Five Moves
On the rhetoric of managed decline
This is the second essay in a series on Portland State University’s fiscal crisis. The first, “Austerity Recursion,” named the self-generating loop by which austerity cuts produce the conditions that require more cuts. It is available at academicgadfly.substack.com.
On March 16, 2025, Andrea Johnson, Vice President of Finance and Administration at Portland State University, stood before a special meeting of the Faculty Senate, the university’s elected faculty governing body, and delivered what she described as a presentation of “objective financial reality.”
She had slides. She had compound annual growth rates. She had three scenarios rendered in color-coded bars: optimistic, pragmatic, and severe. She had, above all, a vocabulary: structural, mechanical, baseline, trajectory, posture.
The presentation lasted nearly an hour. It was an authoritative performance. It was also a recognizable genre. Call it the rhetoric of managed decline. It belongs to a tradition classicists called epideictic: speech that does not invite deliberation but performs a community’s values and conditions as foregone, asking the audience to ratify rather than deliberate. It is performed in proceedings like this one at public universities across the country whenever enrollment has fallen, reserves are depleted, and the administration has already decided what must be done.
Move One: The Passive Voice of Inevitability
Johnson’s presentation removed agency from every sentence that implied a choice. Consider the sequence she offered. The deficit is structural: it inheres in the institution itself rather than in anyone’s decisions. Enrollment has declined without a subject, as if students simply evaporated. State support has contracted with no agent attached, as if funding levels were a natural condition rather than a legislative choice. Personnel costs are outside our control, placing the largest line item in the budget, 82 cents of every operating dollar, beyond the reach of institutional choice by a single prepositional phrase. Each sentence is grammatically constructed to prevent a follow-up question about who did what.
The vocabulary reinforces this grammar. Johnson’s presentation repeatedly used the word ‘trajectory’: enrollment trajectory, expenditure trajectory, fiscal trajectory. The word implies destination without decision, a path no one in the room chose. That is the posture the vocabulary was designed to produce.
Move Two: The Scissors Effect as Misdirection
The scissors effect, as Johnson described it, was a chart: two lines, expenditure rising and revenue falling, crossing to produce the deficit. The slide showed the deficit. It does not show who caused it. The scissors metaphor is a rhetorical choice: it makes the mismatch between revenue and costs appear as a natural outcome rather than the outcome of decisions made over time. Revenue and costs move in opposite directions, the lines cross, and the institution faces a structural deficit.
Johnson attributed the revenue decline to enrollment loss and shrinking state support, both treated as external forces. The presentation did not address the years of underinvestment in advising, recruitment, and transfer infrastructure that drove the enrollment collapse: Portland State and Portland Community College, the university’s primary feeder institution, did not sign a formal memorandum of understanding to streamline transfer pathways until October 2025, by which point enrollment had already fallen by more than twenty percent.
Transfer students constituted more than half of PSU’s undergraduate enrollment as recently as 2021–22.
General education requirements, the foundational courses required for all degrees, that created barriers for those students, remained under review by a faculty task force convened in the middle of the crisis. The enrollment collapse was not inevitable. These investments were deferred, year after year.
A presentation that identifies this deficit precisely while remaining silent about its origins is not “objective financial reality.” It is a partial account dressed in the authority of data.
Move Three: Reserves as Rhetorical Object
Johnson was more candid about the reserve than the presentation demanded. Over a decade, she said, PSU carefully built $70.6 million in reserves. In just the last five years, $42.8 million of those reserves were spent, an average of $8.5 million per year, accelerating to at least $12 million this year alone. She presented this depletion as evidence of a crisis requiring immediate action.
Those same numbers tell a different story. The previous round of austerity measures, PSU’s Bridge to the Future, consumed nearly sixty percent of the university’s reserve cushion. Fall 2025 enrollment fell another two percent after those cuts. Out-of-state students, who generate the highest tuition revenue, declined by nearly nine percent. The austerity did not arrest the spiral. Spending reserves on cuts reduced the programs and personnel that generate enrollment, thereby reducing the tuition revenue the reserves were meant to protect against loss. The reserves were spent, and enrollment fell anyway, which led the university to a new and larger deficit requiring a new and larger round of cuts.
Johnson presented each number as a separate fact, but read whole, they describe a loop: the previous intervention failed, exhausted its savings, and left the institution more exposed to the next round of the same cuts. She did not say so.
Move Four: “We Are Not Planning for Permanent Decline”
Johnson’s disavowal came near the end of the presentation. In her words: “We are not planning for a permanent decline. We are ensuring that we remain solvent and capable of thriving when our growth efforts take hold.” The claim was intended as reassurance. It is, in the administration’s own words, an admission.
The mechanism unmasks the admission. The question is not intent. Eliminate programs, and the university becomes less attractive to prospective students. A less attractive university enrolls fewer students. Fewer students mean less tuition revenue. Lower tuition revenue leads to a larger deficit. A larger deficit triggers another round of cuts. This is the loop named “Austerity Recursion” in the first essay in this series. Johnson’s reassurance does not interrupt it.
President Cudd, in her closing remarks, revealed the recursion without appearing to notice it: “Having a separate academic department for general education is simply something we can no longer afford. Who teaches the general education curriculum is a separate issue from the existence of an academic unit.” The institution proposed to eliminate University Studies, the program that coordinates PSU's general education curriculum, while simultaneously promising that enrollment would recover. The promise and the plan cannot both be true.
Move Five: Retrenchment as Agency
Johnson deployed the word ‘posture’ four times in the presentation, always in the same construction: the institution faces a choice between acting and reacting, between directing its own future and being directed by external forces. Retrenchment was framed not as a capitulation to financial pressure but as an assertion of institutional will. In Johnson’s words: “We can either act as architects of our own future or be forced to react to the decisions of external bodies.” The posture disguised a defensive contraction in the language of institutional courage.
This framing works: it converts a defensive contraction into a strategic initiative and allows the administration to present cuts as choice rather than necessity. It is the rhetorical move most difficult to argue against, because the alternative Johnson described (losing institutional autonomy, having an outside consulting firm determine the university’s future, the scenario that befell Southern Oregon University) is worse. The threat is real. The posture argument obscures a simpler question: how many options were exhausted before retrenchment was declared necessary? Southern Oregon went to the Oregon legislature outside the joint lobbying coalition used by Oregon’s public universities and obtained a $15 million emergency appropriation. PSU did not make that request.
Johnson’s presentation described state funding as a mechanical outcome of a formula-based model, as if the formula were immutable and political intervention were unavailable. Cudd acknowledged, under questioning from the Faculty Senate, that advocacy had produced results in previous sessions and that she remained committed to it. The contradiction between that acknowledgment and Johnson’s presentation of state funding as mechanical and fixed is not a minor inconsistency. It is the difference between a constraint and a choice. The word “posture” does not name that difference. It buries it. Kenneth Burke called this identification: the rhetorical act of making an audience feel they share the speaker’s constraints so completely that the speaker’s conclusions appear to be their own.
None of this disputes the $35 million deficit, the reality of the enrollment decline, or the pain of retrenchment. The numbers are real. The crisis is real. The claim that presenting them is a neutral act is not. Every presentation of data is an argument. Johnson’s argument was that the university’s financial crisis arrived from outside, operates by necessity, and admits of only one response. She made that argument for nearly an hour to a room full of faculty and community members who had come to hear about the university's financial condition. They had not been invited to deliberate about it.