A Philosopher's Obligation
When a scholar of resistance becomes an agent of austerity
When Portland State University’s Board of Trustees named Ann E. Cudd as its 11th president in March 2023, the appointment arrived with a distinct promise. PSU had not simply hired another career administrator, but a foundational figure in analytical feminism. In her landmark study, Analyzing Oppression, Cudd theorizes how institutions coerce the vulnerable into participating in their own subjugation. As a philosopher, she has argued for decades that the oppressed have a moral obligation to resist.
Two years later, the PSU Vanguard, the university’s student newspaper, ran an editorial titled “Ann Cudd (Not) for President.” The Philosophy Department, her own discipline, was among the hardest hit by her budget cuts, with three teaching faculty members terminated in a single round. Beyond the department, the administration’s credibility faltered when an independent arbitrator ruled that the university had violated its labor contract with faculty. A campus climate survey confirmed a deeper rift, revealing that students did not feel respected, and faculty lacked trust in the administration’s direction.
Cudd’s own scholarship was designed to expose precisely these types of institutional contradictions.
The Scholar
Cudd’s best-known contribution to the field, Analyzing Oppression (Oxford University Press, 2006), asks a question that refuses an easy answer: if there is no natural hierarchy among human beings, why does subordination persist across generations? Her answer is unsettling. Oppression endures because it is embedded in institutional structures that maneuver the vulnerable into making choices that perpetuate their own subjugation. She called this “oppression by choice” in a 1994 article of the same name. The mechanism is insidious because it disguises the coercion. When individuals make rational decisions within a rigged system, the coercion becomes invisible not only to observers but often to the oppressed themselves.
Her framework classifies oppression into material, economic, and psychological dimensions. She is particularly attuned to indirect forces, the institutional structures and social norms that channel behavior without the appearance of overt compulsion. Her theory insists that any adequate understanding of oppression must account for these dimensions simultaneously. This leads to her most demanding conclusion: that all persons bear a moral responsibility to resist oppression wherever they encounter it.
Beyond individual oppression, Cudd co-edited Theorizing Backlash: Philosophical Reflections on the Resistance to Feminism (2002), which examined how progressive social movements encounter institutional resistance. Her contribution analyzed how sexual harassment operates as “protected speech” in academic settings, documenting the mechanisms by which institutional power structures shield abusive behavior behind procedural and legal principles.
In Capitalism, For and Against: A Feminist Debate (2011), co-authored with Nancy Holmstrom. Cudd defended capitalism as potentially liberatory for women, arguing it could provide a path out of traditional roles and poverty. But even her defense of capitalism was conditional, premised on the idea that institutional protections against exploitation and inequality must accompany market systems. She did not argue for capitalism as creative destruction, nor that market logic should override the democratic and social missions of institutions. Her defense of capitalism was a defense of regulated markets within a framework of justice, not a license for austerity imposed from above.
By 2019, Cudd had moved from analyzing institutional power to prescribing how it should be used. In an article published in the Journal of Social Philosophy, “Harassment, Bias, and the Evolving Politics of Free Speech on Campus,” she argued that university administrators and faculty “can and should support progressive change in other ways that challenge entrenched understandings of academic freedom and tradition to bring about social transformation and serve the evolving social missions of universities.” She described the university community as uniquely positioned to improve society.
Her presidency must be judged by her own framework.
The President
Ann Cudd arrived at PSU in August 2023, inheriting an institution in financial distress. Enrollment had declined roughly 30 percent over the preceding decade, revenues were falling, and costs, particularly personnel costs, continued to rise. No one disputes the severity of the problem. A 2024 financial analysis by Eastern Michigan University accounting professor Howard Bunsis, commissioned by PSU-AAUP, confirmed that PSU faced fiscal pressures. But the same analysis found that the university’s actual operating cash flows remained positive year after year, that reserves were growing, and that the administration’s projected deficits consistently overstated the institution’s financial jeopardy. A 2024 state evaluation of PSU found that spending on institutional support (executive, legal, financial, IT, and administrative functions) had grown at double the rate of total operating costs, increasing from 7.1 percent to 9.5 percent of total spending. On a per-student basis, administrative spending had doubled. This was the reverse of the national trend.
The question was never simply whether to cut, but what to cut, how to cut it, and who decides. On these questions, Cudd’s scholarship should have shaped her presidency. Instead, she did the opposite.
The first test came in her decision to eliminate PSU’s Intensive English Language Program, which led to the layoff of 12 faculty. The faculty union disputed the necessity, noting that the program’s net revenue was trending upward. More troubling was the process: faculty learned of the elimination on the same day they were scheduled to provide input on the university’s strategic plan. The Faculty Senate formally opposed the cut. The administration proceeded anyway.
When a scholar who has written extensively about institutional coercion and the importance of democratic participation overrides the deliberative bodies of her own institution, the dissonance is hard to miss.
Then came December 2024. Seventeen non-tenure-track faculty received termination letters. Among the departments most severely affected was Philosophy. Angela Coventry, chair of PSU’s Philosophy Department, told the Board of Trustees that the loss of three teaching faculty “irreparably harms our students and contradicts PSU’s mission to provide accessible, high-quality education.” The Vanguard noted the irony: a president with as deep a background in philosophy as Cudd’s had subjected the Philosophy program to cuts so severe they threatened its long-term viability.
The cuts were part of Cudd’s “Bridge to the Future” plan, designed to close an $18 million budget deficit. The plan identified faculty reduction and course restructuring as its primary mechanisms, with PSU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences targeted for up to $7 million in cuts. The humanities and liberal arts, which Cudd had described as essential to the social mission of universities, as she argued in her 2019 article, were the first to absorb the losses.
The faculty union fought back. PSU-AAUP filed a grievance alleging the administration had violated the collective bargaining agreement, arguing that the university had not followed the contractually required procedures for layoffs driven by budgetary need. In November 2025, an independent arbitrator agreed, finding that PSU had failed to adhere to its contractual obligations. The arbitrator noted that budgetary concerns were “stamped on virtually every piece of evidence” in the case. Yet the administration had chosen a contract clause designed for curricular changes rather than the clause governing economic layoffs, which requires a more deliberative process and faculty involvement. The arbitrator ordered reinstatement of the 10 affected faculty and full back pay.
Cudd’s administration then attempted to resist the binding arbitration decision, prompting an open letter from more than 200 PSU faculty and staff, as well as condemnation from state and national labor leaders who warned the university was undermining collective bargaining itself. The administration relented in January 2026, but Cudd’s statement was revealing: she maintained that the layoffs were “necessary and appropriate” and “implemented in good faith,” even as she conceded compliance with the arbitrator’s order.
By fall 2025, the financial picture had worsened. Enrollment fell another 2 percent, with out-of-state students dropping by nearly 9 percent. Cudd announced a new plan to cut $35 million over the next two years under the framework she called PIVOT, the Plan for Institutional Vitality and Organizational Transformation. PSU-AAUP’s president, Bill Knight, warned that Cudd’s no-growth plan is based on a “false assessment of the market” and that continued austerity narratives would accelerate institutional decline. The campus climate survey confirmed what faculty had been saying: there was a severe disconnect between the university’s senior leadership and the faculty, staff, and students who teach, research, and study there. Eighty-three percent of students felt respected by faculty and staff; only 60 percent felt the same about administrators. Faculty reported a lack of trust in the administration’s direction.
The Contradiction
A sympathetic reader might object: doesn’t a budget crisis suspend philosophical commitments? If the state has disinvested from higher education, if enrollment is falling, if the Board of Trustees demands a balanced budget, then perhaps Cudd is herself constrained, coerced even, by forces beyond her control. Perhaps she is as much a victim of the structure as the faculty she is cutting.
The objection is fair, but Cudd’s own theory answers it.
In Analyzing Oppression, Cudd is clear that the most dangerous form of oppression operates through economic forces that exploit people’s own rational choices, concealing the coercion from those who suffer it and from sympathetic observers. The manager who implements layoffs because the budget demands it is not exempt from Cudd’s framework. She is, in Cudd’s terms, perpetuating oppressive structures through individually rational choices made within a coercive institutional environment. The theory does not give administrators a pass because they face constraints. It identifies that pass—“I had no choice”—as the ideological mechanism by which oppression reproduces itself.
The evidence suggests Cudd did have choices. Administrative spending at PSU grew at double the rate of total operating costs. The arbitrator found that the administration chose the wrong contract clause, a faster and less inclusive process, when a more consultative one was required. The Faculty Senate opposed cuts that the administration implemented over their objection. These are not the actions of a leader with no options. They are the actions of a leader who chose efficiency and unilateral power over deliberation, administrative convenience over shared governance, and fiscal targets over the democratic processes she had championed in her scholarship.
Now consider the situation at Portland State through Cudd’s own lens. Faculty are told that layoffs are the rational response to budget realities. Programs are told they must demonstrate their financial viability through contribution margins or face elimination. Workers are informed that their terminations are “necessary investments in key programs.” Each individual—each faculty member contemplating early retirement, each department chair scrambling to justify headcount, each student accepting larger class sizes—makes an individually “rational” choice within a structure that narrows their options to the point of coercion.
This is, almost textbook, what Cudd describes as “oppression by choice”: a system that disguises its own force by making the victim the author of their own subordination.
The language of fiscal sustainability performs this function. “Bridge to the Future,” “PIVOT,” “institutional vitality”: these phrases naturalize what are, in fact, political choices about who bears the cost of institutional change. The 2019 Cudd urged university leaders to “challenge entrenched understandings” and serve “evolving social missions.” The 2024 Cudd implemented a top-down austerity that reinforces them. In Theorizing Backlash, Cudd examines how institutional power structures resist progressive movements. Her own administration's initial defiance of a binding arbitration ruling provides the case study. And when she argues, as she does throughout her career, that all persons have a moral obligation to resist oppression, she provides the philosophical justification for the faculty protests, union grievances, and public demonstrations that have defined her tenure at PSU.
Coda
Cudd’s scholarship makes claims about institutional power and the moral obligations of those who wield it. Either those claims are true, in which case her administrative conduct at PSU stands indicted by her own framework, or they were never sincerely held, and the scholarship was an intellectual exercise disconnected from the business of governing.
Neither conclusion is flattering.
A third possibility is more unsettling: that Cudd holds her philosophical commitments, but the transition from scholar to administrator may have produced exactly the kind of adaptive preference formation she warns about in her own work. The demands of a Board of Trustees, the logic of budget spreadsheets, and the political economy of higher education funding—these have restructured her own choices in ways that her theoretical framework would recognize as coercive.
If so, she would be, by her own definition, participating in the perpetuation of the structures she spent a career working to dismantle. And her own theory would insist that she has a moral obligation to resist.
Faculty at Portland State have been doing exactly that. They have filed grievances, organized pickets, testified at Board meetings, written open letters, and fought for the contractual rights that protect academic labor. They have done what Cudd’s scholarship says the oppressed must do.
The question that remains is whether the philosopher-president will ever read her own work again—not as a text to be taught, but as a roadmap to follow. Until then, the obligation belongs to those who do.
Ramin Farahmandpur is a Professor of Educational Leadership & Policy at Portland State University. He writes at Academic Gadfly.