Ever wonder what makes PSU’s academic leaders tick? What books line their shelves, what inspired them to pursue their field and what visions they have for PSU’s future? Inside Portland State’s new “Deans Decoded” series takes you behind the scenes into the offices of Portland State’s distinguished deans. Join us as we decode the personalities behind the titles, one dean at a time.
Dean Youde joined Portland State University from the University of Minnesota Duluth, and brings a wealth of knowledge and a global perspective to the College of Urban and Public Affairs (CUPA).
For Dean Youde, international politics isn’t just about policies and institutions. It’s about the real-world impact on people’s lives, grounded in a belief that global challenges require collaborative solutions.
His journey from researcher to dean was driven by a commitment to fostering an academic environment where students critically engage with global challenges and develop the tools to lead, advocate and create meaningful change.
Under his leadership, CUPA is becoming a place where knowledge meets action and where future leaders learn to navigate and shape an increasingly interconnected world.
Inside Portland State’s Ruben Gill Herrera sat down with Dean Youde to chat about his background and the things he’s looking forward to at PSU. Watch the video or read the full interview below to learn more.
RGH: Hey, Dean Youde. How do you start your day?
JY: I usually start my day pretty early, around 5:30 in the morning. I've got two Labradors who like to wake up and eat breakfast about that time, so we get up, we have breakfast and then I take them for a nice walk through the neighborhood. They get a chance to sniff all the good smells and I get a chance to get myself mentally ready for the day before I come onto campus.
RGH: Nice, nice. And what was the last book you read?
JY: I'll give you two books. The first one is “The name of this band is R.E.M.” R.E.M. was the first band I ever really loved, and I never got a chance to see them live. This was a really neat chance to read about them, their development as a group and learn that they were actually pretty good people who altogether really made a dramatic impact on music.
The other was a book called “Challenger” by Adam Higginbotham, which is about the explosion of the Challenger shuttle in the mid-1980s, and it was one of the most gripping books I've ever read. I still have visceral memories of seeing that happen on TV. To just read about everything that went into that accident was heart-pounding in a remarkable way.
RGH: Can you tell us something about PSU that you didn't know before coming in?
JY: I knew about the farmer's market, but don't think I really appreciated how big and incredible it is on Saturdays. You have blocks of the Park Blocks just taken up with all these vendors, great produce and all this incredible agriculture that we have in this area. Really on a Saturday, there's nothing better than walking around with some pastries and some coffee, getting a chance to see all these vendors and making up all these ideas about how we might be able to mix and match things. It's become one of my favorite things to take visitors to go see, and it blows most other farmer's markets I've had a chance to visit away.
RGH: Do you have a small or big family?
JY: I come from a rather large family. I'm the third of nine kids. When we all get together now, between spouses and kids and things like that, there's about 40 of us. So we don't all get together that often. But now, it's just me and my partner and our two dogs so it's a little bit of the opposite end of the spectrum.
RGH: How do you spend your free time?
JY: A lot of it is exploring this new city that I get to call home. I like to be outside as much as possible. I've discovered that Portland, as many of you probably already know, is an incredible running city. There are great paths for biking. I've been able to do some really nice hiking with my dogs through Forest Park and other areas. I haven't been kayaking or stand up paddleboarding yet on the Willamette, but I've heard that that's really nice in the summer so I'm looking forward to doing that.
RGH: Where did you grow up?
JY: I grew up in a town in northeastern Iowa. It's a town of about 30,000 people called Cedar Falls. One of the best things about it was that it was the home of the University of Northern Iowa so I got a chance to spend time in the library up there and get to take classes when I was still in high school and really start my own intellectual journey while I was still growing up there. I still get to go back every so often. My mom and some of my siblings still live there.
RGH: Can you tell us a bit about these robots?
JY: These robots here, it's just a little robot parade to hang out. There's something that's just fun about their construction, the different sorts of designs. There's this fun sense of both optimism and pessimism that comes into robots and some of the anxieties and the opportunities that play into science fiction, particularly around the middle part of the 20th century. Some of them wind up a little bit, some you can make move and sometimes if I'm a little bored or I just need a little break, I can move the robot parade around and restage them as I need to. No research that I've done about it but I grew up watching Star Trek and a lot of mid-20th century science fiction, and it inspired a lot of my own interests in international relations and how groups work together. So it helped influence the sort of work I do today, and there's a certain optimism when you're going through whatever the world is going through to know, "Hey, there's still some possibility here. There's still a lot of good that's happening."
RGH: What are you most excited about right now?
JY: I am so excited about all the incredible changes and opportunities that are happening here in Portland. We are a few blocks away from City Hall and we have just seen this complete transformation of Portland City government. You walk around the downtown area and you can see that Portland is on the verge of this incredible renaissance and coming into its own again. To know that I get to work with all these incredible students, staff and faculty who are smart and committed to these sorts of public policy challenges that we face here in Portland. That's the sort of thing that gets me up every morning at 5:30. To be able to tackle that challenge and find new ways that we can partner with community partners, we can think about the offerings that we have and how we can contribute to the larger community as a whole.
RGH: Who has inspired your career most in life?
JY: There are two people that were probably the most inspirational in my career so far, both of whom were former teachers of mine. The first one was Steve McCrea. He was one of my high school teachers. And Bob Grey, who was my advisor throughout my entire undergraduate experience, from the day I arrived on campus until the day I graduated. What I valued so much about both of them was that they encouraged me to explore connections, to seek out innovative ways of linking different areas that might seem like they don't always go together, to try out new ideas, to be willing and ready to fail, to dream big and to really put my heart and soul into the work that I do. I'm really fortunate that I was able to dedicate some of the books I've written to both of them and send them copies so they could see the effect that they had on me 20 or 30 years after I had been in the classroom with them.
Dean Youde with his undergraduate advisor Bob Grey
RGH: Can you tell us a bit about the books you've written?
JY: I've written five books so far and I've edited another three. Most of them are related to issues around global health and global health politics. Ultimately, I'm interested in these questions about how we foster cooperation on these issues that require some sort of cooperation. No country's going to be able to address the challenges that global health faces on their own. We have to find ways to cooperate, but sometimes our structures don't really work together to do that. The books that I've written have looked at various elements of where that cooperation has or hasn't happened, but then also tried to look at what are the things that we could do to try to help promote that cooperation. That's become an issue that has obviously risen to the forefront of the political agenda much more so in the past 7 to 10 years than it had been previously, but it remains just as pressing today as it was at the height of the COVID pandemic or with the Ebola outbreak, and before that, all the other health challenges that we faced.
RGH: What's your favorite thing on your desk or in your office?
JY: My favorite thing on my desk right now would be this little eraser, which at one point I swear was a pink eraser. This is an eraser that my AP psychology high school teacher gave me. Everyone in the class got one of these erasers right before we took the AP psychology exam. In very faint letters now it's got the date, AP psychology B squared, because that's what we called our teacher, Charles Blair-Broeker. It was something that he gave us as a way of remembering that even if we make mistakes, we can go back, we can correct those mistakes to not get ourselves too stressed out, too overworked, as we were going into this exam. I did well with the exam and decided, "You know what? This is a bit of my lucky totem," if you will. It has gone with me pretty much everywhere since that day, coming up on 30 years. It has gone with me when I was abroad in Zimbabwe, when I moved to Australia, as I've moved from Iowa to Vermont to New York to California to Minnesota, and now out here to Oregon. I've always had this lucky eraser with me because it's a nice sense of grounding for me and it helps to keep me centered when sometimes things are challenging or overwhelming.
RGH: Is there anything that we missed today that you would like to mention?
JY: I'm just super excited to be part of the PSU community and part of this institution. I'd known about CUPA for a good 10, or 15 years before I even had the opportunity to apply for this job, and when it came open, I had a few people reach out and say, "This seems like the sort of place that would be for you." Now having been here for a few months, I'm like, "Oh, this is definitely a good place to do work with some really good people."
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity by Brianna Vasquez
Photography by Jeremy Chun Sajqui