THE OPEN UNIVERSITY: PORTLAND STATE

Let Knowledge Make the City; Let the City Make Knowledge Free

What are our weaknesses?

We are cash-poor.We have an emerging but not emerged "brand".

We have an increasingly resentful and frustrated bifurcated faculty workforce (TTF and NTTF).

We have uneven practices and visions across the university (this does not have to be a weakness but often is as units work at cross-purposes and fail to leverage overlap).

What are our strengths?

Portland attracts top faculty and draws international students, lifelong learners, and high-achieving students.

Portland supports progressive politics (this means it supports learning and social justice and will organize against labor practices perceived to be exploitative).

Portland encourages a high degree of creativity and experimentation.

We have highly articulate leadership.

What are we not?

We are not an elite university that can tap wealthy alumni and venture capitalists.We lack the brand that leads a person to take a MOOC from a PSU rather than a Yale professor.We are not in Ashland.We are not in Eugene.We are not in Idaho.We are not on the East Coast.

We are Portland State University, which means we are about:

Free inquiry challenging received wisdom/pieties and delighting in creativity

Social justice and sustainability

Fairness and dignity in employee relations

The Pacific Northwest and the Pacific Rim零八宪章!

WHAT'S THE NEW HIGHER ED. PICTURE?

Credentialization is increasingly decried.Online options multiply exponentially (favoring universities with already established "brand").Credits become more and more readily transferrable across different kinds of institutions and organizations.Students require more international experience to prepare for the transformed economy.

Higher Ed. Picture II

Focus on defining and assessing student learning outcomes. Focus off university rankings. Employers want guarantees (badges/certificates) of knowledge/experience. Students can get the more intensive aspects of their learning -- the hands-on experience and in-person collaborations, the small seminar, the lab, etc.-- in cities where they would like to live rather than worrying about whether the school was ranked in the top third or bottom third of the second or third tiers in the 1990s.

This is a rosy picture for PSU. Why?

We embrace the new picture by making it easy for students to design their own education with the most affordable price tag. We play to our strengths (place and ethics). We develop services that help students achieve their credits with a combination of the most credible, cheaper, online versions available and the rest from our faculty who excel in their fields, who identify long-term with PSU, and have earned the academic freedom that fosters innovation.

But how is this possible budgetarily?

If lower-division courses subsidize upper-division courses, if cheaply delivered SCH subsidizes expensive SCH, won't this mean that we are in even worse financial health than we already are?

Not necessarily.

Eliminate existing costs

We eliminate the costs that add up from being a sprawling enterprise that tries to be all things to all people. A workforce that has been created for short-term cost savings but unsustainably, with increasingly emergent costs as this workforce organizes, is replaced by technology and partnerships. We increase enrollments in select areas by aggressively seeking out the international student and the lifelong learner and we create an infrastructure to support these students.

What's the proposal then?

We create an advisory board to work with departments/units/cross-disciplinary combinations to identify areas where we have strength and permanent investment (tenured faculty, for example) as well as a dependence on unsustainable adjunct instruction. We generate concrete, actionable plans to reduce reliance on NTTF instruction by 50% while not losing relationships with any of the students that would have sat in those classrooms.

What is on the chopping block?

Our professional identities. (In practice, this might mean revising tenure and promotion guidelines such that TTF are more directly involved in the work of rethinking PSU and more involved in the services that will be needed to create the infrastructure of student support). Components of, or entire, programs/units where other cheaper but credible opportunities are available for our students.

What is not on the chopping block?

The culture of creative, intellectual, and scholarly freedom that drives innovation, energizes people, and attracts talent.