Portland State Will Lay Off 36 Employees, Close 2 Departments

Portland State University President Ann Cudd announced Tuesday that the university will close two departments and lay off 34 full-time faculty members and two full-time academic professionals as part of its plan to address a projected $35 million budget shortfall over the next two years. Its faculty union, the PSU–American Association of University Professors, has negotiated with administrators in recent months to shrink the number of layoffs and said it will continue to push back against the cuts.

The two departments earmarked for closure in the earlier “provisional plan”—university studies, Portland State’s general education department, and conflict resolution—will be shuttered, Cudd said during a press conference Tuesday. Other faculty jobs will be eliminated from the Portland Center, which offers international students the opportunity to study abroad at Portland State, as well as the educator licensure; leadership, learning and counseling; history; philosophy; and world languages and literatures departments. In addition to the full-time reductions, three faculty positions will be made part-time. Of the 36 faculty and academic professionals who will be laid off, eight are tenured.

The final date of employment for affected instructional faculty will be June 15, 2027; laid-off academic professionals will end their employment on Dec. 15, 2026.

The university originally sent pink slips to 52 faculty members and academic professionals—12 of whom were tenured, according to the union—in May as part of its provisional plan to address the deficit. In accordance with Article 22 of the PSU-AAUP contract, each affected department was allowed to present an alternative plan to reduce costs in their program without resorting to layoffs. University officials began to negotiate with the union over these plans on July 6.

“I offer my thanks to everyone who stepped up and stepped forward during this process, whether it was offering creative solutions, reconsidering their retirement plans or otherwise working toward a best possible outcome for the future of Portland State,” Cudd said during the press conference. “We’ve made these decisions guided by our future and focused strategic plan and our core purpose to support learners to follow their dreams and achieve their goals for a better life for their families and communities.”

The cuts amount to $16 million in savings, according to a university press release, which leaves Portland State with $19 million left to cover. Cudd said the university will chip away at that number by making “personnel reductions in a variety of other ways,” including by eliminating vacant positions.

“We have not identified the full $35 million. We’ve been given two years to do that,” Cudd said. “There have also been some other retirements outside of the faculty ranks … and we’ve made other cuts as well. Although, to be sure, the largest portion of our budget is personnel.”

The union is not done fighting the cuts. Members are asking Portland State students, employees and community members to write to the Portland State Board of Trustees and urge them to “reject managed decline” of the university and “fight for funding.” During a press conference following Cudd’s on Tuesday, Bill Knight, president of the PSU-AAUP, said it was “very sad” that the president hasn’t been “willing to fight for positive growth and transformation of the university.”

“This is a ‘final plan’ that’s only one step in a much larger process, including for those faculty members named in the final plan—their positions may still be saved,” Knight said. “We can still find change and solutions that will generate those possibilities.”

Union leaders have pushed the university to seek special financial assistance from the Legislature, which Cudd said Monday that she has no current plans to do.

“It is a challenging time for the Oregon budget, there’s no getting away from that,” she said. “So we don’t believe that we should expect a really large increase.”

Southern Oregon University, which declared financial exigency in 2025 amid a $12.5 million budget deficit, did receive help from the state, but “we believe that that is really an emergency situation,” Cudd said.

“We have a runway—but a short runway—for dealing with our problems on our own terms, making our own plans that are strategically guided by student need, demand for workforce and so forth, that we can assess and respond to,” she said. “So we believe that this is the moment when we must act, and that if we don’t act now, then our future, our financial future, will be radically constrained.”

On July 17, 17 elected officials in Oregon wrote to Cudd and the Portland State Board of Trustees asking them to pause the layoffs and “partner with faculty, staff, students, and our offices to champion increased funding for Portland State come January.”

Union leaders have also criticized the university for not investing more in marketing to help grow the university’s enrollment, which has declined by a third over the past 14 years, Cudd said in May. Portland State “has invested only 17 percent of the marketing, recruitment and enrollment budget that most universities our size have,” Knight said.

Cudd said that marketing would be a priority going forward.

“We plan to be doing that in the coming year. We’re going to carefully track that and make sure that it’s tied to achievable metrics that will deliver enrollment gains,” she said.