Portland State University Provost Robert Williams told the October 2026 Faculty Senate that the university had not met a core enrollment goal: bringing in more new students than it loses to those who stop out or graduate. “We did not meet that goal,” he said. PSU is now moving to spend $10.8 million over three years on enrollment recovery while cutting the people who teach its students. For Oregon’s labor movement, that raises a question: Will the plan protect the faculty and staff students need to complete their degrees?

On Sept. 25, PSU’s trustees approved a three-year enrollment initiative called Start | Stay | Finish. President Ann Cudd says it will stabilize enrollment, then deliver 800 net new students and $14.5 million in revenue by fiscal year 2030. The money will come from education and general fund reserves, according to Cudd’s Sept. 29 blog post.

Recruitment merits investment, but Cudd’s projections deserve scrutiny, especially when employment decisions could weaken PSU’s ability to keep students enrolled.

PSU’s “2026 Institutional Reductions” page cites financial necessity and a 23 percent enrollment decline since 2019 to justify job cuts. Yet a university describing itself as too financially strained to keep faculty has found $10.8 million for a marketing and recruitment plan. This is a choice about priorities.

Of the $10.8 million investment, Cudd assigns 84 percent to recruitment, 9 percent to persistence tracking and student analytics, and 7 percent to community engagement. Trustees should explain how that investment will work alongside cuts to the teaching and support students need to finish.

Marketing may bring students to campus, but unavailable required courses can keep them from finishing. Enrollment depends as much on what happens after admission as on the invitation to apply.

The demographic outlook makes that work more urgent. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education projects that Oregon will have 19 percent fewer high school graduates in 2041 than in 2023.

That long-term forecast does not rule out growth at PSU by 2030. Portland State serves transfer students, graduate students, and working adults returning to finish their degrees. Smaller high school graduating classes will intensify competition for recent graduates. PSU’s prospects for growth therefore depend in part on how well it recruits and supports students whose paths to college begin later or follow a different route, the students most affected when advising and instruction are cut.

State enrollment data show PSU losing ground as Oregon State grows. From 2019 to 2025, PSU fell from about 26,000 students to 19,700, while Oregon State climbed from about 32,800 to 38,500, according to the Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission. In this market, recruitment spending can shift students among campuses without increasing overall enrollment. PSU is entering this competition late, while Oregon State has grown.

Online courses and community college partnerships may help. They also require instructors, advising, and dependable course schedules. Students studying from home still need someone to explain an assignment, evaluate their work, and help them complete a degree.

Meanwhile, PSU’s July plan to help address a $35 million deficit calls for eliminating 36 full-time academic positions and reducing three others to part-time. The university also announced it will eliminate the Conflict Resolution and University Studies departments. Those cuts risk weakening the teaching and support the enrollment plan depends on.

For a working student, an unavailable required course can mean another term of tuition and another delay in reaching their career goals. For a parent, a schedule change can disrupt work and child care arrangements. Faculty and support staff help students navigate these challenges. Cutting their positions risks making a difficult path harder.

Labor has a direct stake in that outcome. Portland State prepares teachers, counselors, social workers, engineers, and public employees. Its educational mission connects university workers with the communities and workplaces its graduates serve.

Trustees should redirect part of the approved $10.8 million toward helping students complete their degrees. That could mean protecting required course sections, improving advising, and helping former students return to finish. Recruitment spending should proceed in stages, with further commitments tied to enrollment gains and the additional revenue remaining after costs. Reserves can fund a trial; continuing commitments need recurring revenue.

Cudd has promised quarterly tracking. Her reporting should include course availability, progress toward degrees, and the effects of personnel reductions. Faculty, staff, and their unions should help evaluate the results and shape any changes.

Oregon lawmakers have a responsibility here, too. A public university serving working adults cannot build a stable future through repeated job cuts and competition for a shrinking pool of students. Sustained public funding must support affordable education and the people who provide it.

PSU should use its limited reserves to test recruitment and retention together, protect the teaching students need to finish, and expand spending when results justify it. Trustees should judge success by how many students complete their degrees as well as how many the university recruits.

Sources

1. Ann Cudd, “Moving Portland State Forward,” Portland State University, Sept. 29, 2026: pdx.edu/president/blog/moving-portland-state-forward (the $10.8 million investment, the 84/9/7 breakdown, the 800-student and $14.5 million targets, reserves, and quarterly tracking).

2. Portland State University, “2026 Institutional Reductions”: pdx.edu/president/2026-institutional-reductions (the 23 percent enrollment decline since 2019 and the financial-necessity rationale).

3. Portland State University, “PSU finalizes academic restructuring plan,” July 21, 2026: pdx.edu/news/psu-finalizes-academic-restructuring-plan (the $35 million deficit, the 36 position reductions, and the elimination of Conflict Resolution and University Studies).

4. Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission, Fall Fourth Week Enrollment, 2019–2025: oregon.gov; Portland State University, “PSU by the Numbers”: pdx.edu/portland-state-university-facts (the PSU and Oregon State enrollment figures).

5. Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, Knocking at the College Door: Projections of High School Graduates (2024): wiche.edu/knocking (the projected 19 percent decline in Oregon high school graduates by 2041).

Here in Oregon as elsewhere, anti-Persian conduct reaches back nearly 50 years to 1979, when militant Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans hostage. Within weeks of that incident, President Jimmy Carter ordered federal immigration agents to come to Portland State University to interview 155 Iranian students.

The scrutiny and resultant attacks broadened to others of Middle East heritage, such as Qatari and Arab students. A Qatari student had a bullet fired through his car window, for instance. Three Arab students were beaten at Cleveland High School and one of them, a Kuwaiti, said classmates chanted at him, “Go home, Iranian, go home.” A PSU graduate reported being punched by a driver who asked whether he was “a damn Iranian”.

In Portland at that time, anyone who looked Iranian became a target of enmity.

Twenty years later, a Portland State professor, Kazem Tehrani, told the Oregonian that “there are certain times that we are very nice and very good people,” he said of how Americans regarded him and other Iranians. “And other times when we are ‘terrorists’.”

Global events ever since have meant that fear and persecution have continued. Each crisis in the Middle East, especially between the U.S. and Iran, has led to incidents in public schools, medical institutions, and elsewhere.

By 2001, Iranian Oregonians again became targets. Portland’s police chief met with 100 Iranians and Iranian Americans at PSU and promised that a detective would follow up on every reported bias incident. This would come as a relief to an immigration attorney by the name of David Shomloo, who had experienced young men shouting at him at a Beaverton intersection. He asked when describing that encounter, “why do I have to answer for the wrong deeds of these horrible people?”

Other incidents follow a similar pattern. In 2017, Multnomah County deputies found anti-Muslim graffiti at the Troutdale home of an Iranian American man, along with a note threatening to shoot him. The man was not even Muslim, but Baha’i. In 2018, a patient at Oregon Health and Science University refused an appointment with her Iranian American doctor. The patient aske for a white, American-born physician instead, and the clinic complied. This incident, reported by surgeon Rahel Nardos, was the subject of Oregonian coverage of the incident. Dr. Nardos wrote that her staff had no guidance on when and how to draw the line on such conduct.

Just as other groups have contended with discrimination in its various forms, so too are our Middle Eastern guests, refugees, students, and transplants. Oregon already prohibits national-origin discrimination in employment, as does the federal government under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. These laws do not, however, protect people in other contexts.

In 2025, two Iranian-American state legislators stepped forward with a bill to celebrate the Iranian New Year, Nowruz. Representatives Farrah Chaichi (D-Beaverton) and Cyrus Javadi (then R-Tillamook) sponsored House Bill 3768, designating March 21 as Nowruz Day. This bipartisan legislation passed unanimously in the House and by 22-6 in the Senate. Governor Kotek signed it into law.

Now, Oregon should step from celebration to protection of Middle Easterners in our state agencies, universities, school districts, hospitals, and local governments. They could do this through a concurrent resolution that has no fiscal impact. Such a resolution could affirm that national origin, heritage, and family ties abroad are not, by themselves, grounds for suspicion, reassignment, or exclusion. It could encourage public employers to give staff a written procedure for addressing national-origin protests by parents, patients, or the public.

Such a resolution need not interfere in an employer’s review of legitimate employee conduct or eligibility for a sensitive position. It need not take a position on American foreign policy – after all, Iranian Oregonians disagree about such topics among themselves. The measure would not target any single institution, create a new cause of legal action, or impose a mandate on any public body.

As an educator, I believe that we make gains in our communities when we educate, and this resolution would take a step toward building awareness while also ensuring that Oregon’s public bodies enact safeguards that make sense to protect against workplace discrimination.

As Portland voters consider whether to turn over the power of the purse to any resident, they should be aware of the problems participatory budgeting’s founding cities faced. Those issues, in many cases, ended the experiment Measure 26-267’s supporters would encase in constitutional concrete here.

More than 7,000 cities worldwide have adopted participatory budgeting.¹ That is the number the backers of Measure 26-267 put first, and they use it to settle the debate before it begins. The figure is a legitimate data point. Its source is not neutral, and the promoters have reason to define participatory budgeting broadly. They leave out a second figure, one that should weigh more heavily on a Portland voter. In Brazil, where the model originated, the number of cities with such programs dropped by more than half in a decade. Measure 26-267 would write this model into Portland’s charter just as evidence turns against it.

Paolo de Renzio, Paolo Spada, and Brian Wampler, the leading advocates of participatory budgeting, document its decline in their essay “Paradise Lost? The Crisis of Participatory Budgeting in Its Own Birthplace.” The essay draws on Spada’s longitudinal survey, which counts only Brazilian cities with more than 50,000 residents and programs that last at least two consecutive budget cycles. That rule separates a standing institution from a one-time event. By this measure, the number of such cities rose to 133 between 2001 and 2004, then fell to 58 by 2013–2016. Even Porto Alegre, where it began in 1989, now faces an uncertain future.²

The campaign’s 7,000 figure relies on a different counting method. The Participatory Budgeting World Atlas, the source of the larger number, reports more than 11,000 cases across 71 countries, yet it describes the Brazilian situation as a “huge crisis.”³ The two counts measure different things: one tallies every reported case using a broad definition; the other includes only lasting programs, and indicates that the model is in retreat. Both numbers date to the same period. The count the campaign cites traces to the 2019 World Atlas. The decline it leaves out extends through 2016, the last year a consistent survey covered Brazil’s programs. No survey since shows a recovery.

Portland’s version of participatory budgeting takes its name from Porto Alegre but little else. In Porto Alegre, residents governed a large share of the city’s investment budget, an actual transfer of fiscal authority.⁴ Brazilian cities are moving away from the redistributive model. Portland would keep the language, strip the substance, and freeze the 2 percent share in the city charter.

De Renzio, Spada, and Wampler cite three reasons for the decline. The first is especially relevant to Portland: participatory budgeting thrives when governments have discretionary, additional funds for resident-chosen projects. Without new money, the cost comes from other priorities, and the process becomes an empty exercise. In Brazil, that money dried up after 2000. Portland faces the same risk: Measure 26-267 would carve $16 million from existing services like parks and emergency response.⁵ The funding structure scholars identify as a failure case is now on Portland’s ballot.

The second reason is political, and here Portland draws the wrong lesson from the right diagnosis. In Brazil, participatory budgeting became the emblem of one party, Lula’s Workers’ Party. When the party won national power, it shifted focus. Centrist and conservative governments, having watched it serve as a partisan tool, avoided it. The program rose and fell with one party’s fortunes. In Portland, four of six councilors behind Measure 26-267 are members of the Democratic Socialists of America; the measure has the same single-faction origin. Portland’s solution is to entrench the program in the charter, so no future council can reduce or redirect the money.

Supporters are correct to argue that charter protections would shield the program from repeal, unlike Porto Alegre. But this trades one failure for another. Funding participatory budgeting from a fixed budget, as the scholars warn, forces new projects to come at the expense of existing services. Portland’s measure would do just that, making it permanent. A set-aside that cannot be reduced when revenue falls leaves other services to bear the cuts. Porto Alegre lost its program when discretionary money disappeared; Portland risks keeping the program and losing essential services.

The third problem is time itself. Participatory budgeting is most effective in its early, small-stage years. Over time, residents propose more than the budget can fund; unbuilt projects accumulate, interest wanes, and the cycle that sustained early enthusiasm stalls.

The United States offers its own precedent. New York City adopted citywide participatory budgeting by popular vote in 2018, suspended it during the pandemic, and returned with a smaller version in 2022. In its most recent cycle, only about 2 percent of adult New Yorkers participated.⁶ The largest such program in the U.S. draws turnout in the low single digits and has already been suspended. Portland now proposes to commit to it permanently.

None of this settles whether Portlanders should have more say over public money. The impulse behind participatory budgeting is serious, and the case for resident control does not disappear because the first attempt failed. Previous analysis showed that groups positioned to administer the program funded nearly all of this campaign,⁷ a reason for skepticism. The Brazilian record is another issue, independent of who profits. Even without vested interests, similar programs have not endured under the fiscal conditions Portland would write into law. Under Measure 26-267, the city would adopt the form its inventors see fading, the shape their research warns against. Now it proposes to lock $16 million annually into a program the city that invented it could not sustain. Porto Alegre has already shown how this ends.

Notes

1. Participatory Budgeting Project, “Learn About PB,” participatorybudgeting.org: “PB has spread to over 7,000 cities around the world.” The figure derives from the Participatory Budgeting World Atlas (2019).

2. Paolo de Renzio, Paolo Spada, and Brian Wampler, “Paradise Lost? The Crisis of Participatory Budgeting in Its Own Birthplace,” International Budget Partnership, November 25, 2019. Figures from Spada’s longitudinal survey, 1989–2016.

3. Participatory Budgeting World Atlas 2019 (Oficina), which reports more than 11,000 cases worldwide and 436 in Brazil while describing the Brazilian situation as a “huge crisis.”

4. On Porto Alegre’s origin (1989) and the size of its participatory budget under the Workers’ Party, see de Renzio, Spada, and Wampler, “Paradise Lost?” (note 2).

5. Measure 26-267 requires “at least 2% of the city’s adopted General Fund discretionary ongoing expenses,” estimated at $16.4 million in FY 2027–28. Multnomah County Voters’ Pamphlet, Measure 26-267 (multco.us).

6. 2018 NYC Charter Revision Commission, ballot Question 1; pandemic suspension via Gotham Gazette; participation (approximately 140,000 in the most recent cycle) via the NYC Civic Engagement Commission, “The People’s Money.”

7. “Your Two Cents, Their Million,” Academic Gadfly; campaign finance per Oregon Secretary of State, ORESTAR, committee “Community Budgeting for All.”

Cover image: adapted from a photo by Ganice, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

That organization has set its sights on liberal Portland, irrespective of the fact that this city spent 2026 cutting core services because of severe budget shortfalls. In this fiscal environment, the City Council struggled to find money to save the jobs of essential-service workers but failed to stop the layoffs of 70.

Enter Measure 26-267, which would compel the city to create an entirely new spending program even while existing services struggle.

The measure, which its backers call Your 2 Cents PDX, would amend the city charter to require the City Council to set aside at least 2 percent of the general fund’s discretionary budget for participatory budgeting: residents propose spending ideas, delegates shape those ideas into projects, and a citywide vote determines the winners. The city’s ballot summary estimates the program would cost $16.4 million in fiscal 2027-28 and $17 million the year after, and it would begin next July if voters approve it.¹ The initiative qualified with 78,743 signatures, the largest filing in the city’s modern history, of which elections officials verified 41,860.²

The Endorsers: A Vendor on the Slate

The endorsement list is a census of the Portland left. The Coalition for Communities of Color, the Multnomah County Democrats, the Working Families Party, Imagine Black, Unite Oregon, and the Democratic Socialists of America all signed on. One name on the list comes neither from Portland nor from the local volunteer sector. The Participatory Budgeting Project, a Brooklyn nonprofit founded in 2009, co-endorsed this measure to create, in a city where it has no office, demand for the services it sells.

The Project’s business is selling cities on participatory budgeting and then consulting on its implementation. Headquartered in New York with a second office in Oakland, it calls itself the support structure behind most participatory budgeting processes in the United States. It charges implementation fees of $20,000 to $65,000 per process. Seattle’s $27 million program appears on its client list.³ For such an organization, a charter amendment mandating a permanent program in a city of Portland’s size is not a policy outcome. It is a market, and no competitor is better placed to seize it.

The Project’s Finances

This outfit’s finances explain their endorsement. Since 2009, it has taken in $13.9 million over 111 grants from 37 funders, and the recent entries in that record read as institutional distress. Its co-executive leadership turned over completely between December 2023 and July 2024. Its fiscal 2024 filing recorded a deficit of $540,556.⁴ The Ford Foundation, once a reliable patron, ended the relationship in 2023 with a grant that Ford’s paperwork labeled “tie-off general support,” the language a foundation uses when it means goodbye.⁵ Founder Josh Lerner had already departed for a separate outfit, People Powered, taking Hewlett money with him.⁶ The Project’s earned revenue is shrinking, so it depends more on new contracts. Portland, preparing to route $16 million in public funds that includes a percentage for administration, through a delegate structure that does not yet exist, may offer a financial reprieve.

The Project’s funding record shows a pattern of dependence on ballot measure success. Robert Wood Johnson is now the largest single funder, giving $1.5 million in 2023 and another $1.3 million in 2025, both earmarked to spread participatory budgeting through New Jersey, and both framing the practice as a health intervention: participatory democracy recast as a social determinant of well-being.⁷ Freedom Together, formerly the JPB Foundation, raised its general operating support from $150,000 in 2020 to $450,000 in 2024. The California Endowment underwrote expansion in its home state.⁸ The pattern is a national organization sustained by national philanthropy, pursuing local mandates that turn grant dependence into earned contracts.

From Porto Alegre to Portland

In theory, participatory budgeting puts public money under residents’ control. The practice began in Porto Alegre, Brazil, under a Workers’ Party government, and there it governed a substantial share of the municipal budget, an actual transfer of fiscal authority to residents. New York City has used participatory budgeting since 2011, and in 2018 its voters wrote a citywide program into the city charter without fixing a funding level. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 2020 pandemic emergency order then suspended participatory budgeting and delayed the citywide program until 2022. In its most recent cycle, approximately 2 percent of adult New Yorkers took part.⁹ The democratic case may seem sound: budgets encode priorities and most residents have little say in how they are set.

In Porto Alegre, a leftist government used participatory budgeting to redistribute public money. Portland’s Measure 26-267 uses the rhetoric of popular power without the substance. It redirects $16 million to a program implemented by a paid intermediary. This is the only “power” transfer in the proposal. The budget that funds police, fire, parks, and homeless shelters is decided as before—by accountable elected officials.

The campaign does not mention one provision of the measure. The citywide vote on residents’ proposals would not be subject to city or state election law. A parallel balloting apparatus, standing outside the rules that govern every other public election in Oregon, would allocate a significant amount of tax dollars each year. The delegates’ good faith aside, a spending process exempt from election law raises an accountability question the democratic premise ignores.

Labor Against the Caucus

On this measure, organized labor and the council’s socialists have landed on opposite sides. Six of the twelve city councilors support the measure: Candace Avalos, Mitch Green, Angelita Morillo, Tiffany Koyama Lane, Sameer Kanal, and Jamie Dunphy. Four of the six (Morillo, Kanal, Koyama Lane, and Green) are members of the Democratic Socialists of America; Avalos and Dunphy caucus with them but are not official DSA members.¹⁰

Opposition has come from a direction that cuts across the left’s familiar lines. Mayor Keith Wilson opposes the measure. So does the vast majority of organized labor. The Northwest Oregon Labor Council has argued that taking 2 percent off the top diverts money from such essential services as parks, community centers, Portland Street Response, and firefighting, and puts the jobs of the city workers who deliver those services at risk.¹¹ Every dollar routed into a delegate-designed allocation is a dollar removed from a budget already in crisis.

That divide should trouble anyone who casts Portland politics as a contest between a progressive council and its opponents. Here the union movement, the institution with the longest record of defending public workers, joins the mayor to oppose a measure the progressive caucus calls democratic reform. When labor and the council's socialists find themselves at odds over a budget question, the disagreement is worth a closer look at who would benefit.

The campaign’s money comes from the groups closest to the program it would create. Its political action committee has reported about $1.2 million in contributions, drawn primarily from Participatory Budgeting Oregon, East County Rising, and the Next Up Action Fund, and about $1.06 million of that total came as donated services rather than cash.¹² Participatory Budgeting Oregon promotes the practice statewide. The Participatory Budgeting Project, its national counterpart in Brooklyn, endorsed the measure and is one of the few organizations equipped to administer such a program. None of this breaks any law; it is how advocacy works. Still, a reform presented as the people’s voice is being financed by the organizations that would gain from its passage.

The Choice in November

Whether Portlanders should oppose this measure based on these facts is not the point. Certainly, a resident might conclude that $16 million in participatory allocation is worth the vendor’s fees and the pressure on the general fund, irrespective of the whiff of self-dealing by the idea’s advocates. It may be defensible, even if it is not the altruistic democracy concept the campaign is selling. A voter may not care that the measure is the product of a national consultancy positioned to win the contract, and the advocacy groups that paid for the signatures and stand to profit from redirected funds. It would be hard to fathom, however, that Portlanders to say yes to an expensive proposal in the same year the city cut basic services and 70 city workers lost their jobs.

Voters who will sit in judgment of this proposal should realize that people who are not registered voters may soon decide how to spend tax dollars that are plundered from essential services or voter-approved earmarked funds, with the cost of staffing and running the program skimmed off the top, and a New York outfit with money problems of its own positioned to collect. “Participatory democracy” as a noble experiment is tainted by these facts.

Notes

1. Measure 26-267 requires “at least 2% of the city’s adopted General Fund discretionary ongoing expenses,” with the City estimating $16.4 million in FY 2027-28 and $17.0 million in FY 2028-29 and the program operational July 2027. Multnomah County Voters’ Pamphlet, Measure 26-267 (multco.us); Portland City Auditor, ballot title.

2. Backers submitted 78,743 signatures; the City Auditor verified at least 41,860 as valid (statistical sampling certified by Multnomah County), above the 40,437 required. Willamette Week, "Participatory Budget Initiative Backers Submit Whopping 78,000 Signatures," July 8, 2026, and "Community Budgeting Initiative Qualifies for November Ballot," July 23, 2026.

3. Self-description and fee range: Participatory Budgeting Project (participatorybudgeting.org). Seattle’s $27 million program: Seattle Times editorial, Nov. 2023, and City of Seattle Office for Civil Rights.

4. Grant totals compiled from Candid / Foundation Directory. Fiscal 2024 deficit and the 2023-24 leadership turnover: Participatory Budgeting Project, IRS Form 990 (via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer).

5. Ford Foundation Grants database (fordfoundation.org/grants/), 2023 grant to the Participatory Budgeting Project.

6. People Powered (people-powered.org); William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Grants database (hewlett.org/grants/).

7. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Grants Explorer (rwjf.org).

8. Grant records via Candid / Foundation Directory; Freedom Together Foundation (formerly JPB) and The California Endowment grant listings.

9. 2018 NYC Charter Revision Commission, ballot Question 1 (Nov. 2018), creating the Civic Engagement Commission and directing a citywide participatory budgeting program, with no funding level fixed. Pandemic delay: Gotham Gazette. Participation: NYC Civic Engagement Commission, “The People’s Money” results (approximately 140,000 participants in its most recent cycle).

10. Portland DSA endorsed candidates (portlanddsa.org/endorsed-candidates/); Willamette Week, “One Thing Has Changed at Portland City Hall: The Socialists Are Setting the Agenda,” July 16, 2025.

11. Willamette Week, “Participatory Budgeting Measure Faces Organized Opposition, Including From the Mayor,” Aug. 31, 2026.

12. Oregon Secretary of State, ORESTAR campaign finance records, committee “Community Budgeting for All” (filer ID 23058).

The agenda had one item: the administration’s report, in four parts. The President began the meeting; General Counsel Cindy Starke explained the Article 22 process; Vice President for Finance and Administration Andria Johnson presented the budget; and the President concluded with next steps. The meeting then turned to questions.

During the question period, a senator asked about a tenured colleague whose unit had been named for possible elimination. In response, the President said: “We don’t have a plan yet because we’re following the contract… I can’t really provide the information until we’ve fully engaged the Article 22 process.”

But 18 days earlier, the administration had already drawn up a list of positions to cut.

THE LIST

On the morning of February 26, 2026, Vice Provost for Academic Budget and Planning Amy Mulkerin emailed Maneka Brooks, dean of the College of Education, with the subject line “Potential Layoffs.” She wrote she wanted to share “what was submitted as potential layoffs,” and “vacancies and retirements are tracked separately.”

Below that sentence was a table listing eight faculty positions, each with a position number, rank, faculty type, tenure status, and a program designation. Six of the eight held indefinite tenure. Under the program designation column, four entries read “Program Sunset,” three “Program Revitalization,” and one “Program Revitalization, Reduce by .25 FTE.” President Cudd and Provost Shelly Chabon were copied.

_{Exhibit 9, page 1, released under DA Order 26-59. Other position numbers are grayed; see note.}

Two hours later, the dean replied. “Everything looks great.” She corrected one position number and raised the quarter-time reduction to a full position. Then she added what she called a heads-up: “we only need one FTE in an area, but it is unclear if the layoff would be” one of two numbered positions, “depending on the processes.”

One of the eight positions was mine.

Portland State released the email exchange in July in response to my public records request, with the list and the dean’s corrections blacked out under the internal advisory exemption. I petitioned the Multnomah County District Attorney, who on August 27 ordered release of the redacted text. Portland State complied on September 2.

THE CONTRACT

Article 22 describes the University’s fiscal-crisis layoff process. Section 3 requires notice to the union and its members, a presentation of the University’s financial condition to the Senate, and a comment period. Section 4 provides that a provisional plan, issued only after the President declares that retrenchment is necessary, “will include tentative assignments of reductions to departments.” A second comment period follows.

Section 5 provides that the order of layoff within a department is determined only when the President’s final plan includes layoffs, and then by category and inverse seniority, “based on departmental recommendations.” A memorandum of agreement attached to the contract links the individual faculty members’ notice period to the provisional plan.

In the order the contract sets them out, the steps assume that positions have not yet been identified when the process begins. Section 4 describes the provisional plan as assigning reductions to departments, and the order-of-layoff step comes last, when the President, on the department’s recommendation, decides which positions go.

On March 16, Starke described those steps to the Senate. Once the President “considers all the feedback she receives,” Starke said, “she’ll make a decision about whether to move forward and declare retrenchment is in fact necessary.” Only “after announcing that retrenchment is necessary” would the President “issue a provisional plan,” and “that plan will identify the impacted departments and will also identify the specific positions proposed for elimination.”

Johnson told the Senate that “no final decisions have been made.” Asked why her office had not modeled the revenue effects of program cuts, she answered: “We did not develop those scenarios because we do not have a plan yet.”

In her opening remarks, the President had said: “There are a range of reductions taking place across the university to address the deficit and deliver PSU to the financially sustainable state that we must reach. Not all of those reductions are part of the Article 22 process we’re talking about today.”

Three times after that, she said there was no plan. In her closing remarks: “Nothing is done, no decisions have been made.” To the senator asking about a colleague with a joint appointment, she gave the answer quoted earlier; and likewise to a senator asking about retirements: “So we don’t have a plan yet.”

Dean Brooks and Vice Provost Mulkerin, who had exchanged the list 18 days earlier, attended as ex officio members of the Senate. They kept silent.

THE PREPARATION

A second record released under the same order shows how the administration prepared for that meeting. On March 9, the day the President issued her Article 22 notice, the Senate’s presiding officer asked that the March 16 meeting be scheduled from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM, with time for senators’ questions. He cited a precedent from the University’s only prior Article 22 use in 2021.

The request was forwarded to Vice Provost for Faculty Success Christopher Monsere, whose office leads labor relations and administers the retrenchment process. His reply, sent that evening to the President’s chief of staff and two university attorneys:

Please don’t respond today—we can think about it and get back to them tomorrow. This isn’t a contractual/CBA issue but a political decision for Ann. There may be nothing wrong with offering time for questions (2 hours seem way too much though), but we would have to do a lot of boundary and expectation setting that the questions should be about the budget/financial condition of the University.

_{Exhibit 1, page 1, released under DA Order 26-59.}

The next morning, he attached the 2021 Senate packets. By contrast, in 2021 President Stephen Percy issued a notice on February 4, presented it to the Senate on March 15, opened a 30-day comment period, and issued a provisional plan naming positions no earlier than May 3. Asked at the March 15, 2021 meeting how many positions would be cut, Percy told senators that “no decisions have been made as to numbers.” In 2026, the dean approved a position-level list 11 days before the notice.

The March 16 meeting began at 3:30 PM and ended at 5:13 PM. The presiding officer adjourned with questions still in the queue.

THE DEFENSE

The University will argue that the February list was budget planning, and it will quote the District Attorney’s order: “an unremarkable and professional planning discussion.” The District Attorney was deciding whether the University could withhold the redacted text, not whether it had followed the contract. The President will maintain that her statements were accurate, since she had not made any decisions yet, and that the list was one of the reductions she had described as not part of the Article 22 process. Each of those claims is true. A list is not a decision. The President had not yet declared that retrenchment was necessary. Some reductions, such as vacancies and retirements, need no Article 22 process.

Those claims cannot explain the final layoffs.

The Provisional Plan released on May 14 listed nine positions in the College of Education. The Final Plan released on July 21 confirmed seven. Five of the seven were on the February 26 list as the dean approved it. Two positions were added between February 26 and May 14, before the provisional plan. No departmental recommendation could have named them. Between May 14 and July 21, two layoff notices were rescinded.

None of the required contract steps—presentation, comment period, provisional plan, or departmental recommendation—spared a single one of the five. These were the same five positions the dean had approved in February.

For five of its positions, the February list was not a plan. It was the outcome. Nothing in the process that followed changed it. Nor was the list one of the reductions the President described as not part of the Article 22 process. Six of the eight positions on the February list were tenured, and Article 22 is the only procedure under which Portland State can eliminate such positions. A list that was not part of the Article 22 process would mean the University was selecting them for elimination in a way the contract does not allow.

The dean’s heads-up shows what the process was for. “Depending on the processes” refers to the contract’s order-of-layoff step. Under the contract, that step orders all of a department’s faculty by category and, within each category, lays off the least senior first, adjusted to keep the areas of specialization the department needs. The department makes that recommendation and submits it to the President through the dean. The dean may make her own only if “no timely recommendations are received from the department.” On February 26, no recommendation could have been late: the notice that began the process was still 11 days away. In the dean’s email, the positions had already been selected by program designation; the only question she left to “the processes” was which of two named positions to eliminate.

The Dean gave her own faculty the same account the President had given the Senate: that the affected positions would be identified only later, through the process. On April 7, at an all-college meeting three weeks after the Senate met and four days after the Board was consulted, a faculty member asked when people would actually be identified. “That’s the provisional plan,” Dean Brooks answered. “So after these 30 days of comment, people will actually be identified.” She had approved the February list six weeks before.

THE BOARD

Article 22 recognizes, in Section 2(b), the requirement to consult the Board of Trustees before the President may declare a retrenchment. The agenda for the Board’s April 3, 2026 meeting lists that consultation as item 8: “Consultation regarding Proposed Retrenchment (Article 22).”

On September 19, I wrote to the chair of the Board about the administration’s conduct in the retrenchment. I did not ask the board to withdraw its confidence in the President. As I told the chair, “governance is not the same as confidence. A board may choose to retain confidence in a president. But the board’s duty is to exercise independent oversight of the administration it appoints, and to be able to state specifically how it has done so.” I asked whether the board had examined the record, whether it had made a determination about the propriety of that conduct, and whether it was prepared to state the basis for its position directly rather than leave it to inference. The February 26 list is one item in that record.

The chair replied three days later. He wrote that the board “take[s] its oversight responsibilities seriously,” that it receives “regular reports from senior leadership about the retrenchment process, including objections to the process,” and that “the University also has processes in place to ensure compliance with its legal and contractual obligations.” On that basis he is “confident that the President and her leadership team have acted and will continue to act appropriately and with integrity.” He copied two attorneys from the University’s general counsel. His confidence rested on the reports the board receives from the leadership it oversees and on the processes in place to ensure compliance. The University’s compliance with the public-records law, for one, came only after the District Attorney ordered it to release the list at issue. He did not say whether the board had examined that record itself.

The President told the Faculty Senate she was following the contract. The contract is public. So is the list.

Sources

Exhibit 9 and Exhibit 1 are records Portland State University released on September 2, 2026, under Multnomah County District Attorney Public Records Order 26-59 (August 27, 2026). Quotations from the March 16, 2026 special meeting of the Faculty Senate are from the University’s Kaltura recording (15:12, 58:32, 1:19:21, 1:27:11, 1:38:00); the published minutes, which paraphrase rather than transcribe, are cited only for attendance and the order of speakers, not for quotations. The April 7, 2026 quotation is from Portland State’s recording of the All-COE meeting (media.pdx.edu/media/t/1_yw94rvdm). Both recordings are available to PSU account holders on the University’s Kaltura site and to the public through a records request. Quotations from the 2021 proceedings are from the Faculty Senate minutes of March 15, 2021. The February list for the College of Education is the only such list released to date; records for other colleges have not been requested.

A note on the image. Exhibit 9 is reproduced as the University released it. I have grayed the other faculty position numbers, leaving only mine, D99375. The ranks, tenure statuses, and program labels are unchanged. I have chosen not to name those colleagues.

The author is a professor in the College of Education at Portland State University. The views in this essay are the author's and do not represent the University.

The case for the new venue rests on a 2020 seismic report and what followed. That year, the city commissioned Miller Consulting Engineers to evaluate Keller Auditorium and found that the building would not withstand a major earthquake. The council then adopted a two-venue strategy in October 2024: renovate Keller and construct a new venue at PSU. A later market study found that Portland could support only one 3,000-seat venue. Consultants recommended the new build at PSU; the steering committee and the mayor’s ex officio group concurred. Staff informed council that the two-venue strategy was no longer viable. That left council one path forward: vote on whether to plan for the new venue.

Four councilors raised the same objection: no firm number for the city’s share. Ryan, Green, Smith, and Kanal each pressed for specifics about the city’s financial obligations following approval. Councilor Kanal referenced a cautionary precedent, recalling when the administration assured council that advancing a budget item for the Tennis Center would not commit the city to privatization, only for the contract transferring the facility to the USTA to never return to council. Councilor Avalos, who had introduced amendments in the City Life committee to require council approval of the financial plan, came into the session confident in those measures but grew concerned as the discussion went on.

In response, Deputy City Administrator Oliveira said that staff cannot give council a number until it authorizes the work. He clarified that the resolution would allow staff to collaborate with PSU and begin the process. The immediate next step would be assembling the capital stack, a compilation of all funding sources that must collectively cover the project cost. Oliveira noted that if staff had presented a complete capital stack upfront, councilors likely would have objected to work done without their approval. For the December 1 update, he offered a range: maybe $44 million, maybe $100 million, maybe the full capital stack “because we hit the lottery.” He reiterated that the information is unavailable because the process has not yet begun.

A range that wide means the city’s share is unknown. The councilors’ unease is not mere procedural squeamishness; rather, it is an appropriate response when council is asked to make a major decision without knowing the cost, especially in a city that has grappled with budget gaps in consecutive years.

The question of risk allocation emerged as PSU’s representative made clear: “This would be the city’s venue.” While the previous council had invited PSU to propose, a letter of intent signed in November 2024 assigned PSU the tasks of assembling the capital stack, securing state funding, and leading philanthropic efforts, all of which PSU has reportedly accomplished, along with completing market, economic, and traffic studies. The representative said the state bonding and philanthropy were secured, and indicated that the hotel, academic and community spaces, and parking structure either have their costs covered or are supported by other partners. Every element of this statement casts PSU as a partner that has met its obligations and places ultimate ownership, and thus risk, on the city. But no dollar figure was attached to any of these assurances.

Ownership decides who pays for cost overruns. State bonds, grants, and pledges are capped. One uncapped layer remains. That layer covers any difference between the project cost and the sum of capped sources, including all overruns. The building’s owner usually bears this responsibility. Three comparable projects show what ownership has cost in other cities.

Miami-Dade County owns the Adrienne Arsht Center, a Broadway-capable complex built through its largest public-private partnership. It opened in 2006, two years late and more than $218 million over budget, at a final cost of about $473 million. In Kansas City, the Kauffman Center’s guaranteed maximum price climbed by 20 percent to $393 million, $67 million above the 2004 estimate, during construction. Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Concert Hall was intended to open in 1997 for around $110 million but instead opened in 2003 at roughly $274 million. Los Angeles County bonded $110 million for the garage beneath it, counting on parking revenue to repay the debt, but the delay left the county servicing that debt without the expected revenue. In each case, the public owner paid the overrun.

Most large public projects run over budget. Research compiled by Bent Flyvbjerg at Oxford puts cultural buildings among the worst categories.1 This trend is partly because landmark projects often undergo design changes after budgets are approved. For a project of this scale in Portland, an overrun comparable to Kansas City’s would amount to tens of millions of dollars. The councilors who asked who would bear that cost were asking the right question.

Council can move the project forward without writing a blank check. The seismic risk is real, the single-venue market conclusion stands uncontested, and the process PSU describes has been thorough. Council should adopt Councilor Avalos’s amendments and begin the December 1 discussion by establishing ownership terms rather than focusing solely on headline figures. Before committing, council must determine whether the city’s contribution will be a fixed amount or a residual obligation. It should also clarify whether any overruns will fall to the city as owner or be contractually shifted to PSU and its partners. Council should also ask what “secured” means in dollars for state bonds and philanthropy, and should scrutinize assumptions about operating revenue that may factor into debt service.

The administration says it cannot answer until council votes, but council can and should attach clear conditions to its approval. The experiences in Miami, Kansas City, Los Angeles, and with the Tennis Center all point to the same lesson: permission must be contingent on the condition Councilor Avalos proposed, that the complete financial decision returns to council, in full, before the city signs. The first estimate is never the final cost. Council must decide now who will pay the difference.

Philosopher-turned-university administrator Ann Cudd spent 27 years at the University of Kansas, teaching and writing on oppression, feminism, and the ethics of capitalism. She later moved into senior academic leadership at Kansas, then became dean of Arts and Sciences at Boston University. She was later appointed provost at the University of Pittsburgh. In 2023, she became the 11th president of Portland State University. Because she spent her career defending positions on markets and equality, her decisions as an administrator can be measured against her own views.

As provost at Pittsburgh, she put major university funding behind need-based aid and made the SAT and ACT optional. When Black student organizations pressed for an anti-racism course, she backed it. That same administration spent millions resisting a faculty union. It also closed the English Language Institute, a 60-year-old program for international students.

Cudd belongs to neither the left-progressive nor the free-market camp. She is a liberal-institutionalist who treats markets, competition, and hierarchy as legitimate. Within that frame, she uses institutional power to correct failures that make competition unfair. Her corrections stop short of equalizing outcomes or dismantling the hierarchy that sorts people into winners and losers. Across Kansas, Boston University, and Pittsburgh, she consistently advanced this position.

The Rules of the Game: Defending “Enlightened Capitalism”

Cudd’s philosophy is grounded in contractarianism, a tradition that justifies social arrangements by asking whether rational people could agree to them for mutual advantage. Her 2006 book Analyzing Oppression conceives oppression not as individual prejudice but as a structural condition of institutions. If the problem is structural, the remedy must be as well.

Cudd makes her case in the 2011 Cambridge volume Capitalism, For and Against, a formal debate with the socialist-feminist Nancy Holmstrom, in which she takes the pro-capitalist side. She does not defend laissez-faire capitalism but advocates for what she calls an “enlightened capitalism,” one that is “feminist and liberal.” She accepts capitalism’s defining elements, private capital, decentralized markets, and wage labor. However, she insists that markets must not discriminate and that the government must play a corrective role. It includes public health and education, a minimum level of welfare, limits on pollution, and checks on overspeculation. For Cudd, the state should correct market failures, not redistribute wealth for its own sake.

Her conception of competition is drawn from sport, not what she calls the “no-holds-barred dogfight.” She rejects the predator-and-prey model, instead likening competition to a game. It has rules like property and trade, players who mostly abide by them, and losers who still gain from participating. Healthy competition, in her view, requires clear rules and referees to enforce them. She first developed this metaphor in a 2007 paper on competition and the ethos of capitalism. Competition, she writes, is only justified when the rules are fair. Exclude a group from the rules, and competition forfeits the very benefit that makes it worth defending. This is a point she repeated in her 2012 University Distinguished Professor lecture at Kansas.

Holmstrom, her debate opponent, sees capitalism as an obstacle to human progress, whereas Cudd sees it as the means to achieve it. She rejects the Marxist charge of exploitation as outdated, arguing that it does not survive scrutiny. According to Cudd, the disadvantages feminists blame on capitalism stem from patriarchy. This is an older system that capitalism can profit from by paying women less, but did not invent. The culprit, for her, is patriarchy, not the market. She credits capitalism with the global decline in extreme poverty, and argues that where poverty persists, the cause is “not too much capitalist development, but too little.” Even the environment, she argues, is better protected by private ownership than by collective ownership, because shared resources get overused while owners have reason to maintain what they own.

Her most consequential distinction, the one she leans on most later, is between inequality and poverty. Material inequality, she argues, matters only when it leaves someone deprived. The rich pulling further ahead of the poor is acceptable to her, as long as those at the bottom are still rising. This distinction enables her to target unmet financial need while remaining untroubled by inequality itself.

Cudd is no free-market absolutist. She maintains that capitalism “requires restraint and intervention if it is to be justifiable.” The real task, she argues, is to reform it, not to defend it as it is. Her reconciling line unifies her position: market conviction and correction as one commitment, not two.

Her critic, Nancy Holmstrom, gets the last word in the volume, and it is worth taking seriously. Holmstrom’s objection is that Cudd reasons from an idealized capitalism. Defending the system as it could be, she says, leaves the system as it is unchallenged. Her deeper objection is that while sexism and racism can in principle be eliminated from capitalism, class division cannot, because it is “constitutive of the system.” That is the fault line: Cudd wants fair footing and a fair race; the socialist wants the hierarchy itself abolished. The divide between those two is the divide between Cudd and the left.

Her 2017 chapter “What Is Equality in Higher Education?” brings this philosophy to academia. She begins with the principle that everyone is entitled to an adequate education. Beyond that minimum, she accepts inequality if it serves three social goods: flourishing lives, collective provision, and democratic participation. Elite institutions and some degree of meritocracy, in her view, are acceptable. Her main critique concerns merit-based financial aid, which she regards as a zero-sum competition that weakens the system. She advocates replacing it with need-based aid and outcome-focused rankings. Notably, the passage about admissions weighing “cultural competence” for an “elite leadership group” is often misattributed to her. In context, she is summarizing Elizabeth Anderson’s argument, not her own. Her core proposal is to shift from merit-based to need-based aid. She would attempt to implement this policy five years later at Pittsburgh.

Kansas: When Theory Becomes Method

At Kansas, she began applying her scholarship to the structural barriers she saw around her. In 2002, while co-chairing a state task force, she pointed out that Kansas women were better educated than men yet rarely reached management positions. The barrier was structural: a shortage of affordable childcare, not a failing of the women themselves. In 2004 she made a similar argument about the faculty tenure clock, which forces women to build a career and raise children at the same time.

While overseeing the women, gender, and sexuality studies program, she established a graduate degree using existing faculty and no new state money. It was an early example of an approach she would repeat: expanding programs by repurposing what she already had. In 2013, as the university’s first vice provost for undergraduate studies, she institutionalized this approach. It consisted of early-alert flags in course software, referrals to advising and federal college access (TRIO) programs, and a deliberate focus on first-generation, low-income, and minority students. She framed it as data-driven rather than market-driven. The method is informed by her scholarship: find a patterned disparity, measure it, and intervene before students leave.

In 2013, as KU touted its economic impact to state legislators, Cudd pointed to what the argument overlooked. The value of the humanities, she noted, defies any economic measure. Left out of a case built on dollars, they could eventually lose their funding, unless faculty spoke up for them. She called KU’s humanistic tradition a strength worth preserving. Boston, however, would show the other side of her.

Boston: Representation as Institutional Design

Cudd arrived at Boston University in 2015 as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. She was tasked with setting priorities across a college spanning everything from nuclear physics to 17th-century poetry, and with a stated pledge to diversity. She pursued it through strategic planning. After convening a task force and a diversity planning committee, she defended a diverse faculty on three grounds: “reasons of justice, reasons for good education, and reasons for innovative thinking.” The first is the one everyone expects. The other two, that diversity improves teaching and makes the institution’s ideas more original, are the argument she makes for treating a diverse elite as a public good, not only a matter of fairness.

At Boston, the humanities defender from Kansas became the administrator who had to weigh a program’s cost. In December 2015, Cudd barred the small, internationally admired Editorial Institute from admitting new doctoral students and convened a review committee. She called it a one-year hiatus rather than a closure, and said she was “fully supportive of the work” of the Institute. Its co-director, the T.S. Eliot scholar Christopher Ricks, resigned in protest; scholars and publishers wrote to her, asking her to reconsider. Faculty interpreted the decision as a lack of support for an expensive humanities program.¹ The decision was clear: a dean who defended the humanities in principle applied enrollment and cost criteria to one of its programs in practice. It is the first apparent contradiction between her principles as a philosopher and her goals as an administrator.

Pittsburgh: The Philosophy in Practice

In 2018, Cudd was named provost at Pittsburgh, an institution finally large enough to turn the whole of her scholarship into policy.

The strongest case is financial aid. The Pitt Success Pell Match, which she championed, put substantial university money behind students with demonstrated need. A year in, it helped more than 5,000 students at a cost of around $25 million and, by her account, improved retention by three points. Her reason was that the university had “a retention and, frankly, a graduation issue” rooted in unmet need. This is the argument from her 2017 chapter “What Is Equality in Higher Education?” put into practice: fund need instead of merit, and the competition gets fairer. Test-optional admissions followed from the same principle. She argued that standardized tests measure access to test prep as much as ability. ReSTART, the revenue-sharing budget model she introduced, applied the same approach institution-wide. It pushed authority and accountability down to deans and units so they could fund their own priorities. She defended it as “best practice” for a research university.

The Pittsburgh diversity record is often misinterpreted. Pitt’s anti-racism work did not originate with Cudd. It came largely in response to organized pressure. The Black Action Society and 17 other groups, along with the African American Alumni Council, presented the university with a documented record and a list of demands. Black students were about 5 percent of undergraduates, down from roughly 14 percent in 1979. The organizations asked Pitt to reverse a four-decade decline, with a target of 10 percent within five years.

The organizations also demanded an anti-racism course, which Cudd approved. She described it as making the curriculum “more engaged and inclusive to the Black narrative.” Her account of retention pointed to belonging, inclusive classrooms, and, again, affordability. Cudd worked from a theory of structural inequality. The students’ demands gave it a specific problem to address, and she translated it into a racial-equity program.

Her early pandemic decisions demonstrated the same priorities. Within days of the shutdown, she permitted students to switch courses to satisfactory/no-credit grading, protecting their transcripts and degree progress. She also co-signed a joint objection, with other provosts, to Trump-era visa rules that put international students at risk.

On labor, theory and practice diverge. Cudd’s own 2011 scholarship treats labor unions not as an expression of worker solidarity but as a market correction, a “reasonable remedy” for the power a sole employer holds over workers. Yet as provost she presided over an administration that spent more than $3 million on union-avoidance counsel since 2016. Though the institution had traditionally engaged in such practices, spending under $9,000 in a typical year, by 2019, as the unionization fight peaked, the administration had spent more than $1 million. It was only after the faculty prevailed in their union election that the spending fell back. Pitt’s disclosures itemize the spending but do not show that Cudd personally authorized it.

This spending drew objections. In 2020, graduate students petitioned Pitt to redirect the money it “planned to spend on union avoidance” toward emergency aid. When the faculty union did bargain, the main demand was a $60,000 minimum for the instructors who represented two-thirds of the teaching force. In 2018, Cudd’s administration had questioned whether a faculty union was even needed. During a bargaining impasse, she listened to protesting faculty through an intercom rather than meeting them. She said the rules barred her from discussing negotiations. The union, pointedly, turned her own “Year of Emotional Well-Being” theme into a slogan against her. The contradiction is more specific than “diversity champion versus union-buster”: a provost whose own theory treats collective bargaining as a legitimate market-failure remedy, nevertheless presided over an administration that resisted it.

At Pittsburgh, the English Language Institute shared the same fate as the Editorial Institute. It was to close in 2023 due to declining enrollment. By the department chair’s account, Cudd “initially signed off on the closure” while trying to make it “the least disruptive as possible.” After a student petition and a six-page letter to Cudd and the dean, the institute won a one-year reprieve. This was what she had done at Boston: professed support, least disruption, and a rationale of enrollment and cost. By itself, the closure was a defensible administrative decision. Enrollment had fallen, money was tight, and any provost might have made the same call. Nothing in her philosophy resisted the closure. A framework for making competition fair has no principle for saving a program that cannot compete.

Rearranging the Hierarchy: Fair Competition and Its Limits

What is the common thread of this philosopher who defends capitalism, becomes a dean who promotes faculty diversity, and then serves as a provost who closes programs and resists a union? The answer is the difference between what she pursued and what she merely managed. The commitments she pursued all point one way, toward access, mobility, representation, recruitment, and student success. Need-based aid, test-optional admissions, retention analytics, cluster hiring, and the anti-racism curriculum are the policies she pursued across her career. On the other side are faculty employment and the preservation of specific academic programs. For these, the questions are about viability, cost, enrollment, and restructuring. This is where her actions regarding union spending, the Editorial Institute, and the ELI belong.

Both sides follow from a single principle, maintained from 2011 onward: she never argued against competition, only that it must be fair. That is what makes them coherent rather than contradictory. Correcting the rules of the game is the intervention her framework demands. That means removing the merit-aid distortion, the testing barrier, and the disadvantages of income and race that keep qualified students out. But the existence of competition, of an elite, of winners and losers among programs and workers, is something she accepts as legitimate. Her endorsement of Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” and her explicit acknowledgment in the Equality chapter that her own preferred policies “would probably also decrease the number of viable institutions” are not asides. They reflect the same disposition that lets her close a program with professed regret. The line she draws is between correcting competition and abolishing it, and she invariably sides with correcting.

She summarized her argument in a single sentence: capitalism “requires restraint and intervention if it is to be justifiable.” Substitute “the university” for “capitalism” and you have her entire administrative philosophy. The university becomes a competitive, hierarchical institution, made fair by correcting specific failures, not by leveling outcomes. The same principle spans her academic career, from the 2007 sport metaphor to the Pittsburgh policies. She developed these ideas as a scholar, then implemented them as an administrator.

Holmstrom’s objection points to a limit in Cudd’s equity of representation, which measures fairness by who is admitted and who is hired. That is a real and demanding commitment, but one about access and representation. Her framework prioritizes access and recruitment, but treats the stability of existing faculty and programs as a separate question. It leaves that question to cost and viability, not to equity. Consequently, what appears to be a clash in values is consistent within her own framework. A provost can diversify the student body while her administration resists the faculty union, or defend the humanities in principle while closing a humanities program, without any inconsistency in her own terms.

Representation diversifies who stands where in the structure; it does not make those lower in it any less precarious. If class hierarchy is, as Holmstrom argues, constitutive of the system, then fair competition and need-based correction leave the pyramid intact. They rearrange the hierarchy without flattening it.² On that reading, Cudd’s equity is genuine but limited. It extends to access and representation, and it ends when protecting the vulnerable (untenured faculty, a small program’s staff) would require constraining competition rather than correcting it. That is not a personal failing; it is the predictable blind spot of a liberal-institutionalist, and readers should weigh it as such.

None of this is to say Cudd invented the pressures she managed. She governed under a decades-long strain on public higher education that she did not create and could not escape, a strain of declining state support, enrollment volatility, and the rankings arms race.³ The question the record raises is not whether she caused those conditions, but how she responds to them: whether liberal-institutionalism is a way of resisting the market-based university or a way of administering it more fairly.⁴

Coda: Open Questions at Portland

Cudd left Pittsburgh in 2023 to become president of Portland State University, an urban-serving public institution very different in character from the elite research universities where her model took shape. Nothing in the pre-Portland record settles what she will do there, and this profile makes no prediction. But it does suggest what to watch.

Her framework raises pressing questions about a place like PSU. A liberal-institutionalist committed to fair competition and need-based access has an obvious agenda at an access-mission university. But she also faces a clear pressure point, because such institutions are defined less by competition for scarce elite places than by the survival of programs and the security of those who staff them.

The same philosophy that produced Pell Match also produced the ELI closure. The question is whether, at an institution whose whole purpose is to serve first-generation and working-class students rather than to select an elite, Cudd’s instinct to correct competition can coexist with the distinct imperative of protecting what the market would cut. That is the question the record leaves open, and the one worth following.

Notes

1. A student leader described the administration’s reasoning in blunt terms of viability. That job-placement rationale was the student’s paraphrase, not Cudd’s own.

2. This line of critique holds that a politics of representation can diversify an elite while leaving intact the class structure beneath it. Adolph Reed Jr., “The Limits of Anti-Racism” (Left Business Observer, no. 121, September 2009), and Class Notes (New York: New Press, 2000), argues that anti-discrimination and diversity aims, pursued on their own, make the distribution of places within a hierarchy fairer without challenging the hierarchy itself. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus (New York: Routledge, 1997), distinguishes a politics of recognition from a politics of redistribution and warns that gains in the first can come at the expense of the second. Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), makes the structural version of the argument: class is not another axis of identity to be equalized but the constitutive relation of capitalism. The point is structural rather than biographical: it concerns the reach of the liberal-institutionalist framework, not the sincerity of Cudd’s diversity work.

3. See also, on the conditions themselves, Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos (New York: Zone Books, 2015), on the remaking of public institutions and their subjects by neoliberal reason, and Christopher Newfield, The Great Mistake (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), on the defunding and marketization of public higher education. Both describe conditions under which public universities have operated in this period; they are cited to ground those conditions, not to settle whether Cudd’s framework resists or administers them.

4. This profile’s thesis is an interpretive synthesis, well-supported across her writing and decisions, but stated outright by no single source, and offered as the most coherent account of the evidence rather than the only possible one.

Sources Consulted

A note on sources: newspaper and wire articles were retrieved through the ProQuest U.S. Newsstream database; each is cited to its original outlet with the ProQuest document number given for retrieval. Cudd’s books and book chapters are cited to the printed editions. This list reflects the verified sources on which the profile draws; it omits unverified material and sources outside the pre-Portland scope.

Books and Book Chapters

Cudd, Ann E. Analyzing Oppression. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Cudd, Ann E. “For Capitalism as a Feminist Ideal and Reality.” In Capitalism, For and Against: A Feminist Debate, by Ann E. Cudd and Nancy Holmstrom, 3–130. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Cudd, Ann E. “Ann Cudd’s Reply to Nancy Holmstrom.” In Capitalism, For and Against: A Feminist Debate, by Ann E. Cudd and Nancy Holmstrom, 263–288. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Cudd, Ann E. “What Is Equality in Higher Education?” In The Equal Society: Essays on Equality in Theory and Practice, edited by George Hull, 267–289. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017.

Holmstrom, Nancy. “Nancy Holmstrom’s Reply to Ann Cudd.” In Capitalism, For and Against: A Feminist Debate, by Ann E. Cudd and Nancy Holmstrom, 289–322. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Kansas Era (2002–2015)

“Report Shows Kansas Female Workers More Educated but Paid Less.” Lawrence Journal-World (KRT wire), November 22, 2002. ProQuest doc. no. 461992028.

“Kansas Women Faculty, Students Face Hard Choices between Career and Family.” Lawrence Journal-World (KRT wire), April 2, 2004. ProQuest doc. no. 463709605.

“Women’s Studies Wants Name Change.” Lawrence Journal-World (McClatchy wire), November 4, 2007. ProQuest doc. no. 463718489.

“Meet Kansas University’s Deans.” Lawrence Journal-World, August 16, 2008. ProQuest doc. no. 238801006.

“Regents Approve Advanced Degrees in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at KU.” Lawrence Journal-World, November 18, 2010. ProQuest doc. no. 806225988.

“University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy to Give Inaugural Lecture.” Targeted News Service, December 7, 2012. ProQuest doc. no. 1238809011.

“KU Names Three New Distinguished Professors.” Lawrence Journal-World, June 19, 2012. ProQuest doc. no. 1021104298.

“KU Moving Faster Now on Online Education.” Lawrence Journal-World, April 28, 2013. ProQuest doc. no. 1346556218.

“KU to Choose among Internal Candidates for New Vice Provost Job.” Lawrence Journal-World, June 13, 2013. ProQuest doc. no. 1367254067.

“KU Picks Longtime Philosophy Professor to Oversee Undergraduate Education.” Lawrence Journal-World, July 11, 2013. ProQuest doc. no. 1399474509.

“Touting Its Economic Impact, KU Skips over the Humanities.” Lawrence Journal-World, November 4, 2013. ProQuest doc. no. 1448339065.

“Professors Ask Regents to Suspend Social Media Policy.” Lawrence Journal-World, January 9, 2014. ProQuest doc. no. 1476251618.

“KU’s Core Curriculum Entering Its Second Year.” Lawrence Journal-World, August 24, 2014. ProQuest doc. no. 1555604048.

“Eastern Kansas Universities Work to Improve Retention and Graduation.” Lawrence Journal-World, January 3, 2015. ProQuest doc. no. 1641713703.

“Four Are Finalists for UF Liberal Arts Dean.” Gainesville Sun, January 30, 2015. ProQuest doc. no. 1649637433.

“Kansas Professor Speaks about Women and Capitalism.” Radford University / Targeted News Service, April 8, 2015. ProQuest doc. no. 1671163546.

“BU Announces Ann Cudd as New CAS Dean.” Daily Free Press (University Wire), May 30, 2015. ProQuest doc. no. 1684366604.

“KU Vice Provost Leaving for Dean’s Job in Boston.” Lawrence Journal-World, June 10, 2015. ProQuest doc. no. 1687288250.

Boston University Era (2015–2018)

“Announcement: Ethical Leadership MOOC.” Targeted News Service, March 3, 2016. ProQuest doc. no. 1770438265.

“Success Rate of Earning Bachelor’s Degree Depends on Family Income.” Daily Free Press (University Wire), April 22, 2016. ProQuest doc. no. 1783521857.

“Small but Acclaimed BU Institute Fears for Its Future.” Boston Globe, July 6, 2016. ProQuest doc. no. 1802057046.

“Small Institute Fears BU Is Targeting It.” Boston Globe, July 7, 2016. ProQuest doc. no. 1802114389.

“Student Curriculum Committee Forum Discusses Gen-Ed Program.” Daily Free Press (University Wire), October 5, 2016. ProQuest doc. no. 1825710721.

“Stan Sclaroff Named Interim CAS Dean.” Daily Free Press (University Wire), September 5, 2018. ProQuest doc. no. 2099901417.

University of Pittsburgh Era (2018–2023)

“NYC Company, Pitt Extend Experiment to Cut Intro Course Prices.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 8, 2020. ProQuest doc. no. 2334118994.

Simonton, Justin. “Pitt Challenging National Merit-Aid Trend.” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, March 8, 2020. ProQuest doc. no. 2373439577.

Schackner, Bill. “Pitt Gives Students Option to Forgo Letter Grades.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 22, 2020. ProQuest doc. no. 2380537960.

Nigrosh, Benjamin. “Nearly 800 Pitt Grad Students Sign Petition Demanding Funding Extension.” The Pitt News (University Wire), June 26, 2020. ProQuest doc. no. 2417234592.

“’Embarrassing’: Black Student Leaders Criticize Low Black Student Enrollment.” The Pitt News (University Wire), August 26, 2020. ProQuest doc. no. 2437089722.

“’They Wanted to Be Seen’: African American Alumni Council Discusses BAS Demands, Racial Justice Efforts.” The Pitt News (University Wire), October 23, 2020. ProQuest doc. no. 2453654361.

“Pitt Submits Document Opposing Proposed DHS Visa Rules.” The Pitt News (University Wire), November 11, 2020. ProQuest doc. no. 2459130487.

Schackner, Bill. “Emphasis on College Entrance Tests Declining.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 2, 2021. ProQuest doc. no. 2557160037.

Hagen, Lacretia. “Pitt Faculty Choose Union in a Landslide.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 20, 2021. ProQuest doc. no. 2583327917.

“Exclusive: Gallagher Reflects on Tenure, Decision to Step Down.” The Pitt News (University Wire), April 21, 2022. ProQuest doc. no. 2656347355.

“Finalist: Let’s Restore Value of College Degree.” Wisconsin State Journal, May 5, 2022. ProQuest doc. no. 2659531580.

“Ann Cudd Talks Free Speech, Revenue at Chancellor Search Q&A.” The Badger Herald (University Wire), May 4, 2022. ProQuest doc. no. 2659474987.

“Faculty Assembly Talks Community Engaged Scholarship, New Budget Model.” The Pitt News (University Wire), May 18, 2022. ProQuest doc. no. 2665429594.

“University of Pittsburgh Makes SAT, ACT Optional through 2025.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 6, 2022. ProQuest doc. no. 2721509622.

Troy, Jack. “Solidarity, Serenity and Slow Negotiations: Faculty Look Back on Year since Unionization.” The Pitt News (University Wire), October 28, 2022. ProQuest doc. no. 2729537527.

Schackner, Bill. “Pitt Faculty Members Protest Slow Contract Talks.” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, December 7, 2022. ProQuest doc. no. 2747785672.

Schackner, Bill. “Pitt to Close English Language Institute.” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, January 10, 2023. ProQuest doc. no. 2763185932.

Troy, Jack. “Pitt’s Spending on ‘Union Avoidance Firm’ Slows, but Reaches $3M.” The Pitt News (University Wire), January 18, 2023. ProQuest doc. no. 2766302977.

Schackner, Bill. “Fate of Pitt’s English Language Institute Remains Uncertain.” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, January 18, 2023. ProQuest doc. no. 2766605116.

Schackner, Bill. “Cudd One of Two PSU Presidency Finalists.” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, February 24, 2023. ProQuest doc. no. 2779828841.

Schackner, Bill. “University of Pittsburgh Provost Ann Cudd Leaving for Portland State.” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, March 10, 2023. ProQuest doc. no. 2785535620.

“English Language Institute Remains Open for Another Year, Though Its Future Is ‘Unknown.’” The Pitt News (University Wire), March 30, 2023. ProQuest doc. no. 2792250276.

Aiken, Anya, and John Tomasic. “High Court Rejects Race in College Admissions.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 30, 2023. ProQuest doc. no. 2831170556.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The class has been warned before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The drive home from Talent.

His first year.

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

Swimming lessons, which never took.

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

The Oregon coast.

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

Snow one winter, leaves the next.

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

Barkdays, holidays, Santa, and bow ties.

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

Afternoons, among the books.

The contortionist at rest.

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

His people.

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

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

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

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

The proof, circled in yellow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bruce Liemsidor and author, Venice, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOURCES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Price of Expulsions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forms of Political Entry

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

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

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

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

TDU and Deep Entry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Presence of Accountability

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

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

Endotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 2011 Rupture

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

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

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

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

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

Who Was in the Room

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

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

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

Coordination, Privatized

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

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

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

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

Accounting for the Alliance

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

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

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

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

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

The Witness

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Substitutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Ironic Defense

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not “doing the right things.”

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

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

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

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

A University in Decline

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

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

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

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

A Decade of Building

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

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

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

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

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

A Choice, Not a Necessity

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Map

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

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

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

The Math

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

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

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

The Landscape

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

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

The Cycle

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

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

What to Watch

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Echoes of 1997

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

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

From Citizens to Human Capital

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

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

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

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

A Receipt, not a Fix

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

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

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

The Austerity Reflex

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oregon’s Shock Doctrine

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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