The Provost’s Report

The Rhetoric of Managed Decline

Discourse, Crisis, and the Production of Consent

Between October 2025 and February 2026, the Portland State University Provost delivered four oral reports and one written report to the PSU Faculty Senate. Individually, each reads as a routine administrative update. Read in sequence, they constitute a sustained rhetorical campaign to manage faculty perception during the most significant period of institutional restructuring in Portland State’s history. This analysis examines those reports not for what they announced but for how they framed, deflected, deferred, and contained.

The material context is severe. PSU’s enrollment has fallen 23 percent since 2019-20. The pragmatic budget scenario projects a $42 million annual deficit by 2028-29. Reserves that peaked at $125 million are on track to fall below the university’s safety threshold within 2 years. The administration’s response is PIVOT (Program Inquiry and Viability Organizational Taskforce), a framework that classifies every academic program as Grow, Sustain, Revitalize, or Sunset, with implementation planned for the next fiscal year. The financial crisis is real. But a crisis can be narrated in more than one way, and the narration shapes what appears possible in response. This essay is about the narration.

The analytical foundation draws on five bodies of critical scholarship whose concerns converge on a single question: how do institutions maintain legitimacy while pursuing agendas that contradict the commitments on which that legitimacy is based?

Norman Fairclough’s (1992) three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis provides the method. Fairclough distinguishes among the text itself, the discursive practice through which it is produced and received, and the larger social practice it serves. His framework directs attention to what is stated, the institutional conditions under which it is produced, and the power relations the discourse sustains. Two of his concepts are central here: selective recontextualization, the strategic repositioning of elements from one context into another to alter their meaning, and significant absence, the recognition that exclusion from a discourse shapes meaning as forcefully as inclusion. Fairclough shows how the language works. He does not explain why it succeeds.

For that, the analysis turns to Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) theory of hegemony. Hegemony, for Gramsci, operates not through coercion but through consent: dominant groups maintain power by presenting their worldview as common sense, as natural and inevitable rather than political and contestable. Gramsci also introduces the concept of the war of position, the contest waged within institutions by subordinate groups seeking to challenge hegemonic framing from the inside.

Naomi Klein (2007) would recognize what comes next. Crises, she argues, are not merely responded to but exploited to advance changes that would be impossible under normal deliberative conditions. Compressed timelines, urgency, and disorientation are the instruments.

Sara Ahmed (2012) names the mechanism: non-performativity. Institutional speech acts perform the appearance of commitment while substituting for the actions those commitments would require.

Finally, Wendy Brown’s (2015) account of neoliberal rationality extends Gramsci’s theory of hegemony into the contemporary university. Brown identifies the particular form that hegemonic common sense now takes in higher education: market logic applied to domains that previously operated on different principles. Brown also offers de-democratization, the process by which democratic institutions retain their formal structures while losing their substantive capacity.

That is the framework. Now the reports.

The Metaphorical Structure

October 2025: Scrappiness as Virtue

The Provost’s first report of the academic year invokes the concept of “scrappiness” to describe PSU’s institutional identity. The language is not neutral. Brown’s analysis of neoliberal rationality helps explain what this language does: the internalization of market discipline as institutional character. To be “scrappy” is to accept resource deprivation not as a policy failure but as a badge of identity. It transforms structural underfunding into cultural distinction, foreclosing the question of why resources are scarce. The Provost does not ask faculty to endure austerity; she asks them to celebrate it.

The October report also introduces a pattern that will recur across all five months: the celebration turn. Updates on program eliminations or budget reductions are followed immediately by announcements of small victories, grant awards, or community partnerships. This is selective recontextualization: the strategic placement of elements that, in combination, redirect attention from systemic contraction to individual resilience.

November 2025: The Jigsaw Puzzle

I was in the room for the November report. It is the most emotionally laden of the five. Delivered in person at the moment when PIVOT self-study instructions had just gone out, and data was arriving late, it opens with an extended acknowledgment of faculty exhaustion and emotional toll. This is a non-performative preamble: the speech act of recognizing pain substitutes for the structural act of addressing its causes. Having performed empathy, the Provost proceeds to the central metaphor.

The jigsaw-puzzle metaphor presents institutional restructuring as an assembly problem. It presumes that all the pieces exist, that they belong to a single coherent image, and that the task is to fit them together. This framing does two things. First, it legitimizes the restructuring by presenting it as already containing its own solution. Second, it positions the Provost as the assembler, the figure who sees the picture on the box, while faculty contribute individual pieces. The metaphor forecloses the possibility that the picture itself is wrong, that the pieces do not fit, or that the puzzle was designed without consulting those who must assemble it. Anyone who has assembled a jigsaw puzzle knows the first thing you need is the picture on the box. Faculty were not given the box.

The November report closes with a quotation from Nelson Mandela. The moral authority of the source displaces the politics. To question the Provost’s framing after a Mandela quotation is to appear not merely skeptical but ungracious. It is difficult to raise a point of order after Nelson Mandela.

December 2025: The Strategic Absence

In December, the Provost submits only a written report and does not appear before the Senate. The written report is brief, procedural, and stripped of the metaphorical elaboration that characterizes the oral presentations. This absence is significant. Fairclough’s distinction between discourse as text and discourse as practice directs attention not only to language but to the conditions of its production. The December absence occurs at the precise moment when PIVOT Track 1 classifications are being finalized, and faculty anxieties are at their highest. The Provost’s physical absence removes the Q&A session, the one moment in the Senate’s ritualized structure in which faculty may press for specifics. The written report, by contrast, cannot be interrupted. That is the purpose.

An anonymous faculty question submitted during the December meeting asks directly whether the administration is pursuing “managed decline.” The question names what the Provost’s rhetoric has worked to obscure. This is a moment of resistance to the urgency frame: the questioner refuses to accept the premise that contraction is inevitable and instead names it as a choice.

January 2026: Corrective Lenses and Ayin Tova

The January report introduces the most elaborate metaphorical framework of the series. The Provost describes her recent cataract surgery and uses it as an extended metaphor for institutional vision. She asks the faculty to see each other with “ayin tova,” the Hebrew concept of the “good eye.” The metaphor performs a telling transfer: the problem of institutional restructuring becomes a problem of perception. If faculty cannot see the value of PIVOT, the issue is not with the process but with their eyes.

The call to see with a “good eye” functions as an invitation, as Ahmed calls it, to inhabit the institution’s self-image. Faculty who decline the invitation, who insist on seeing what is before them rather than what the institution wishes them to see, are positioned as the ones who cannot see. The corrective lens metaphor turns dissent into diagnosis: critical faculty do not have a different perspective; they have impaired sight.

The January report also includes a PIVOT Track 1 update in which the Provost notes that programs have been reviewed by “four to five academic leaders” and that “nothing is finalized.” A faculty question asks whether athletics is subject to PIVOT review. The Provost responds that athletics is reviewed through a separate NAAR process. The logic of financial accountability applies to academic programs but not to the unit whose budget is most opaque and whose contribution margin is most questionable from an academic mission lens. Faculty are asked to justify their programs with self-studies written on four-week deadlines. Athletics is asked nothing. The football team, it appears, does not require a self-study to demonstrate its contribution to the academic mission. The asymmetry is not an oversight; it is the clearest expression of which institutional values PIVOT protects (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004).

February 2026: Walls and Bridges

The final report in this series introduces the metaphor of walls and bridges. The Provost acknowledges the PSU Climate Survey’s trust gap, commemorates two deceased colleagues, announces that ten non-tenure-track faculty are returning after the arbitration ruling, and provides PIVOT Track 1 and Track 2 updates. She closes with a quotation from Martin Luther King Jr.

The walls-and-bridges metaphor is the most politically calculated of the series. It concedes the existence of division (walls) while positioning the administration as the builder of connections (bridges). Faculty who maintain their objections to PIVOT are implicitly figured as wall-builders, obstacles to institutional progress. Gramsci’s war of position is visible in reverse: the administration claims the terrain of reconciliation, leaving opposition with no rhetorical ground from which to operate except refusal.

The faculty representative on PSU’s Board of Trustees intervenes during the February meeting to disrupt this framing. She challenges the relationship between PIVOT classifications and the ongoing General Education revision, exposing what Fairclough calls an incoherence in the discursive practice: two parallel restructuring processes operating on the same programs with different logics and different timelines, neither acknowledging the other.

What Is Not Said

The systematic omissions across the five reports are as revealing as the rhetorical strategies. The Provost’s reports do not mention the April 2025 vote of no confidence in the Bridge to the Future plan. They do not acknowledge that PIVOT is the second attempt at the same restructuring, rebranded after the faculty rejected the first attempt. Klein’s framework suggests this is not oversight but method: each failed iteration generates the next crisis, which justifies the next attempt. They do not provide contribution margin data for individual programs, despite repeated faculty requests. The HECC report’s implications for governance accountability, and the arbitration ruling ordering the reinstatement of laid-off Non-Tenure Track faculty—these go unaddressed, except obliquely in February, when the Provost announces the return of “ten NTT faculty” without acknowledging that their departure was itself contested.

Fairclough’s concept of significant absence applies. What is excluded from a discourse is as constitutive of its meaning as what is included. The omission of the no-confidence vote removes from the discursive field the fact that the faculty has already rendered judgment on the administration’s restructuring logic. The omission of contribution margin data removes the empirical basis for faculty to evaluate which programs are financially viable and which are not. The omission of the arbitration ruling removes evidence that the administration’s previous personnel decisions were found to violate contractual obligations. Each absence limits what can be said in response to the Provost’s framing.

The Faculty’s Counter-Rhetoric

Individual faculty interventions in the Senate meetings mount tactical challenges to the administration’s discursive dominance from within the institution’s own governance structures.

The faculty trustee’s question about the relationship between PIVOT classifications and the General Education revision exposes a structural incoherence that the Provost’s metaphors cannot contain. If programs are being evaluated for elimination under PIVOT while they are being redesigned under Gen Ed revision, the two processes operate on contradictory logics. The Provost’s response does not resolve this incoherence; it defers it.

The anonymous December question about managed decline names the policy that the Provost’s rhetoric has carefully avoided naming. By asking directly whether the administration is pursuing contraction as a strategy rather than responding to it as a crisis, the questioner reframes the entire conversation. If decline is a crisis, faculty can only react. If decline is a policy choice, faculty can demand a different one.

The PSU-AAUP president's invocation of the “death spiral” reframes the Provost’s celebration turn. Whereas the Provost narrates selective achievements as evidence of institutional vitality, the AAUP president identifies a structural dynamic in which enrollment decline, program cuts, and reduced course offerings compound. It replaces the Provost’s pastoral imagery with the language of system failure.

The faculty trustee’s direct statement to the university president, “I’m having trouble believing you,” is the most critical faculty speech act in the five-month sequence. It refuses the performative frame entirely. Whereas the administration’s rhetoric assumes its speech acts are received as good-faith communication, the faculty trustee’s intervention withdraws that assumption. It names the credibility deficit not as a difference of perspective but as a failure of institutional trust.

Conclusion: The Senate as Therapeutic Community

The Provost’s central rhetorical achievement across these five months has been to redefine the Faculty Senate’s function. The Senate’s constitutional role is deliberative: it exists to evaluate, debate, and render judgment on academic policy. The Provost’s reports, through their combination of empathy preambles, celebration turns, quotation shields, and transparency performances, have steadily repositioned the Senate as a therapeutic community, a space in which faculty pain is acknowledged, resilience is celebrated, and collective grieving substitutes for collective decision-making. The Senate has not voted on this redefinition of its function. It was not on the agenda.

Brown’s analysis of de-democratization in neoliberal institutions exposes what is at stake. The formal structures of shared governance remain intact: the Provost still reports to the Senate, faculty still ask questions, and committees still meet. But the substantive content of governance has been displaced. The capacity to shape institutional direction through deliberation rather than respond to administrative initiatives is gone. The question is not whether the Senate has authority but whether the conditions under which it exercises that authority have been structured to render its authority procedural rather than substantive.

The faculty’s counter-rhetoric suggests that the displacement is unfinished and contested. The faculty trustee’s interventions, the AAUP president’s death-spiral framing, the anonymous December question, and the persistent demand for contribution margin data each represent moments in which faculty reclaim the Senate’s deliberative function. They refuse the therapeutic frame and insist on the evaluative one.

The governance question for the coming months is whether faculty will evaluate the PIVOT process on the quality of its metaphors or on the merits of its evidence. The Provost’s rhetoric has been designed to make the former feel like the latter. The faculty’s task is to insist on the difference. Programs have been classified for potential elimination. Faculty lines are at stake. Students are making enrollment decisions based on a catalog that may not exist next year.

That charge has never been more urgent than it is right now.

References

Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.

Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Zone Books.

Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Polity Press.

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell Smith, Eds. & Trans.). International Publishers.

Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. Metropolitan Books.

Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Portland State University Faculty Senate. (2025–2026). Provost’s reports to the Faculty Senate, October 2025–February 2026. Portland State University.