The Deficit Behind the Deficit
A faculty member's account of what PSU's Board of Trustees needs to know before implementation proceeds
In February 2026, Portland State University’s Office of Academic Affairs submitted a 66-page report, PIVOT: the Plan for Institutional Vitality and Organizational Transformation, to President Cudd. The report reviewed 293 academic programs and 163 administrative units, assigned each a classification, and projected $18.6 million in cumulative savings toward a $35 million structural deficit. One month later, President Cudd invoked Article 22 of the PSU-AAUP collective bargaining agreement. Article 22 governs financial exigency. Its invocation supersedes normal shared governance and bargaining obligations.
I coordinate the Postsecondary, Adult, and Continuing Education (PACE) program and teach graduate courses in education policy, philosophy of education, and organizational theory at Portland State, where I have been a faculty member since 2002. I read PIVOT as someone who participated in the process it describes, who submitted a self-study, and who observed the university label various programs as “grow,” “sustain,” “revitalize,” “sunset,” and “start,” with preliminary classifications circulating through my college. That review produced program self-studies, unit vitality profiles, and a classification system PSU did not previously possess, assembled under extraordinary time pressure—a record that would not exist without it. What follows is an accounting of what the record omits.
A $16 million question the report does not answer
PIVOT prescribes institutional actions to achieve $18.6 million in cumulative savings. The deficit target is $35 million. The gap between those two figures is $16.4 million, a shortfall of nearly half the required reduction. The report addresses this gap obliquely, through references to “conservative estimates” and the assurance that “actual savings are likely to exceed these projections as additional pathways are developed.” No mechanism is named. No timeline is specified.
Responsible deficit-reduction planning in higher education requires accounting for implementation costs, including severance obligations, teach-out expenditures, legal costs associated with program discontinuation, and accreditation review fees. PIVOT’s financial model considers none of these against the gross savings figures it presents. Research on program elimination in higher education has consistently found that hidden implementation costs substantially erode projected gross savings in the first two fiscal years following closure decisions. PIVOT's financial model presents no net savings calculation, leaving the Board without a reliable estimate of what the institution will actually realize.
Phase 2 savings of $6.4 million depend on “workload management adjustments” and “potential faculty reductions” that the report never establishes as contractually permissible. The invocation of Article 22 in March 2026 is the institution’s own acknowledgment, in contractual form, that a consensual pathway to these savings was not feasible. Board members reviewing PIVOT’s financial projections should understand that those projections depend on extraordinary measures that the report’s collaborative framing fails to disclose. The workforce reductions those measures require carry consequences the financial model does not account for—consequences that are both fiscal and racial.
Equity on paper, silence in practice
PIVOT’s equity commitments are out of alignment with the report’s own appendices. The report repeatedly references PSU’s values of access and inclusion, describes equity-disaggregated student success metrics as a core evaluation criterion, and commits to monitoring equity impacts during implementation—all of which are appropriate for an institution with PSU’s urban research mission and student demographic profile. The appendices, however, show that the institution has not applied these standards to its own restructuring decisions.
The College of Education dean’s reflection in Appendix G states that, given the college’s already small number of Black faculty members, the collective bargaining agreement’s seniority-based layoff sequencing may result in the loss of most Black faculty. The dean’s use of conditional language should not obscure the gravity of the observation. The concern is not speculative. The college’s Black faculty population is already small. The proposed workforce reductions are substantial. The layoff sequencing mechanism is rule-based and predictable. The outcome the dean describes is foreseeable, and the institution has done nothing to address it.
The disparity does not originate with the seniority rule. It originates with the classification decisions that determined which programs would be cut — decisions made by administrators who had access to the college's faculty demographic data and chose not to conduct a disparate impact analysis before proceeding.
The seniority provisions of the CBA exist for important reasons. They remove subjective and potentially discriminatory discretion from layoff decisions, protecting faculty from arbitrary termination. The accountability for what follows does not rest with the agreement. It rests with an administration that designed a restructuring plan producing a racially disparate outcome and declined to acknowledge it.
The PSU 2025 Campus Climate Survey documented a 21-point racial inclusion gap among administrators and a significant trust deficit in institutional leadership direction. No disparate-impact review has been conducted or is planned. The Board should ask, before implementation proceeds, whether an adverse impact analysis has been completed, what its findings are, and what alternative reduction strategies have been considered that would achieve the fiscal goal without producing a racially disparate workforce outcome. That question cannot be separated from the next one: whether the programs the report proposes to eliminate serve public obligations the institution has not analyzed.
Mission alignment ends where the analysis ends.
The report’s internal commitments—teach-out plans, Faculty Senate curricular review—address closure as an administrative process. They do not address it as a regulatory event. PIVOT recommends 71 programs for phased discontinuation, including 17 of 31 programs in the College of Education, 18 of 43 programs in the College of Urban and Public Affairs, and 19 graduate certificates university-wide. For programs in education, public health, social work, and behavioral health, the external regulatory and accreditation dimensions of those closures are substantial.
For the College of Education, program discontinuation triggers review by the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation. CAEP requires institutions to notify the accreditor of significant changes to the approved educator preparation program portfolio, and its standards require that program closures be conducted in a manner consistent with the institution’s accreditation commitments throughout any teach-out period. Oregon educator preparation programs must also maintain approval from the Oregon Teacher Standards and Practices Commission, which conducts its own review of program modifications and closures on a timeline independent of CAEP’s. PIVOT is silent on both requirements. The Board should ask whether CAEP and TSPC have been notified, what their preliminary responses are, and whether the proposed closure timeline is consistent with the institution’s accreditation obligations.
The workforce consequences of the proposed educator preparation discontinuations extend this concern from an accreditation question into a public mission question. Oregon's teacher shortage is extensively documented across state and federal reports. The Oregon Educator Equity Report, published by the Educator Advancement Council in collaboration with the Oregon Department of Education, has documented persistent shortfalls in teacher supply across multiple subject areas and geographic regions, with rural and high-need districts facing the most severe deficits. Oregon already struggles to recruit and retain teachers in special education, bilingual education, and STEM fields. The College of Education’s Sunset classifications are concentrated in graduate certificate and master’s-level programs that serve as direct workforce preparation pathways for candidates entering the classroom. Eliminating these pathways does not simply close programs with low enrollment. It removes supply from a pipeline that the state has identified as critically insufficient.
The analysis stops precisely where the public mission obligation is most acute. The same failure extends to behavioral health and public health. Oregon's behavioral health workforce shortage is on the state legislative record. House Bill 2235, passed by the Oregon Legislature in 2023, declared a state of emergency in Oregon's behavioral health system due to severe shortages of licensed counselors, clinical social workers, and mental health practitioners — a shortage that predated the pandemic and has worsened since. Several graduate certificate programs classified for “sunset” support licensure pathways in these fields. Eliminating them without a downstream workforce consequence analysis is not a mission-aligned decision. It is a fiscal decision dressed in mission language. This oversight, which survived six months of review without correction, is itself a governance question.
Extensive engagement is not shared governance.
What the report calls shared governance was, by its own evidence, consultation with no binding effect. Nearly 200 program and unit self-studies were prepared and submitted. Multi-day working sessions among deans were convened. A newsletter and dedicated website maintained communications across a six-month process. The Transition Monitoring Team provided ongoing feedback to academic leadership.
The report describes this effort as producing “meaningful opportunity to respond,” a phrase that implies faculty input shaped outcomes. The evidence in Appendix G does not support the claim. Of the eleven schools and colleges that submitted reflections, six reported no changes to preliminary classifications following faculty engagement. The dean of the School of Business reports that faculty affirmed all classifications. The MCECS dean reports no changes. The Honors College dean reports no changes. The University Studies Interim Executive Director reports that faculty who suggested alternative classifications were provided with explanations for why the existing ones were correct. Across the entire institution, fewer than ten programs changed classification because of faculty input, a modification rate below four percent.
The faculty engagement process was consultative. Administrative leaders retained decision-making authority throughout. While this may be argued to be a defensible choice under conditions of financial urgency. It is not shared governance. Describing it as such undermines the credibility of the report’s other claims.
What the Board should ask
The $35 million deficit is real. The enrollment decline has been a decade in the making. Difficult decisions about the academic portfolio are unavoidable, and some of PIVOT’s recommendations are sound. The Board’s obligation is not to dispute that judgment but to ensure the plan’s gaps are closed before implementation proceeds.
Four questions deserve answers before the Board endorses implementation.
1. Has an adverse impact analysis been completed for workforce reductions in the College of Education, and what are its findings?
2. Has the institution notified CAEP and TSPC of the proposed discontinuations of educator preparation programs, and what are the accreditation implications?
3. Has the financial model been revised to reflect implementation costs, calculating net rather than gross savings, and does the revised model account for Article 22’s role in achieving projected reductions?
4. For each center and institute classified as Phase Out, has an individualized assessment of external revenue capacity been conducted, or were the classifications applied categorically to units with general fund dependence?
PIVOT produced a planning framework that PSU will use for years to come. The framework’s gaps, however, are not minor procedural oversights. These are failures of the process that promised to deliver sound analysis, and they carry legal, accreditation, and workforce consequences that the Board of Trustees must understand before implementation proceeds.