soccer pitch painted on the asphalt, and walls decorated in blue and pink. By 2017, children could be seen playing in the courtyard. The Defense Intelligence Agency did not update its files.

The New York Times broke the My Lai story in 1969. The same newspaper broke Minab in 2026. That is not a tribute to American journalism. It is an indictment of a system in which the press functions not as accountability but as its permanent substitute.

Between My Lai and Minab, there are 58 years and 8,000 miles. In Vietnam, soldiers entered villages, counted the bodies, and called the dead “enemy.” In Iran, coordinates were fed into a targeting system, a Tomahawk missile was launched, and the incident was attributed to a data problem. The weapons may have changed, but the children’s fate did not.

At My Lai, Major Colin Powell investigated the incident. He reported that relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people were, in his words, “excellent.” At Minab, the Trump administration initially claimed Iran had bombed its own school. Both claims were lies. Both were issued not in panic but in the practiced calm of institutions that have learned that denial is the first line of defense, and that time is always on the side of the powerful.

At My Lai, 26 soldiers were charged. The senior officers who ordered the operation and covered up its results retained their careers. At Minab, the investigation is ongoing. The language of official inquiry already serves the same function it did in 1969: not to establish accountability, but to manage the interval between the event and the moment when the public stops asking about it.

The word “error” is a careful choice in the official account of Minab, just as the word “aberration” was in the official account of My Lai. Senator Elizabeth Warren called the Minab strike one of the most devastating military errors in decades. Kenneth Roth stated that a filing error does not explain 175 dead children. Both terms serve the same purpose: they blame an individual or a database rather than the American war machinery that produced them. In the name of freedom and democracy, the war itself is justified. Within that framework, regret is permitted, accountability is unnecessary, and the ledger is closed.

We have been here before. The next school already exists somewhere in a targeting database. Its coordinates have not been updated. Its walls may be painted with flowers. Children may be visible in its courtyard in satellite imagery that no one will check until after the missile lands. The machinery does not pause between wars. It waits.

On weekends, I wandered past what had once been the American Embassy. The diplomats in pressed suits were gone; Revolutionary Guards, Islamic Student Association members, and government loyalists now moved through the compound. Behind those high walls, 52 Americans had been held for 444 days. That history hung in the air like dust that refused to settle.

Where long black sedans had once glided through iron gates, street theater now set the scene. Crowds pressed against the walls, fists raised, voices raw. “Marg bar Amrikā!” “Marg bar Esrāʿīl!” “Marg bar Ettəhād Jamāhīr-e Showravī!” Death to America. Death to Israel. Death to the Soviet Union. The slogans no longer sounded like protest; they had become liturgy. Men in crisp black shirts stood beside women in chadors, children tugging at their sleeves. Together they formed a living barricade, sealing off the embassy gates with their bodies.

The American Embassy was not the only empty building. The British compound also sat abandoned, its gardens wild. The Israeli mission had become an office of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

On long walks home, I kept a running inventory: missing flags, murals of clenched fists, portraits of martyrs, and young guards gripping rifles, eyes darting, shoulders slumped under the weight. Tehran itself had become a lesson in estrangement. The embassies told the same story: the world beyond us was receding, step by deliberate step.

I found another door. A Soviet bookstore housed within the Soviet Embassy compound. I slipped inside for contraband of glossy pages that celebrated collective labor and distant victories of the Great Patriotic War. The elderly Russian woman behind the counter rang up my purchases without looking up. I sometimes wondered whether she found it strange to watch an Iranian boy leafing through Soviet propaganda, or whether strangeness had become ordinary.

On my walk back, magazines hidden under my arm, I passed the graffiti-scarred American Embassy again. “Den of Spies” sprawled across its wall in red paint. I had just stepped out of one superpower’s propaganda repository and was walking past the shell of another. The irony did not escape me. I had gone looking for news and had come back with a different version of the same lie.

At home, there was still the radio. Late at night, my father sometimes joined me. We leaned toward it, straining to hear voices break through the government jammers — the Voice of America, the Voice of Israel, a fragment of weather, a clipped headline. “They’re talking about us,” he’d murmur. But the picture they painted of a nation flattened into a caricature of zealots and hostage-takers never matched our muddled days of ration queues, Komiteh patrols, and hushed worries in cramped living rooms.

The chanting crowds outside the embassy gates, the Soviet bookstore’s glossy optimism, and the radio voices that rendered us unrecognizable; all three offered me only distortions. That was our life: suspended between toppled empires, Soviet periodicals, and Islamic chants. We belonged nowhere entirely, caught among competing worlds. The boulevards roared with chants while subtler lessons waited elsewhere.

Ramin Farahmandpur is a Professor of Educational Leadership & Policy at Portland State University. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming memoir, “Between Borders and Belonging: A Refugee’s Memoir,” about his journey from Iran through Pakistan and Vienna to America during the 1980s.

“I’m Ramin,” I said.

“Paul Barash. HIAS port receptionist.” His handshake was firm, undiminished by its repetition.

Outside, the August air filled with exhaust, asphalt, and the collective exhalation of eight million people, hit like a wall. Paul hailed a cab. I pressed against the window past yellow cabs weaving like mechanical fish, steam rising from grates as if Manhattan were seething from below, and skyscrapers so tall they seemed provocative, audacious.

“You know,” Paul said, as if continuing a conversation already underway, “there are so many restaurants in New York, you could eat at a different one every night for years and never repeat.”

I said nothing. For 13 months, I had calculated food in terms of days and dollars: whether I could afford both lunch and dinner, or whether I would need to choose. I was mystified that abundance could constitute a problem.

Then I noticed the scar — a pale arc beneath his throat. He caught my gaze.

“Mugging,” he said. “Late night. I resisted. Dumb.” A half-smile. “Inch deeper and you’d be riding with someone else.”

I nodded. My mind moved between the cab and a Pakistani checkpoint, between his scar and the calculations that had governed every border I had crossed. Even here, for those who belonged, safety was provisional. That was not a comfort; it was recognition.

Paul Barash was not offering mercy. He showed up, held a sign, shook a hand, said his welcome, and made conversation about restaurants on the way into the city. He was part of a network that had met ships carrying Jews fleeing pogroms in the 1880s, had processed Holocaust survivors in the 1940s, and had welcomed Soviet refuseniks in the 1970s. Now it was our turn — Iranian Jews. Each wave carried its own particular damage. The work remained the same.

I never saw him again. He died in 2013 at the age of 88, five years before a gunman shot up the Tree of Life synagogue and named HIAS as his motivation.

I have spent 40 years building a life on the foundation that Paul Barash’s work helped make possible. I was humbled by the realization of what I owe to the network that saved me and many others, quietly and below the radar of public scrutiny. Without fanfare, Barash and his HIAS colleagues defended my life, and now, it is my obligation to defend and protect their work on behalf of refugees, whose fear and persecution have led them to our shores.

Bernardo identified as a Coyote, a Genízaro: a mixed-blood of Pueblo (Zuñi and Isleta), African, and Spanish descent, his family rooted in communities just south of Albuquerque, bordering Isleta Pueblo. His scholarship on Genízaros, indigenous slaves and their descendants, granted state recognition by the New Mexico Legislature only in 2007, was not an academic exercise. The scholarship and the biography were the same project. He had learned as much from his own mentor, Professor Nelia Olivencia, who told him as a young man that we are descendants not only of people but of ideas. Gallegos spent his career demonstrating that the two cannot be separated. His final book, Postcolonial Indigenous Performances: Coyote Musings on Genízaros, Hybridity, Education, and Slavery, wove together indigenous identity, hybridity, religious syncretism, and personal narrative into a work of sustained intellectual force.

His 1988 dissertation, Literacy, Schooling, and Society in Colonial New Mexico: 1692–1821, had established the terms of that project decades earlier. In it, Gallegos demonstrated how the printed word functioned as an instrument of conquest, deployed by Spanish colonial authorities to implant a foreign worldview into the consciousness of a newly subjugated people, systematically rearranging their perceptions of themselves and their environment. The missions, he argued, were not sites of education in any neutral sense; they were sites where colonization established a foothold through literacy. That the Genízaros appear explicitly in his analysis, named alongside the vecinos as targets of Hispanicization through print. He was writing about his own ancestors.

Bernardo was a teacher and a storyteller who could walk into a lecture hall with an anecdote from his own community and illuminate how dispossession, power, and resistance were bound together in ways no textbook had managed to convey. He could not always hold back his emotions when teaching that history. That grief bore witness to what colonialism had taken from his community across generations — the very community whose slave records had supplied the archive for his scholarship.

He saw potential in students that they could not yet see in themselves. Students remembered him as someone who went out of his way to mentor them, with several going on to earn doctorates and secure faculty positions in fields he had helped open. It was Bernardo who advised me to apply to the doctoral program at UCLA and to seek out Peter McLaren. One of the assigned readings in his Social Foundations course was McLaren’s Life in Schools, a book that arrived at the right moment in my development as a scholar. What Bernardo understood, and what that pairing of assigned text and personal counsel demonstrated, was that intellectual formation and mentorship are inseparable.

Bernardo P. Gallegos II passed away on October 6, 2019. He was 67. What he left behind is a body of scholarship that refuses to let the dispossession of indigenous communities in New Mexico pass as heritage — work that named the missions as instruments of colonial control, that recovered the Genízaros from the margins of the historical record, and that insisted biography and scholarship could occupy the same page without apology.

His students have carried his work forward. I am one of them. In the last thirty years, I have been trying to see in my own students what he saw in me.

Selective disclosure of institutional wealth and gap-closing options forecloses paths rather than opening them. By presenting PSU's fiscal challenges as an E&G shortfall only, the administration conceals its preordained conclusions about how it intends to move forward.

Following the lead of some of their peers who have also faced declining state support, PSU has decided to reorganize around market logic: faculty are pressured to generate revenue on a per-class basis, administrative structures expand to manage external partnerships, and programs whose value is civic rather than commercial are reclassified as liabilities.

Scholars call this reorganization “academic capitalism”. Writing in the 1990s, Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie documented this transformation in Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University, a comparative study of public universities in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

A few years later, Slaughter and Gary Rhoades extended that analysis in Academic Capitalism and the New Economy, arguing that universities had come to treat knowledge not as a public good but as a commodity to be capitalized upon in profit-oriented activities. The university was not simply adapting to market conditions. It was actively reorienting its priorities, hiring patterns, and organizational structures to align with market criteria.1

The core argument of academic capitalism is that institutional harm need not involve bad actors. The theory explains why universities reward revenue-generating activity and abandon programs whose value cannot be measured in dollars. Programs that serve community members, working families, and first-generation students, whose value is civic rather than commercial, become problems to be solved rather than students to be served.

PSU’s invocation of a program-elimination framework, the Plan for Institutional Vitality and Organizational Transformation, or PIVOT, is academic capitalism with Oregon branding.

Academic Capitalism at PSU

PSU is not a university without resources. It is a university with roughly $509 million in institutional assets across multiple reserve funds, one of which is being drawn down to cover an annual deficit in operational finances that has plagued the university since 2022. While the E&G gap of $40 million is real, the remedy administrators prescribe is not the only solution, or even the best one.

PSU’s administrative expansion, for instance, is a case in point. Growing the administrative branch of a university is a counterintuitive way to manage a shortfall because its impact has led to costs that run counter to the university’s mission. Nevertheless, an evaluation in 2024 by the Higher Education Coordinating Commission (HECC) documented that the annual growth rate in PSU’s spending on administration. It tracked institutional support, covering functions such as executive offices, legal, financial, accounting, space management, procurement, and information technology, and found that the sum of these expenditures was twice the total operating expenses during the same period when student enrollment declined.2

The proportion of total spending directed toward administrative functions grew from 7.1 percent to 9.5 percent. PSU built administrative capacity as its student population declined. The university’s per-student spending on administration doubled.

A rational management plan would begin reversing this costly trend, not only to save money but also to preserve academic programs that are core to the university’s mission. Under PSU’s current system, programs that earn more than they cost generate surpluses that subsidize administrative bloat. If they do not make a healthy profit, these programs are targeted for elimination.

Under academic capitalism, administrative growth is not a side effect. It is the mechanism by which the university remakes itself. Faculty must produce revenue, programs must cater to perceived market demand, and administrators multiply to manage market relationships, external partnerships, compliance functions, and strategic positioning. Those administrators require support staff. Support staff requires infrastructure. The costs accumulate at the center while the cuts land at the margins, and the margins at PSU are the programs serving the students least likely to appear in rankings or research metrics. PSU provides a case study of this model.

Collateral Damage

Programs that generate positive contribution margins (revenue above instructional cost) may appear on PIVOT elimination lists if they fall below PSU’s opaquely chosen threshold of 77 percent profit. That threshold represents the level at which a program is deemed to contribute sufficiently to university-wide overhead. That list includes administrative costs, facilities, technology, and institutional support. Courses and whole departments are judged not on academic value or even whether they lose money. They are held to a minimum profit standard to support PSU overhead.

As an example, the Postsecondary, Adult, and Continuing Education Program (PACE) has been classified for “sunset” even though it generates a 47 percent profit.3 A rational management plan retains programs that earn more than they cost, particularly when they serve a vital community need. PACE meets those standards. Its elimination is not a financial decision; it is a values decision. PACE serves working adults pursuing graduate credentials in education, counseling, and related fields. It aligns with Oregon’s documented workforce needs. PACE does not merely break even; it generates revenue, though not at the voracious profit mark that administrative bloat depends on.

The appearance of PACE on a PIVOT elimination list reveals a priority value not publicly stated: adult learners do not fit the enrollment profile, the marketing model, or the revenue trajectory that academic capitalism prizes. They are workers. Many hold union cards. Many are the children of immigrants or of working-class families who did not have the opportunity to complete a degree when they were young. The PACE program exists because Oregon made a public commitment, decades ago, that the state’s urban research university would serve those students alongside the traditional-age undergraduates who generate more predictable tuition streams. It would seem, however, that PSU is retreating from that public commitment.

PSU’s Actual Financial Picture

Portland State University’s narrative is that it is broke. This narrative supports the institution’s rationale for threatening more than 200 employees’ jobs. It is the premise behind the proposed sunset of programs that serve working adults, first-generation students, and Oregon’s workforce. The cuts prompted by the E&G deficit, we are told, are inevitable, and there is no alternative.

This narrative fails to mention the academic capitalism philosophy underlying the advertised approach, and it omits a discussion of other alternatives. A full disclosure would include the university's complete financial picture.

PSU does not have a single pot of money; it has three. Each is governed by separate policies, legal structures, and rules about use. Together, those three sources amount to roughly $509 million in institutional assets, including multiple reserves.4 And this is in addition to revenue streams, such as state funding and tuition. Understanding what these resources are and how they work is essential for any meaningful conversation about what is being done to Oregon’s urban public university and who is being asked to bear the pain.

The First Pot: The Public University Fund

Portland State has invested approximately $132 million in the Oregon Public University Fund (PUF). It is not endowment money. It is not donor money. It is PSU’s own operating cash, fed by tuition revenue, state appropriations, and other institutional income, held with the Oregon State Treasury for investment until needed for operations.

The PUF is an investment reserve established by the 2014 Oregon Legislature and administered by Oregon State University on behalf of five participating public universities, including Eastern Oregon University, Oregon Institute of Technology, Southern Oregon University, Western Oregon University, and PSU. The Treasury invests participant funds in intermediate-term fixed income securities under the governance of the Oregon Investment Council, held to strict benchmarks. In fiscal year 2025, PSU’s share of the PUF earned $6.6 million. As of June 30, 2025, PSU’s share of the fund made it the single largest participant in the pool’s total assets of $250 million.

The PUF is separate from, and in addition to, the Education and General fund reserves discussed in Board of Trustees meetings. The PUF is where PSU’s cash sits while invested with the Oregon State Treasury; the E&G reserves are the accounting category that tracks institutional cash remaining available. This is not the same money counted twice. When administrators speak of reserves, however, they speak only of the E&G balance. They do not mention the PUF. This omission is worth noting.

The Second Pot: The E&G Reserves

The Education and General fund reserve is the operating cushion PSU has built over the years when revenues exceeded expenditures. As of fiscal year 2024, those reserves stood at approximately $97 million, and PSU has been drawing them down at a rate of $17 to $18 million per year, spending more than it takes in every year since 2022.

The PSU Board of Trustees adopted a Reserves Management Policy in 2016, establishing a mandatory floor. Reserves must cover at least 90 days of operating expenses. The university has already breached that threshold. The Board approved the use of $18 million in reserves for fiscal year 2025, explicitly acknowledging the breach. At this spending rate, the HECC’s 2024 university evaluation estimates that the E&G fund will be exhausted in less than four years. PSU has a deficit. No one disputes it. What is disputed is the claim that this aspect tells the whole story.

The Third Pot: The PSU Foundation

The Portland State University Foundation held $201 million in net assets as of June 30, 2025, accumulated through donor gifts, endowments, bequests, and fundraising proceeds. Of that total, $185.4 million is donor-restricted, meaning it is legally bound to purposes designated by donors and is unavailable to cover general operating deficits. The $15.6 million, however, is unrestricted.5 The Foundation is a legally separate entity, governed by its own Board of Trustees and bound by state laws governing institutional funds. Endowed funds are subject to legal restrictions tied to donor intent. The Foundation cannot be redirected to cover operating deficits, and the university cannot access its assets without satisfying those donor restrictions and Foundation governance requirements.

The Foundation’s annual spending distribution, typically four to five percent of market value, flows back to the university for donor-designated purposes: scholarships, named faculty chairs, and specific academic programs. It supplements the university’s academic mission. It does not and cannot replace state appropriations or tuition revenue. The Foundation’s $201 million exists; it is part of PSU’s total institutional wealth, and no complete accounting of PSU’s financial condition omits it.

A Combination of Solutions is Called for

To forge a path forward that is better aligned with PSU’s mission and values as an Urban Research University, a blend of revenue and expense remedies is imperative – one that makes educator losses an option of last resort.

Here is a list of actions that could preserve the university, return it to a sustainable, thriving campus, and retain most of the people whose contributions turn mission into accomplishment:

1. Enrollment Revitalization

Because years of enrollment decline have made sustainability a fragile goal, job number one is to reverse this 10-year trend. PSU simply cannot resolve an enrollment-driven revenue crisis without a funded enrollment strategy. The Board of Trustees should require a specific, resourced plan for enrollment recovery, including a transparent accounting of current enrollment management expenditures across all funds and incorporating a multi-year target for student growth.

Additionally, PSU-AAUP President Bill Knight has argued publicly that the university should direct its energy toward recruitment, retention, and growth rather than cuts. Among the top 50 metro areas in the United States, Portland is a stark outlier in the percentage of its population enrolled in public four-year institutions, meaning PSU has an untapped market, not an exhausted one.6 Knight has called for strengthening direct pipelines with Portland Public Schools and Portland Community College, establishing direct billing agreements with major Oregon employers, and mobilizing the city of Portland as a partner in the university’s future.

It will never be true that contracting academic offerings will entice more students to PSU; only retention and, perhaps, expansion, can do that.

2. Cut Administrative Bloat

A second urgent and obvious strategy is to pare back the excessive layer of administration and overhead—fully 17 percent of the current budget goes to administration and the president’s office alone.

3. Boost Revenue

For the 2026-27 academic year, the University of Oregon is raising tuition by 4.5 percent.7 Oregon State University is proposing a 4.97 percent hike.8 A modest 2 percent tuition increase at PSU would keep student costs lower than those at OSU and UO, yet still yield $3 to $4 million while potentially attracting students who can no longer afford the other two.9 A modest increase is unlikely to have a deleterious impact on enrollment, particularly when compared to canceling courses, programs, and whole departments.

4. Revisit Institutional Options

There are several pieces to this strategy. First, a truth-in-advertising approach is vital. Budget communications to the Board, public officials, the campus community, and the public should clearly distinguish between rising per-student costs driven by enrollment declines and those driven by expansion. Conflating the two produces inaccurate institutional narratives and misdirects reform efforts.

Next, programs with demonstrated positive contribution margins should be retained unless the university can prove that their elimination would improve, rather than worsen, PSU’s net financial position.

Third, the Board should consider its net worth the way any business or household would. The Public University Fund (PUF) was established precisely for use in a moment like this. Its 2025 income generation of $6.6 million—already flowing into the operating revenue pot – is not its only value. A one-time strategic withdrawal from the PUF principal would bridge the remaining structural gap without touching other reserves and with minimal impact to the investment corpus.

Some might object to this latter action as eating PSU’s seed corn. While dipping into restricted Foundation resources would surely be anathema to sound legal and fiscal management, the PUF is a different matter entirely. It is not an endowment, but rather, PSU’s own operating cash. If tuition and state resources can be deposited, they can also be withdrawn. Though PSU board policy constrains this option in its Reserves Management Policy, it can also amend it—and it should.

Together, reducing administrative overhead, increasing enrollment, boosting revenue, and closing the remaining gap with PUF resources can build a sustainable path forward.

The Board of Trustees Reserves Management Policy, the PUF investment statements, the HECC university evaluation, and the PSU Foundation’s audited financial statements are all public documents, available to any Oregonian who chooses to look. None of them support the narrative that Portland State faces a crisis so acute that programs serving working Oregonians must be eliminated while administrative spending grows. Portland State is not out of money. It is not out of solutions.

It is out of alignment with its founding purpose, but it’s not too late to change course.

Then PSU eliminated the ASPSU Children’s Center. Then Little Vikings and Baby Vikings were suspended. Then the university announced that Blackstone Hall, the last on-campus family housing, would be rebuilt as freshman-only dormitories. Families were not invited.

At last week’s President’s Town Hall, Summer stood at the microphone and named how this sequence of decisions impacted her: “I feel like a woman and a mother who ran through some closing gates, and I’m watching others behind me unable to have the same opportunities.”

Those others—single parents whose daily routine requires getting their children to the caregiver before rushing to class and whose long days of being a parent, a worker, and a student are made possible only with access to housing and daycare close to their classrooms—will no longer be able to call themselves college students.

Yet without irony, PSU’s Strategic Plan promises access and equity. Student parents are among those whom such commitments claim to serve: adult learners, often raising children, whose single disruption can end their education entirely. For them, childcare and affordable family housing are not amenities; they are preconditions for attendance. Remove them, and you remove the students.

Summer described watching a single mother arrive at PSU, excited to enroll, only to discover at the last moment that Baby and Little Vikings were gone. “I have not seen that woman again.” That woman will not appear in a retention report because she did not enroll. She is invisible to every metric PSU uses to evaluate itself. That is how an institution persuades itself that it is causing no harm.

For some women, college is not primarily a career investment so much as an exit from violence. Campus housing provides safety. Childcare makes attendance possible. A peer community replaces isolation.

A financially strained childcare program is a problem to be solved, not a program to be eliminated. Seismic retrofitting does not require converting family housing to freshman dormitories. These are not the only choices available. They are choices about whom the institution protects when resources grow scarce.

PSU must decide whether to again welcome such students or explain, in the language of contribution margins and strategic priorities, why it cannot afford to do so.

Kandal, who taught sociology at Cal State LA from 1968 until his retirement in 2010, treated intellectual development as a matter of genuine concern. His lectures were rigorous and alive. He had spent decades inside the sociological tradition, and every lecture showed it. His lessons were not what set him apart, however: he was interested in each student, and that matters. He wanted to know what you thought, where you were headed. Four years later, when I was applying to UCLA for graduate study, he made time to talk it through with me. Not every student arrives with the social capital to know which doors exist, let alone how to open them. A professor who takes students seriously can offer what neither background nor family can.

In his 1996 essay “Gender, Race & Ethnicity: Let’s Not Forget Class,” Kandal argued against the displacement of class analysis by identity politics, not by dismissing gender and race as categories, but by insisting that neither could be understood outside the logic of capital accumulation on a world scale. He cited my other inspiration, Michael, author of dozens of books, in his own bibliography. The two men were, in this respect, working the same problem: Kandal through the classroom, Parenti through a body of work that the mainstream press largely declined to review. These were lessons that have made a lasting impression.

It was through Kandal’s course that I first encountered Parenti’s work. I was struck by the quality of his prose. Difficult ideas were conveyed in direct language—not simplified, but unobscured.

Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media dismantled the mythology of a neutral press with methodical force. Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment extended that argument into popular culture, tracing how ideology operates not only in newsrooms but in the stories a society tells itself for pleasure. Against Empire trained the same unflinching attention on U.S. foreign policy, refusing the language that dressed imperial conduct in respectable clothes. Blackshirts and Reds interrogated the Cold War categories that much of the left had inherited without examination. Dirty Truths, America Besieged, and History as Mystery — all published in the 1990s, worked the same problems from different directions: who holds power, how that power is legitimated, and what it costs those who refuse to look away.

Parenti did not dress his conclusions in false equivalence. What his work taught me, across decades of my own scholarship, was that rigor and political commitment are not opposing forces. The obligation of both is the same: to make visible what institutions prefer to obscure. That is the standard I have tried to bring to my own writing.

In 2014, I traveled to San Francisco to meet him. The man I met bore no resemblance to the caricature that his critics preferred, the doctrinaire ideologue, the uncompromising polemicist. He was warm. He listened as much as he spoke. He had spent decades paying the professional costs of his convictions, denied tenure, dismissed from positions, and ignored by the mainstream press, and none of it had curdled into bitterness. He remained a kind and gentle soul.

I reflect on these experiences because both Kandal and Parenti have passed. Terry Kandal died in July 2012 at the age of 71. Michael Parenti died on January 24, 2026, at the age of 92.

Looking back to 1993, I realize that a younger version of me did not fathom that a fortuitous encounter with a compelling book title would beckon me down a path of my own life’s work in academia — all inspired by these two great teachers.

On March 16, 2025, Andria Johnson, Vice President of Finance and Administration at Portland State University, stood before a special meeting of the Faculty Senate, the university’s elected faculty governing body, and delivered what she described as a presentation of “objective financial reality.”

She had slides. She had compound annual growth rates. She had three scenarios rendered in color-coded bars: optimistic, pragmatic, and severe. She had, above all, a vocabulary: structural, mechanical, baseline, trajectory, posture.

The presentation lasted nearly an hour. It was an authoritative performance. It was also a recognizable genre. Call it the rhetoric of managed decline. It belongs to a tradition classicists called epideictic: speech that does not invite deliberation but performs a community’s values and conditions as foregone, asking the audience to ratify rather than deliberate. It is performed in proceedings like this one at public universities across the country whenever enrollment has fallen, reserves are depleted, and the administration has already decided what must be done.

Move One: The Passive Voice of Inevitability

Johnson’s presentation removed agency from every sentence that implied a choice. Consider the sequence she offered. The deficit is structural: it inheres in the institution itself rather than in anyone’s decisions. Enrollment has declined without a subject, as if students simply evaporated. State support has contracted with no agent attached, as if funding levels were a natural condition rather than a legislative choice. Personnel costs are outside our control, placing the largest line item in the budget, 82 cents of every operating dollar, beyond the reach of institutional choice by a single prepositional phrase. Each sentence is grammatically constructed to prevent a follow-up question about who did what.

The vocabulary reinforces this grammar. Johnson’s presentation repeatedly used the word ‘trajectory’: enrollment trajectory, expenditure trajectory, fiscal trajectory. The word implies destination without decision, a path no one in the room chose. That is the posture the vocabulary was designed to produce.

Move Two: The Scissors Effect as Misdirection

The scissors effect, as Johnson described it, was a chart: two lines, expenditure rising and revenue falling, crossing to produce the deficit. The slide showed the deficit. It does not show who caused it. The scissors metaphor is a rhetorical choice: it makes the mismatch between revenue and costs appear as a natural outcome rather than the outcome of decisions made over time. Revenue and costs move in opposite directions, the lines cross, and the institution faces a structural deficit.

Johnson attributed the revenue decline to enrollment loss and shrinking state support, both treated as external forces. The presentation did not address the years of underinvestment in advising, recruitment, and transfer infrastructure that drove the enrollment collapse: Portland State and Portland Community College, the university’s primary feeder institution, did not sign a formal memorandum of understanding to streamline transfer pathways until October 2025, by which point enrollment had already fallen by more than twenty percent.

Transfer students constituted more than half of PSU’s undergraduate enrollment as recently as 2021–22.

General education requirements, the foundational courses required for all degrees, that created barriers for those students, remained under review by a faculty task force convened in the middle of the crisis. The enrollment collapse was not inevitable. These investments were deferred, year after year.

A presentation that identifies this deficit precisely while remaining silent about its origins is not “objective financial reality.” It is a partial account dressed in the authority of data.

Move Three: Reserves as Rhetorical Object

Johnson was more candid about the reserve than the presentation demanded. Over a decade, she said, PSU carefully built $70.6 million in reserves. In just the last five years, $42.8 million of those reserves were spent, an average of $8.5 million per year, accelerating to at least $12 million this year alone. She presented this depletion as evidence of a crisis requiring immediate action.

Those same numbers tell a different story. The previous round of austerity measures, PSU’s Bridge to the Future, consumed nearly sixty percent of the university’s reserve cushion. Fall 2025 enrollment fell another two percent after those cuts. Out-of-state students, who generate the highest tuition revenue, declined by nearly nine percent. The austerity did not arrest the spiral. Spending reserves on cuts reduced the programs and personnel that generate enrollment, thereby reducing the tuition revenue the reserves were meant to protect against loss. The reserves were spent, and enrollment fell anyway, which led the university to a new and larger deficit requiring a new and larger round of cuts.

Johnson presented each number as a separate fact, but read whole, they describe a loop: the previous intervention failed, exhausted its savings, and left the institution more exposed to the next round of the same cuts. She did not say so.

Move Four: “We Are Not Planning for Permanent Decline”

Johnson’s disavowal came near the end of the presentation. In her words: “We are not planning for a permanent decline. We are ensuring that we remain solvent and capable of thriving when our growth efforts take hold.” The claim was intended as reassurance. It is, in the administration’s own words, an admission.

The mechanism unmasks the admission. The question is not intent. Eliminate programs, and the university becomes less attractive to prospective students. A less attractive university enrolls fewer students. Fewer students mean less tuition revenue. Lower tuition revenue leads to a larger deficit. A larger deficit triggers another round of cuts. This is the loop named “Austerity Recursion” in the first essay in this series. Johnson’s reassurance does not interrupt it.

President Cudd, in her closing remarks, revealed the recursion without appearing to notice it: “Having a separate academic department for general education is simply something we can no longer afford. Who teaches the general education curriculum is a separate issue from the existence of an academic unit.” The institution proposed to eliminate University Studies, the program that coordinates PSU's general education curriculum, while simultaneously promising that enrollment would recover. The promise and the plan cannot both be true.

Move Five: Retrenchment as Agency

Johnson deployed the word ‘posture’ four times in the presentation, always in the same construction: the institution faces a choice between acting and reacting, between directing its own future and being directed by external forces. Retrenchment was framed not as a capitulation to financial pressure but as an assertion of institutional will. In Johnson’s words: “We can either act as architects of our own future or be forced to react to the decisions of external bodies.” The posture disguised a defensive contraction in the language of institutional courage.

This framing works: it converts a defensive contraction into a strategic initiative and allows the administration to present cuts as choice rather than necessity. It is the rhetorical move most difficult to argue against, because the alternative Johnson described (losing institutional autonomy, having an outside consulting firm determine the university’s future, the scenario that befell Southern Oregon University) is worse. The threat is real. The posture argument obscures a simpler question: how many options were exhausted before retrenchment was declared necessary? Southern Oregon went to the Oregon legislature outside the joint lobbying coalition used by Oregon’s public universities and obtained a $15 million emergency appropriation. PSU did not make that request.

Johnson’s presentation described state funding as a mechanical outcome of a formula-based model, as if the formula were immutable and political intervention were unavailable. Cudd acknowledged, under questioning from the Faculty Senate, that advocacy had produced results in previous sessions and that she remained committed to it. The contradiction between that acknowledgment and Johnson’s presentation of state funding as mechanical and fixed is not a minor inconsistency. It is the difference between a constraint and a choice. The word “posture” does not name that difference. It buries it. Kenneth Burke called this identification: the rhetorical act of making an audience feel they share the speaker’s constraints so completely that the speaker’s conclusions appear to be their own.

None of this disputes the $35 million deficit, the reality of the enrollment decline, or the pain of retrenchment. The numbers are real. The crisis is real. The claim that presenting them is a neutral act is not. Every presentation of data is an argument. Johnson’s argument was that the university’s financial crisis arrived from outside, operates by necessity, and admits of only one response. She made that argument for nearly an hour to a room full of faculty and community members who had come to hear about the university's financial condition. They had not been invited to deliberate about it.

Ann Cudd said this at a University of Pittsburgh Board of Trustees meeting in 2019, defending the university’s expenditure of more than $1 million that year alone on Ballard Spahr, a firm retained during a period when graduate students were moving toward a union recognition election and the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board had charged the university with three unfair labor practices.¹

The remark was not a slip. It was a position.

Cudd had built her academic reputation on the study of oppression. Her 2006 book Analyzing Oppression examined how structural forces constrain human freedom and diminish the capacity for self-determination.² She argued that coercion operates most effectively when it is invisible: embedded in institutions, normalized by routine, disguised as necessity. Applied to her own administrative career, that framework is damning.

When Cudd departed the faculty at the University of Kansas for the dean’s office at Boston University and then the provost suite at the University of Pittsburgh, she underwent a transformation that is now familiar in American higher education: the scholar whose published work analyzes oppression and whose administrative record enacts it.

At Pitt, she did not simply manage a university under fiscal pressure. She managed it against its own workforce in the name of sustainability.

The union avoidance consulting industry is one of the least-examined power structures in American labor relations. Its business model is straightforward: corporations and institutions facing union organizing campaigns pay firms to design and execute strategies to defeat, delay, or dismantle worker collective action. In the private sector, this arrangement is ordinary practice.

Firms such as IRI Consultants, Jackson Lewis, Littler Mendelson, and Ogletree Deakins maintain extensive divisions devoted to what the industry calls “positive employee relations”: a euphemism for ensuring workers never attain the legal standing to bargain collectively.

These firms train supervisors in one-on-one conversations designed to raise doubts about union representation. They produce video content, talking-point memoranda, and captive-audience meeting scripts. They monitor organizing campaigns and advise management on legal thresholds for permissible interference.

The goal is not to address the conditions that prompt workers to organize; it is to ensure that workers lack the structural capacity to do anything about those conditions. The research on the industry’s effects is unambiguous: union avoidance consulting is the single largest driver of declining union density in the United States over the past four decades.

The assumption has long been that public universities occupy a different moral ground. They are publicly accountable institutions that spend public money to serve public missions. The use of union-avoidance consultants in such settings exposes considerable political and ethical risks.

Between 2016 and 2023, as faculty and graduate workers at the University of Pittsburgh pursued collective bargaining rights, the university spent more than $3 million on firms whose primary function was to deflect those efforts. Payments to Ballard Spahr escalated from $20,555 in 2016 to more than $ 1 million in 2019 alone, as graduate students moved toward a recognition election. The university also paid $191,055 to Morgan Lewis & Bockius, a firm that has assisted Amazon, McDonald’s, and other corporations in resisting worker organizing, and $330,160 to Ogletree Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart, retained as legal counsel in contract negotiations with the faculty union. The Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board issued a proposed ruling finding Pitt guilty of three unfair labor practices during the 2019 graduate student election, the period of peak consulting expenditure, to which the university filed a formal exception.

The second instrument was governance itself. As Provost, Cudd oversaw a process in which the Faculty Senate was positioned as an institutional counterweight to the union, not as a parallel democratic body but as a mechanism for diluting collective bargaining claims. Shared governance rhetoric framed union demands as encroachments on faculty self-governance, pitting one faculty body against another.

The practical result was the near-elimination of meaningful faculty participation in institutional decision-making through either channel. The Senate was consulted; the union was contested; and the administration retained effective control over both.

Guided by Provost Cudd, the university—whose mission invoked values of access, equity, and the public good—spent $3 million of public money to block graduate students from unionizing. In doing so, the institution cynically deployed the language of fiscal sustainability when really, it was about protecting its own unilateral power.³

Ann Cudd arrived at Portland State University in August 2023, having tested these instruments at scale. She came speaking the language of collaboration. At her first board meeting, she described a commitment to shared governance and a desire to work with faculty and staff as partners in addressing PSU’s enrollment decline and fiscal challenges.

PSU-AAUP, the faculty union, responded in kind, expressing its readiness to partner with the new president toward a shared future.⁴ The sustainability of the institution, both sides agreed, required collective effort.

Nonetheless, in the 2024–25 academic year, PSU administration laid off 17 non-tenure-track faculty members. Most taught overenrolled courses. Some had student waitlists. Their positions were eliminated in June. Ten contested the decision. An independent arbitrator found that the university had violated its collective bargaining agreement, failing to demonstrate that the layoffs were required by changing curricular needs, and failing to follow the shared governance procedures specified in the contract, and ordered reinstatement with back wages.

The university’s legal counsel wrote to the union that the arbitrator had exceeded her authority. The university would pay lost wages. It would not reinstate. Only after an open letter signed by more than 200 faculty and staff and public pressure from labor leaders did the university agree to comply.⁵

Fast-forward to the current academic year. The administration introduced PIVOT (Plan for Institutional Vitality and Organizational Transformation), which is the vehicle for the next phase. Under PIVOT, Cudd has identified nineteen academic departments for potential reduction or elimination, concentrated in the humanities. Three programs are facing proposed closures: University Studies, Conflict Resolution, and Portland Center. Among the departments identified for possible reduction are Educator Licensure and Leadership, Learning, and Counseling, both housed in PSU’s College of Education and serving the teacher and administrator pipeline for Oregon’s public schools.

The university that trains Oregon’s teachers, studies power, and prepares its public administrators has placed those programs on a list of things it may soon abandon. The word that appears in every communication surrounding these decisions is “sustainability.” The cuts are painful but required in the name of fiscal sustainability, a term that essentially metaphorically “green-washes” brutal cuts.

The programs under elimination review are not incidental to equity: they are the curriculum through which students learn to analyze inequality, negotiate conflict, and examine inherited historical conditions. Philosophy, Politics and Global Affairs, Public Administration, History, Conflict Resolution, Women/Gender/Sexuality Studies — these are not supplementary programs for students who have already arrived. These programs serve students who are developing critical-thinking skills to participate as informed, productive citizens.

The pattern is not based solely on fiscal necessity. It is a method of managed participation. Decisions are announced, then retroactively framed as consultative. Governance bodies are notified after the fact and asked to respond within compressed timelines. The union is engaged procedurally, while the substantive parameters of restructuring are fixed administratively.

PSU’s faculty have named the pattern in the only forums still available to them. The Faculty Senate passed a vote of no confidence in the PIVOT program. PSU’s adjunct faculty union has described the administration’s bargaining conduct as reliant on “weaponized incompetence, concern trolling, and good old-fashioned bureaucratic obfuscation.” The vocabulary of workers who have witnessed a recognizable strategy deployed against them is not that of an unreasonable opposition.

Ann Cudd did not invent the union avoidance playbook. She willfully employed this union-busting industry in a public university that, by its own stated values, should have been inhospitable to it. The $3 million spent at Pitt on these shadowy consultants was not an administrative aberration; it was a strategic power play. The dismantling of shared governance as a functional constraint on administrative authority was not an oversight; it was an intended outcome.

What Cudd brought to Portland was not merely an administrative style. She brought a tested strategy for managing institutions facing fiscal stress by foreclosing the capacity for collective faculty response. The strategy rests on a single premise: the university is a managerial enterprise, conceived as a service-delivery platform optimized for measurable outcomes, with academic programs assessed for their alignment with labor-market demand. In that corporate model, shared governance becomes the charade of ratifying decisions already made.

The University Innovation Alliance, founded in 2014, frames its mission as graduating more students, particularly low-income students, from institutions that have “failed” them. Cudd, then Vice Provost at Kansas, served as the institution’s liaison to the Alliance from its inception. The Alliance reframes program cuts as student-centered decisions and financial sustainability as prerequisites for access. It uses the word “equity” the way a demolition permit uses the word “renewal.”⁶

A scholar who spent a career analyzing how oppression operates through invisible structural constraints now deploys those very tactics in her administration of this university. Sustainability, it turns out, is not a financial condition; it is a political argument she has used at two public universities to make workers’ organized resistance harder to sustain than the institutions those workers serve.

The standard by which her administration’s record must be judged is the one she published.

“Becoming aware of one’s causal role in oppression engenders a responsibility to avoid causing oppression either by withdrawing from or changing oppressive institutions.”

— Ann E. Cudd, “Oppression,” The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2013

Notes

¹ When asked by the Pitt News in 2019 about the university’s payments to Ballard Spahr, a firm whose website advertised expertise in “union avoidance training and counseling” and the ability to “work closely with management to design and carry out an effective election campaign,” Cudd called the expenditure “a good use of University funds.” See: Moss, J. (2019, May 14). Pitt paid almost $240K to a “union avoidance” law firm in recent years. The Pitt News. https://pittnews.com. Ballard Spahr payments escalated from $20,555 in 2015 to $144,584 in 2018 and over $1 million in 2019; see also Pitt News, “Pitt’s Spending on ‘Union Avoidance Firm’ Slows, but Reaches $3M,” January 18, 2023, pittnews.com.

² Cudd, A. E. (2006). Analyzing oppression. Oxford University Press. See also Cudd, A. E. (2005). How to explain oppression: Criteria of adequacy for normative explanatory theories. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 35(1), 20–49; and Cudd, A. E. (2013). Oppression. In H. LaFollette (Ed.), The international encyclopedia of ethics. Blackwell.

³ Primary documentation for the Pitt expenditure figures is drawn from the University of Pittsburgh’s annual financial disclosure reports, as required under Pennsylvania’s Public School Code of 1949. Faculty Assembly minutes from November 3, 2021, and November 30, 2022, document the governance consequences of the union vote in detail, including the pausing of salary equity work, the withdrawal of administrator participation from Faculty Affairs Committee meetings, and the exclusion of bargaining unit members from budget deliberations. University Senate of the University of Pittsburgh, Faculty Assembly Minutes, univsenate.pitt.edu/faculty-assembly. On the governance standstill and union activity, see also: Pitt News, “Faculty Union Members Demonstrate Outside of Provost Cudd’s Office, Push for Job Security,” December 8, 2022, pittnews.com/article/177861; TribLive, “Faculty Union Files Labor Complaint Against Pitt, Alleging It Is Stalling Contract Talks,” November 29, 2023, triblive.com. Tyler Bickford of the Union of Pitt Faculty bargaining committee documented the administration’s refusal to engage on interim governance protocols contemporaneously at pittfaculty.org.

⁴ PSU-AAUP’s welcoming statement upon Cudd’s appointment is a matter of public record. Oregon Public Broadcasting, “Portland State University Announces Its New President,” March 10, 2023, opb.org. Cudd’s stated commitment to shared governance at her arrival is drawn from contemporaneous reporting of that board meeting.

⁵ Arbitrator Dorothy C. Foley ruled in November 2024 that PSU had violated its collective bargaining agreement in the 2024–25 faculty layoffs. The university initially refused to comply, with legal counsel arguing that the arbitrator had exceeded her authority. Cudd’s statement upon final compliance read in part: “We believe that the reductions were necessary and appropriate, and were implemented in good faith and in compliance with our collective bargaining agreement. Nonetheless, we’ve decided the best step forward for our campus at this time is to comply with the arbitrator’s order.” Oregon Public Broadcasting, “Portland State Agrees to Reinstate Laid-Off Faculty,” January 15, 2026, opb.org; The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Portland State Pivots, Agrees to Reinstate Laid-Off Faculty Members,” January 14, 2026, chronicle.com. On the PIVOT announcement and nineteen departments, see: Willamette Week, “Portland State University Floats Reductions or Closures of 19 Departments,” March 9, 2026, wweek.com; Oregon Public Broadcasting, “Portland State Declares Financial Crisis, Reveals Plan to Cut or Reduce 19 Departments,” March 9, 2026, opb.org; Oregon Public Broadcasting, “Portland State University Restructuring Moves Forward as Budget Shortfall Widens,” January 30, 2026, opb.org.

⁶ The University Innovation Alliance was founded in 2014 as a consortium of public research universities committed to graduating more low-income students. Cudd served as the University of Kansas’s institutional liaison to the Alliance from its founding, making her a founding participant in its model rather than a later recruit. University Innovation Alliance. (2014). Mission and member institutions.

https://www.theuia.org

Sources

Journalism and Public Record — University of Pittsburgh

Moss, J. (2019, May 14). Pitt paid almost $240K to “union avoidance” law firm in recent years. The Pitt News. https://pittnews.com

Pitt News. (2022, December 8). Faculty union members demonstrate outside of Provost Cudd’s office, push for job security. The Pitt News. https://pittnews.com/article/177861/news/faculty-union-members-demonstrate-outside-of-provost-cudds-office-push-for-job-security/

Pitt News. (2023, January 18). Pitt’s spending on ‘union avoidance firm’ slows, but reaches $3M. The Pitt News. https://pittnews.com

TribLive. (2023, November 29). Faculty union files labor complaint against Pitt, alleging it is stalling contract talks. TribLive. https://triblive.com/news/faculty-union-files-labor-complaint-against-pitt-alleging-it-is-stalling-contract-talks/

Union of Pitt Faculty

Bickford, T. (2022–2023). Bargaining committee updates. Union of Pitt Faculty. https://www.pittfaculty.org/archive-home1.html

Bickford, T. (n.d.). What is in a contract: Governance. Union of Pitt Faculty. https://www.pittfaculty.org/governance.html

Union Avoidance Industry

Barnes & Thornburg. (n.d.). Labor and employment: Union avoidance. https://btlaw.com/en/work/practices/labor-and-employment/union-avoidance

Buer, M. (Host). (n.d.). The shady consultants bosses hire to dissuade workers from unionizing [Audio podcast episode]. The Real News Network. https://therealnews.com/the-shady-consultants-bosses-hire-to-dissuade-workers-from-unionizing

Center for Labor and a Just Economy, Governing for Impact, & LaborLab. (2024, May 28). Spotlight on union-busters: Recommendations to the Department of Labor and Federal Trade Commission. Harvard Law School. https://clje.law.harvard.edu/news/spotlight-on-union-busters-recommendations-to-the-department-of-labor-and-federal-trade-commission/

Labor Lab. (n.d.). Union busting tracker. https://laborlab.us/resource/unionbustingtracker/

McNicholas, C., Poydock, M., Sanders, S., & Zipperer, B. (2023, March 29). Employers spend more than $400 million per year on ‘union-avoidance’ consultants to bolster their union-busting efforts. Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/publication/union-avoidance/

Journalism and Public Record — Portland State University

Lu, A. (2026, January 14). Portland State pivots, agrees to reinstate laid-off faculty members. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/portland-state-pivots-agrees-to-reinstate-laid-off-faculty-members

Oregon Public Broadcasting. (2023, March 10). Portland State University announces its new president. OPB. https://www.opb.org/article/2023/03/10/portland-state-university-announces-new-president-ann-cudd/

Oregon Public Broadcasting. (2026, January 15). Portland State agrees to reinstate laid-off faculty. OPB. https://www.opb.org/article/2026/01/15/portland-state-university-reinstate-laid-off-faculty/

Oregon Public Broadcasting. (2026, January 30). Portland State University restructuring moves forward as budget shortfall widens. OPB. https://www.opb.org/article/2026/01/29/portland-state-university-restructuring-budget/

Oregon Public Broadcasting. (2026, March 9). Portland State declares financial crisis, reveals plan to cut or reduce 19 departments. OPB. https://www.opb.org/article/2026/03/09/portland-state-university-cuts-layoffs-retrenchment/

Willamette Week. (2026, March 9). Portland State University floats reductions or closures of 19 departments. Willamette Week. https://www.wweek.com/news/schools/2026/03/09/portland-state-university-floats-reductions-or-closures-of-19-departments/

Arbitration

Foley, D. C. (2024, November). Arbitration ruling in the matter of PSU-AAUP v. Portland State University. [Independent arbitration decision.]

Cudd — Published Scholarly Works

Cudd, A. E. (2005). How to explain oppression: Criteria of adequacy for normative explanatory theories. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 35(1), 20–49.

Cudd, A. E. (2006). Analyzing oppression. Oxford University Press.

Cudd, A. E. (2011). Capitalism, for and against: A feminist debate (with N. Holmstrom). Cambridge University Press.

Cudd, A. E. (2013). Oppression. In H. LaFollette (Ed.), The international encyclopedia of ethics. Blackwell.

By now, the facts are well-known: a 95-year-old woman advised her city councilor to wear long sleeves in his professional appearances, to cover his generously inked arms. Instead of taking a tactful approach to responding, or perhaps not responding at all, this leader decided to go on the offensive. And offensive he was. He exposed her identity on social media, told her to mind her own business, and mocked her as small-minded.

He did one other thing that was equally ill-advised: he framed her suggestion as “body policing”, borrowing from the feminist pushback to body shamers who see women’s value only in their appearance. In doing so, he treaded on some sacred space that isn’t really designed for 40-something white guys.

A more temperate, leaderlike response might have looked like this: you write a nice note, thanking her for thinking of his best interest. Perhaps you invite her to your next in-district gathering. Maybe you even offer to visit with her to hear more about her perspective (wearing sleeves, of course). In short, good leaders turn every incident into a positive, community-building opportunity.

Instead, this elected official showed us that his constituent’s ink on a page made a bigger impact that the ink on his thin skin.