Three Minutes
On a Friday morning in late January, I walked past a group of faculty in red AAUP hoodies rallying on the wet brick outside the Academic and Student Recreation Center. Someone held a megaphone. Cardboard signs read “Cutting Programs Means Cutting People” and “Working Conditions = Learning Conditions.”
Inside, the room was already packed, people seated shoulder to shoulder, some holding handmade signs in their laps. I found a seat and waited for my name to be called. I had prepared testimony for the Portland State University Board of Trustees—the first meeting of 2026—and I had three minutes to deliver it. Three minutes to distill 23 years at this institution, the students I advise, the program I coordinate, the courses I’ve watched disappear from the schedule days before a term begins. Three minutes, and a warning from the new board chair: if anyone runs over, the people at the end of the list won’t speak.
Before public comment began, Trustee Marisa Madrigal delivered the land acknowledgment. She told the story of her ancestors in central Mexico, the children and grandchildren of those who survived the fall of Tenochtitlan, forced into colonial boarding schools, made to learn the Latin alphabet. Most pre-Hispanic documents were burned during the Conquista. But those young people took the system forced upon them and used it to secretly transcribe their people’s history, calendar, and cosmology in Nahuatl, while elders who remembered were still alive to speak. Madrigal called it a race to capture knowledge and evade erasure. Four hundred years later, she said, she could hear her ancestors’ words in their language, in her ears, as if they were speaking directly to her.
I thought about that phrase—the race to capture knowledge and evade erasure—more than once as the morning unfolded.
The board had business before it opened the floor. Antoinette Chandler, the former chair, had resigned after leaving Portland, and the body needed to elect new officers. What should have been procedural became something else. Trustee Vicki Reitenauer, voting against the vice chair nomination, cited an incident at the April 2025 meeting where a trustee’s conduct during public comment caused harm. “Representation isn’t everything,” she said, “but it is something, and it’s something important.” Trustee Randall Desmont, also voting no, pointed to the trust gap revealed by the campus climate survey: a 21-point racial inclusion gap among administrators, deep skepticism from students and faculty about institutional direction. “Our success is contingent on us narrowing that trust gap,” he said. “How we do our business communicates powerfully.”
The nomination passed. Two no votes. Two abstentions. I watched from the audience and recalibrated my remarks.
Then the chair opened public comment, and one by one, people stepped to the microphone.
Bill Knight, president of PSU-AAUP, went first, citing the board’s own financial presentations. He called PSU a “shocking outlier” among the top 50 metro areas in enrollment at public four-year institutions. He noted the university still lacks recruiting agreements with Portland Public Schools and Portland Community College. “Cutting PSU in this moment,” he said, “is an act of self-immolation that makes none of this better.”
Katie Van Heest, an adjunct professor and union bargaining team member, told the board that adjuncts teach more than a third of PSU’s credit hours. She asked: “Will we continue to see PSU repeatedly making ill-considered choices that waste resources and squander the talent and programmatic excellence we already have here?”
A janitor named Demarie read a statement by his coworker, Christopher Williams, who cleans the dorms. Williams wrote about carpets more than 20 years old in high-traffic areas, about underpaid custodial staff who quit within months because the wages can’t hold them. “As a floor technician,” he wrote, “I can’t magically fix what has long been dead.”
And then there was Tien Ong, who has worked at the University Place Hotel for 18 years, since 2008. He was told in 2024 that the hotel might close. He still hasn’t been told what happens to his job. His interpreter relayed his concerns to the board, and then Ong spoke for himself briefly: “I work hard. You understand.”
The board’s policy is to respond to public comment in writing after the meeting ends.
I was sixth on the list. In 23 years, I had never testified before the board. This time I couldn’t sit and watch.
I introduced myself — 23 years at this institution, coordinator of a graduate program serving working adults in the College of Education. Then I made my case.
Portland State educates the students who keep Oregon running. Nearly half transfer from community colleges. Forty percent are the first in their families to attend college. Many are working adults, caregivers, veterans, career changers, balancing jobs, children, and coursework.
“For a working parent who arranged childcare, a canceled course means lost wages,” I told the board. “For a first-generation student who planned their pathway term by term, it means a degree that slips further out of reach.”
I said that lawmakers recognized Portland State’s unique role when they designated it Oregon’s Urban Research University, and that the designation rings hollow when a student’s required course disappears days before the term begins. I asked the board to put students first — stable course pathways, transparent financial data, meaningful faculty input before programs are eliminated.
Then I heard three words: “You’re at time.”
I had one sentence left. The sentence was: Portland State students deserve better.
After a ten-minute break, President Ann Cudd delivered her report. The language changed. Where public commenters had spoken about carpets that couldn’t be cleaned, courses that vanished, jobs with no answers, the president spoke of “academic portfolio rebalancing,” “operational excellence,” and “implementation planning.” She described the PIVOT process, the Plan for Institutional Vitality and Organizational Transformation, and announced that March would mark the shift “from study, reflection, and analysis to implementation planning.” By pairing programs and operations “that are not serving us,” she said, the university could work toward its vision “rather than drowning in deficits and distractions.”
Matt Chorpenning, presiding officer of the Faculty Senate, offered a different frame. He noted it was a National Day of Action against ICE raids. He asked the board a question he said was not rhetorical: Does this board regard fascism as an emergency? And he said something that has stayed with me: “I don’t believe it is right to look at some numbers and say there are too many employees at PSU without trying to understand who they are and what they do.”
The financial data presented later told a grim story. Total student FTE has fallen 22.5 percent over five years. Credit-hour production is down 27 percent from pre-pandemic levels, equivalent to $65.5 million in foregone tuition revenue. If nothing changes, the university could burn through $60 to $100 million in reserves over three years. For the first time since 2012, state appropriations to PSU declined—not because the state cut higher education, but because PSU’s share of graduates is shrinking relative to other Oregon universities.
These are the conditions under which a janitor reads his coworker’s testimony, a hotel worker asks whether he’ll have a job, an adjunct demands a fair contract, and a professor with 23 years at the institution gets three minutes and doesn’t finish.
I keep returning to Madrigal’s story: the ancestors who took a system imposed on them and used it to transcribe what they knew before it was gone. They couldn’t have known whether their effort would matter. They did it anyway, because putting knowledge on the record is itself a form of resistance. The university’s own motto asks us to let knowledge serve the city. Madrigal’s ancestors understood what that cost.
That’s what public testimony is. You step to the microphone. You say what you came to say. You get cut off, or you don’t. The board responds in writing, later. The decisions are already in motion. But the record exists, and the voices are in it.