Onward: Together
Faculty and Staff Convocation, September 23, 2026
Good afternoon and welcome to fall term and the beginning of Portland State University’s next great era.
I hope everyone had a restful and glorious summer and I hope you are all prepared to come together for an engaging and invigorating fall term.
As we ready ourselves to start a new academic year, we find comfort and joy in the constants:
the first signs of fall on the Park Blocks, the smiling faces of our colleagues, the return of brisk mornings and afternoons that are quicker to cool into evening.
But we are also keenly aware that despite this familiarity, PSU is navigating an age of rapid change.
Some of that change has been foisted upon us by external forces — evolving demographics, changing attitudes about the higher education enterprise, skyrocketing expenses, political winds, and other factors.
Some of it, we have taken on in the interest of taking control of our destiny, improving the way this place operates, and — above all and always — creating the clearest and most enriching path for our students.
Navigating change can be exhilarating and it can be exhausting. There are probably 100 other adjectives we could use to describe how we feel about PSU at this moment, but the one I want to offer up to you today is what I feel to my very core and that is: HOPEFUL.
I stand before you immensely HOPEFUL about the future of this institution and our collective capacity to change the lives of our students; bring energy, research and ideas to improve our community; and enrich and support each other as the stewards of this university.
And I am HOPEFUL that the vigorous campus input and collaboration that we saw last year will carry forward as we continue to wrestle with decisions that scaffold the implementation of our Future in Focus strategic plan.
Next week, we will welcome thousands of students back to campus. This includes new students who have never encountered fall on the Park Blocks nor classes with our inspired faculty and it includes returning students who are one step closer to earning their degree and counting on us to get them across the commencement stage.
Among the returning students will be Bri Whitacre and I want to tell you a little about Bri.
In March 2023, I traveled to Portland for the Board of Trustees meeting where I was formally voted in as PSU’s President. After the vote, a press conference, and all the hoopla of Friday, Saturday morning found me up early and wandering the Portland Farmers Market on PSU’s campus. None of the vendors were open yet, but a friendly barista chatted me up and offered to make me a latte.
That barista was Bri Whitacre. Bri is like a lot of PSU’s students. She had collected some college credits from a few different schools but still hadn’t completed her degree. Life got in the way. But as we met and got to talking, she became interested in the idea of coming back to school.
She became a student in our wonderful History department, received her Bachelor’s degree and is returning for her Master’s this fall. Last year she received an award for having the highest GPA in her major and got a kick out of being able to say that she had the highest GPA … IN HISTORY!
In her own words, Bri is both an academic and a bit of a gremlin. She doesn’t hesitate to call out injustices she sees in the world, gets fired up talking about the patriarchy and fiercely defends those who she holds dear.
When Associate Professor Joe Bohling received a layoff notice last May as part of the Preliminary Plan for Article 22, Bri marshalled a Change.org petition to save his position, telling anyone in her coffee line who would listen about his deep expertise in French and European history. She was quite pleased when, thanks to the creative alternatives put forward by the department and the generosity of some of his colleagues, Dr. Bohling’s position was spared.
I mention this as a telling example of how important our faculty are to our students. They will go to the mat for the faculty who open their minds, push their limits, and see their potential. It’s important to keep this in mind as we begin the academic year — each of us has a role to play in the success of our students, we all can have an impact.
Like many of our students, Bri has a deep love for PSU and will go after anyone who tries to put our university in the category of — again, in her words — “a goofball school.”
PSU is no goofball school.
PSU has a tremendously talented set of faculty. Its dedicated staff come to work every day motivated by the university’s mission. When we say PSU changes lives — we know it’s the people, not the institution.
And our students bring with them a rich and inspiring variety of backgrounds. They find their academic footing at PSU — taking opportunities to engage with this great city, and going on to change their own lives, the lives of their families and quite possibly changing the world.
(Bri, by the way, has the dream of founding a think tank focused on matriarchal societies. Now that would be world changing!)
In our pursuit of PSU’s non-goofball future, it is important to remember what our core values are as well as reflect on what we’ve learned over the past few years.
We are Oregon’s Urban Research University, a place where every student develops the knowledge and skills they need to successfully engage in careers and the world.
We are a national leader for social mobility through higher education, a model for serving learners from all backgrounds and a driving force for Portland’s success.
And we are a dynamic workplace that supports the professional development and well-being of all employees.
We harness our academic excellence, innovative research, strategic partnerships and community engagement to address local, regional and global challenges.
Like universities across Oregon and around the country, we are facing uncomfortable financial realities. But we are making progress.
We have made Student Success our priority focusing resources, technology and the sheer will of so many faculty and staff on the job of helping students persist to graduation.
We have joined with our community college partners to ensure that transferring to Portland State is as seamless as possible.
We’re not about to let another university down I-5 that shall remain nameless claim to be “THE transfer university” in Oregon — instead we will EARN that title in the work we do right here on campus, day by day and term by term.
Our effort to enhance the transfer pipeline is bolstered by a modernization of our General Education curriculum that is currently underway under the leadership of the Faculty Senate.
Our program portfolio has undergone the most comprehensive review in recent memory and together we are taking steps to ensure that what we offer meets the needs of our students and the industries and organizations in our region.
And we are doing everything in our power to amp up PSU’s reputation — from seeking investment for enhanced recruitment marketing and student communications, to partnering with the city on a Performing Arts + Culture Center that would bring new life to the performing arts for our city and unprecedented opportunities and resources to our students and faculty. And we are doubling down on partnerships with industry and community organizations in our labs and classrooms.
We are making progress on each of these growth pillars and we are making progress on shrinking our projected $35 million deficit and returning PSU to a state of financial stability.
Through incredible effort, hard choices, and shared discipline across this campus, we have identified savings that reduce our projected deficit to $8.6 million. That’s a lot, but from where we were a year ago, we’re 75% of the way there — and I’m grateful for all the input, expertise and sacrifice that helped get us this far.
Because of our collective hard work, we can approach this final stretch not with panic, but with precision and confidence.
Part of our progress will be dependent on a key strategic initiative that the Task Force on College Restructuring & Engagement will be working on in the coming months: Identifying a future state for our schools and colleges that will better align with our priorities, our mission and the many opportunities that lie before us.
I have charged the task force with landing on a configuration that will galvanize our collective abilities to use our knowledge, innovation and creativity to serve our City and capitalize on multidisciplinary collaboration.
I see a tremendous benefit in bringing together disciplines that inform each other — be it applied sciences and engineering or social sciences and humanities with policy studies — to create distinctive hubs of expertise on campus.
Streamlining our offerings into six degree-granting schools and colleges will create simplified front doors to our programs and brilliant faculty, simplifying the entry points for the civic engagement opportunities and partnerships that bring education to life for our students.
Bringing together synergistic disciplines will spark new ideas for public impact research and set the stage for meaningful contributions to our region.
This fresh approach will create new opportunities to bolster PSU’s brand and new ways to frame our educational and research offerings.
And yes, streamlining our administrative footprint helps keep us on the path to financial stability, ensuring our resources stay where they belong: in the classroom and the lab.
We are building on the PSU legacy of transformational education experiences and of asking the hard questions.
Today and in the future, students will choose PSU for its academics, its research and its identity as a thriving, evolving university that is optimized to meet society’s challenges.
I’d like you to take a pause and look around … Take in this place, these beautiful trees and welcoming buildings … Now look at the faces that surround you … this is the future of PSU.
We are the heroes of our story.
On Friday, I will formally ask the Board of Trustees to approve an investment in a three-year strategic enrollment stabilization and growth plan. That plan is called START | STAY | FINISH.
PSU is woefully behind other Oregon public universities in terms of funding for enrollment marketing. We must correct that inadequacy, burnish PSU’s reputation and more aggressively recruit new students. But that only addresses the “START” portion of the plan.
Turning PSU around is a Whole University Project — especially when it comes ensuring that enrolled students STAY and FINISH.
Every person in this park can contribute — whether that is offering some timely advice to a student, finding and telling positive PSU stories, striking up the next rich research opportunity in our community, or contributing ideas to address barriers that students face in their pursuit of a college education.
Each of us has our own individual expertise and brings a unique world view to this institution and we all have the power to seed positive change.
Collectively, we are the reason that Portland State will never be known as a “goofball” school!
Collectively, we are the ones who will write PSU’s next great chapter.
Collectively, we are the ones who will ensure that every student who arrives on campus next week can find success here.
It is the honor of my lifetime to be able to do this work with all of you and I look forward to the upcoming academic year.
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Now as we move into the awards portion of our afternoon I want to share with all of you a special award that was given to honor a woman who has shaped this university’s destiny like no other, our beloved and recently departed Trustee and President Emerita Judith Ramaley.
On August 20, a few of us gathered at Dr. Ramaley’s home on the South Waterfront to honor her with the inaugural Judith A. Ramaley Award for Excellence in Trustee Service. We talked about her tremendous impact on PSU and raised toasts to the first woman to lead a public university in Oregon when she became PSU president on August 1, 1990.
During that small ceremony, I shared these words that she told Portland’s City Club when they invited her to speak shortly after her arrival at PSU.
She said: “I will leave absolutely no stone unturned to develop the most advanced model of an urban university in this country.”
How’s that for bold? Of course she’s also the woman credited with coining the acronym STEM — for science, technology, engineering and math — which many of us can’t get through a day without saying at least once.
She was a transformative PSU president who left an indelible impression on Portland State, launching our “Let Knowledge Serve the City” motto and cementing our reputation for community-enaged learning.
She was also a personal mentor to me, someone I had looked to for guidance and wisdom since my first years as a faculty member at the University of Kansas.
The evening after we gathered to celebrate her impact, our beloved PSU champion passed away, leaving behind her visionary legacy. We will be finding a time soon to gather as a campus community to celebrate her impact and we have created a web page to collect your memories.
I want to close by saying that when Judith Ramaley stood up in 1991 and promised to build the most advanced model of an urban university in the country, she was facing her own set of headwinds. But she knew then what we know now: PSU doesn't wait for the future — we shape it. Today, as we begin this next chapter, we stand on the shoulders of that bold vision.