WOKE, BROKE?

Portland State University have long been on our "shake out the suboptimal capacity" list.

Perhaps it's time for Portland State to think about its mission and purpose.  It sometimes gives the impression of being a state-supported version of Brown (or Reed) without the starlets paying bribes to get their underprepared spawn in, or perhaps of Oberlin with a less upscale food court, or perhaps Evergreen State with a broader offering of courses.

That despite, or is it because, of a trolley running through the middle of its student center.  The only sane thing you find in some self-styled progressives is their respect for things that run on rails.

Reality doesn't like it when you're an office for experimenting against it.  "Portland State declares financial crisis, reveals plan to cut or reduce 19 departments."  That's something faculty, everywhere in These United States, dread more than a bad grape harvest in France.  Financial exigency gives senior administrators the opportunity to discharge tenured faculty, without the succour sometimes offered in the form of departmental consolidations.

After months of reviewing the viability of its academic programs, Portland State University is entering the next phase of its effort to achieve financial sustainability.

PSU President Ann Cudd announced Monday that the university will pursue retrenchment, a formal process to downsize the institution.

“I’m taking this step because after reviewing the results of our work, it has become clear that our financial condition is such that departmental reductions or eliminations may be unavoidable,” Cudd said in a morning press conference.

In a letter to leaders of the union representing PSU faculty, the PSU American Association of University Professors or PSU-AAUP, Cudd identified 19 academic departments that could see reductions.

Degree programs in departments like history, philosophy, economics, politics and criminal justice could be affected. The university studies department could be eliminated entirely. The possible cuts range from certificate to doctoral programs.

Portland State is Oregon’s third largest public university by enrollment. The commuter school, located in downtown Portland, is a prominent institution in the state, but years of declining enrollment has plunged PSU into financial chaos.

Retrenchment could have serious consequences for people who teach and learn at Portland State. It’s a mechanism that allows PSU to make sweeping cost-cutting decisions on its workforce and academic programs when the university is under financial hardship.

Eleven years into retirement means I have no familiarity with the economics faculty or their work, although I have trouble recalling anything published out of there that was useful to my research.  "University studies?"  I've long had reservations about anything with "studies" in its departmental name, and "university studies" strikes me, without having to dig too deeply, as a training camp for future deanlets, particularly in those areas subsumable under the rubric of access-assessment-remediation-retention.  That market is drying up, even without those Trumpy yahoos defunding higher education.  The article notes declining enrollments and budget problems at Oregon State and Southern Oregon.  Perhaps that will concentrate some minds.  Oregon's university towns are home to the sort of Democrat-voting-moonbats who dominate urban politics in the Pacific Northwest, and there aren't enough of those to keep Evergreen and Portland State and all the rest enrolled up, but tax-spend-enable dysfunction drives the Normals away, and they might be taking their tuition money with them to the Southeastern Conference.