The Playbook
The Philosopher Who Learned to Bust Unions
“I think that, all in, they’re doing a good job for us.”
Ann Cudd said this at a University of Pittsburgh Board of Trustees meeting in 2019, defending the university’s expenditure of more than $1 million that year alone on Ballard Spahr, a firm retained during a period when graduate students were moving toward a union recognition election and the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board had charged the university with three unfair labor practices.1
The remark was not a slip. It was a position.
Cudd had built her academic reputation on the study of oppression. Her 2006 book Analyzing Oppression examined how structural forces constrain human freedom and diminish the capacity for self-determination.2 She argued that coercion operates most effectively when it is invisible: embedded in institutions, normalized by routine, disguised as necessity. Applied to her own administrative career, that framework is damning.
When Cudd departed the faculty at the University of Kansas for the dean’s office at Boston University and then the provost suite at the University of Pittsburgh, she underwent a transformation that is now familiar in American higher education: the scholar whose published work analyzes oppression and whose administrative record enacts it.
At Pitt, she did not simply manage a university under fiscal pressure. She managed it against its own workforce in the name of sustainability.
The union avoidance consulting industry is one of the least-examined power structures in American labor relations. Its business model is straightforward: corporations and institutions facing union organizing campaigns pay firms to design and execute strategies to defeat, delay, or dismantle worker collective action. In the private sector, this arrangement is ordinary practice.
Firms such as IRI Consultants, Jackson Lewis, Littler Mendelson, and Ogletree Deakins maintain extensive divisions devoted to what the industry calls “positive employee relations”: a euphemism for ensuring workers never attain the legal standing to bargain collectively.
These firms train supervisors in one-on-one conversations designed to raise doubts about union representation. They produce video content, talking-point memoranda, and captive-audience meeting scripts. They monitor organizing campaigns and advise management on legal thresholds for permissible interference.
The goal is not to address the conditions that prompt workers to organize; it is to ensure that workers lack the structural capacity to do anything about those conditions. The research on the industry’s effects is unambiguous: union avoidance consulting is the single largest driver of declining union density in the United States over the past four decades.
The assumption has long been that public universities occupy a different moral ground. They are publicly accountable institutions that spend public money to serve public missions. The use of union-avoidance consultants in such settings exposes considerable political and ethical risks.
Between 2016 and 2023, as faculty and graduate workers at the University of Pittsburgh pursued collective bargaining rights, the university spent more than $3 million on firms whose primary function was to deflect those efforts. Payments to Ballard Spahr escalated from $20,555 in 2016 to more than $ 1 million in 2019 alone, as graduate students moved toward a recognition election. The university also paid $191,055 to Morgan Lewis & Bockius, a firm that has assisted Amazon, McDonald’s, and other corporations in resisting worker organizing, and $330,160 to Ogletree Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart, retained as legal counsel in contract negotiations with the faculty union. The Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board issued a proposed ruling finding Pitt guilty of three unfair labor practices during the 2019 graduate student election, the period of peak consulting expenditure, to which the university filed a formal exception.
The second instrument was governance itself. As Provost, Cudd oversaw a process in which the Faculty Senate was positioned as an institutional counterweight to the union, not as a parallel democratic body but as a mechanism for diluting collective bargaining claims. Shared governance rhetoric framed union demands as encroachments on faculty self-governance, pitting one faculty body against another.
The practical result was the near-elimination of meaningful faculty participation in institutional decision-making through either channel. The Senate was consulted; the union was contested; and the administration retained effective control over both.
Guided by Provost Cudd, the university—whose mission invoked values of access, equity, and the public good—spent $3 million of public money to block graduate students from unionizing. In doing so, the institution cynically deployed the language of fiscal sustainability when really, it was about protecting its own unilateral power.3
Ann Cudd arrived at Portland State University in August 2023, having tested these instruments at scale. She came speaking the language of collaboration. At her first board meeting, she described a commitment to shared governance and a desire to work with faculty and staff as partners in addressing PSU’s enrollment decline and fiscal challenges.
PSU-AAUP, the faculty union, responded in kind, expressing its readiness to partner with the new president toward a shared future.4 The sustainability of the institution, both sides agreed, required collective effort.
Nonetheless, in the 2024–25 academic year, PSU administration laid off 17 non-tenure-track faculty members. Most taught overenrolled courses. Some had student waitlists. Their positions were eliminated in June. Ten contested the decision. An independent arbitrator found that the university had violated its collective bargaining agreement, failing to demonstrate that the layoffs were required by changing curricular needs, and failing to follow the shared governance procedures specified in the contract, and ordered reinstatement with back wages.
The university’s legal counsel wrote to the union that the arbitrator had exceeded her authority. The university would pay lost wages. It would not reinstate. Only after an open letter signed by more than 200 faculty and staff and public pressure from labor leaders did the university agree to comply.5
Fast-forward to the current academic year. The administration introduced PIVOT (Plan for Institutional Vitality and Organizational Transformation), which is the vehicle for the next phase. Under PIVOT, Cudd has identified nineteen academic departments for potential reduction or elimination, concentrated in the humanities. Three programs are facing proposed closures: University Studies, Conflict Resolution, and Portland Center. Among the departments identified for possible reduction are Educator Licensure and Leadership, Learning, and Counseling, both housed in PSU’s College of Education and serving the teacher and administrator pipeline for Oregon’s public schools.
The university that trains Oregon’s teachers, studies power, and prepares its public administrators has placed those programs on a list of things it may soon abandon. The word that appears in every communication surrounding these decisions is “sustainability.” The cuts are painful but required in the name of fiscal sustainability, a term that essentially metaphorically “green-washes” brutal cuts.
The programs under elimination review are not incidental to equity: they are the curriculum through which students learn to analyze inequality, negotiate conflict, and examine inherited historical conditions. Philosophy, Politics and Global Affairs, Public Administration, History, Conflict Resolution, Women/Gender/Sexuality Studies — these are not supplementary programs for students who have already arrived. These programs serve students who are developing critical-thinking skills to participate as informed, productive citizens.
The pattern is not based solely on fiscal necessity. It is a method of managed participation. Decisions are announced, then retroactively framed as consultative. Governance bodies are notified after the fact and asked to respond within compressed timelines. The union is engaged procedurally, while the substantive parameters of restructuring are fixed administratively.
PSU’s faculty have named the pattern in the only forums still available to them. The Faculty Senate passed a vote of no confidence in the PIVOT program. PSU’s adjunct faculty union has described the administration’s bargaining conduct as reliant on “weaponized incompetence, concern trolling, and good old-fashioned bureaucratic obfuscation.” The vocabulary of workers who have witnessed a recognizable strategy deployed against them is not that of an unreasonable opposition.
Ann Cudd did not invent the union avoidance playbook. She willfully employed this union-busting industry in a public university that, by its own stated values, should have been inhospitable to it. The $3 million spent at Pitt on these shadowy consultants was not an administrative aberration; it was a strategic power play. The dismantling of shared governance as a functional constraint on administrative authority was not an oversight; it was an intended outcome.
What Cudd brought to Portland was not merely an administrative style. She brought a tested strategy for managing institutions facing fiscal stress by foreclosing the capacity for collective faculty response. The strategy rests on a single premise: the university is a managerial enterprise, conceived as a service-delivery platform optimized for measurable outcomes, with academic programs assessed for their alignment with labor-market demand. In that corporate model, shared governance becomes the charade of ratifying decisions already made.
The University Innovation Alliance, founded in 2014, frames its mission as graduating more students, particularly low-income students, from institutions that have “failed” them. Cudd, then Vice Provost at Kansas, served as the institution’s liaison to the Alliance from its inception. The Alliance reframes program cuts as student-centered decisions and financial sustainability as prerequisites for access. It uses the word “equity” the way a demolition permit uses the word “renewal.”6
A scholar who spent a career analyzing how oppression operates through invisible structural constraints now deploys those very tactics in her administration of this university. Sustainability, it turns out, is not a financial condition; it is a political argument she has used at two public universities to make workers’ organized resistance harder to sustain than the institutions those workers serve.
The standard by which her administration’s record must be judged is the one she published.
“Becoming aware of one’s causal role in oppression engenders a responsibility to avoid causing oppression either by withdrawing from or changing oppressive institutions.”
— Ann E. Cudd, “Oppression,” The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2013
Notes
1 When asked by the Pitt News in 2019 about the university’s payments to Ballard Spahr, a firm whose website advertised expertise in “union avoidance training and counseling” and the ability to “work closely with management to design and carry out an effective election campaign,” Cudd called the expenditure “a good use of University funds.” See: Moss, J. (2019, May 14). Pitt paid almost $240K to a “union avoidance” law firm in recent years. The Pitt News. https://pittnews.com. Ballard Spahr payments escalated from $20,555 in 2015 to $144,584 in 2018 and over $1 million in 2019; see also Pitt News, “Pitt’s Spending on ‘Union Avoidance Firm’ Slows, but Reaches $3M,” January 18, 2023, pittnews.com.
2 Cudd, A. E. (2006). Analyzing oppression. Oxford University Press. See also Cudd, A. E. (2005). How to explain oppression: Criteria of adequacy for normative explanatory theories. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 35(1), 20–49; and Cudd, A. E. (2013). Oppression. In H. LaFollette (Ed.), The international encyclopedia of ethics. Blackwell.
3 Primary documentation for the Pitt expenditure figures is drawn from the University of Pittsburgh’s annual financial disclosure reports, as required under Pennsylvania’s Public School Code of 1949. Faculty Assembly minutes from November 3, 2021, and November 30, 2022, document the governance consequences of the union vote in detail, including the pausing of salary equity work, the withdrawal of administrator participation from Faculty Affairs Committee meetings, and the exclusion of bargaining unit members from budget deliberations. University Senate of the University of Pittsburgh, Faculty Assembly Minutes, univsenate.pitt.edu/faculty-assembly. On the governance standstill and union activity, see also: Pitt News, “Faculty Union Members Demonstrate Outside of Provost Cudd’s Office, Push for Job Security,” December 8, 2022, pittnews.com/article/177861; TribLive, “Faculty Union Files Labor Complaint Against Pitt, Alleging It Is Stalling Contract Talks,” November 29, 2023, triblive.com. Tyler Bickford of the Union of Pitt Faculty bargaining committee documented the administration’s refusal to engage on interim governance protocols contemporaneously at pittfaculty.org.
4 PSU-AAUP’s welcoming statement upon Cudd’s appointment is a matter of public record. Oregon Public Broadcasting, “Portland State University Announces Its New President,” March 10, 2023, opb.org. Cudd’s stated commitment to shared governance at her arrival is drawn from contemporaneous reporting of that board meeting.
5 Arbitrator Dorothy C. Foley ruled in November 2024 that PSU had violated its collective bargaining agreement in the 2024–25 faculty layoffs. The university initially refused to comply, with legal counsel arguing that the arbitrator had exceeded her authority. Cudd’s statement upon final compliance read in part: “We believe that the reductions were necessary and appropriate, and were implemented in good faith and in compliance with our collective bargaining agreement. Nonetheless, we’ve decided the best step forward for our campus at this time is to comply with the arbitrator’s order.” Oregon Public Broadcasting, “Portland State Agrees to Reinstate Laid-Off Faculty,” January 15, 2026, opb.org; The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Portland State Pivots, Agrees to Reinstate Laid-Off Faculty Members,” January 14, 2026, chronicle.com. On the PIVOT announcement and nineteen departments, see: Willamette Week, “Portland State University Floats Reductions or Closures of 19 Departments,” March 9, 2026, wweek.com; Oregon Public Broadcasting, “Portland State Declares Financial Crisis, Reveals Plan to Cut or Reduce 19 Departments,” March 9, 2026, opb.org; Oregon Public Broadcasting, “Portland State University Restructuring Moves Forward as Budget Shortfall Widens,” January 30, 2026, opb.org.
⁶ The University Innovation Alliance was founded in 2014 as a consortium of public research universities committed to graduating more low-income students. Cudd served as the University of Kansas’s institutional liaison to the Alliance from its founding, making her a founding participant in its model rather than a later recruit. University Innovation Alliance. (2014). Mission and member institutions.
https://www.theuia.org
Sources
Journalism and Public Record — University of Pittsburgh
Moss, J. (2019, May 14). Pitt paid almost $240K to “union avoidance” law firm in recent years. The Pitt News. https://pittnews.com
Pitt News. (2022, December 8). Faculty union members demonstrate outside of Provost Cudd’s office, push for job security. The Pitt News. https://pittnews.com/article/177861/news/faculty-union-members-demonstrate-outside-of-provost-cudds-office-push-for-job-security/
Pitt News. (2023, January 18). Pitt’s spending on ‘union avoidance firm’ slows, but reaches $3M. The Pitt News. https://pittnews.com
TribLive. (2023, November 29). Faculty union files labor complaint against Pitt, alleging it is stalling contract talks. TribLive. https://triblive.com/news/faculty-union-files-labor-complaint-against-pitt-alleging-it-is-stalling-contract-talks/
Union of Pitt Faculty
Bickford, T. (2022–2023). Bargaining committee updates. Union of Pitt Faculty. https://www.pittfaculty.org/archive-home1.html
Bickford, T. (n.d.). What is in a contract: Governance. Union of Pitt Faculty. https://www.pittfaculty.org/governance.html
Union Avoidance Industry
Barnes & Thornburg. (n.d.). Labor and employment: Union avoidance. https://btlaw.com/en/work/practices/labor-and-employment/union-avoidance
Buer, M. (Host). (n.d.). The shady consultants bosses hire to dissuade workers from unionizing [Audio podcast episode]. The Real News Network. https://therealnews.com/the-shady-consultants-bosses-hire-to-dissuade-workers-from-unionizing
Center for Labor and a Just Economy, Governing for Impact, & LaborLab. (2024, May 28). Spotlight on union-busters: Recommendations to the Department of Labor and Federal Trade Commission. Harvard Law School. https://clje.law.harvard.edu/news/spotlight-on-union-busters-recommendations-to-the-department-of-labor-and-federal-trade-commission/
Labor Lab. (n.d.). Union busting tracker. https://laborlab.us/resource/unionbustingtracker/
McNicholas, C., Poydock, M., Sanders, S., & Zipperer, B. (2023, March 29). Employers spend more than $400 million per year on ‘union-avoidance’ consultants to bolster their union-busting efforts. Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/publication/union-avoidance/
Journalism and Public Record — Portland State University
Lu, A. (2026, January 14). Portland State pivots, agrees to reinstate laid-off faculty members. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/portland-state-pivots-agrees-to-reinstate-laid-off-faculty-members
Oregon Public Broadcasting. (2023, March 10). Portland State University announces its new president. OPB. https://www.opb.org/article/2023/03/10/portland-state-university-announces-new-president-ann-cudd/
Oregon Public Broadcasting. (2026, January 15). Portland State agrees to reinstate laid-off faculty. OPB. https://www.opb.org/article/2026/01/15/portland-state-university-reinstate-laid-off-faculty/
Oregon Public Broadcasting. (2026, January 30). Portland State University restructuring moves forward as budget shortfall widens. OPB. https://www.opb.org/article/2026/01/29/portland-state-university-restructuring-budget/
Oregon Public Broadcasting. (2026, March 9). Portland State declares financial crisis, reveals plan to cut or reduce 19 departments. OPB. https://www.opb.org/article/2026/03/09/portland-state-university-cuts-layoffs-retrenchment/
Willamette Week. (2026, March 9). Portland State University floats reductions or closures of 19 departments. Willamette Week. https://www.wweek.com/news/schools/2026/03/09/portland-state-university-floats-reductions-or-closures-of-19-departments/
Arbitration
Foley, D. C. (2024, November). Arbitration ruling in the matter of PSU-AAUP v. Portland State University. [Independent arbitration decision.]
Cudd — Published Scholarly Works
Cudd, A. E. (2005). How to explain oppression: Criteria of adequacy for normative explanatory theories. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 35(1), 20–49.
Cudd, A. E. (2006). Analyzing oppression. Oxford University Press.
Cudd, A. E. (2011). Capitalism, for and against: A feminist debate (with N. Holmstrom). Cambridge University Press.
Cudd, A. E. (2013). Oppression. In H. LaFollette (Ed.), The international encyclopedia of ethics. Blackwell.