PSU Vanguard
by Nick Gatlin
March 9, 2021
Portland State prides itself on its values, its mission and its position in the community. These values include “excellence and innovation,” “integrity” and “inclusion and equity.” Recently, President Stephen Percy named three new strategic priorities for the university: “centering the school’s effort to improve racial justice and equity to combat structural racism, focusing on student success to improve retention and graduation rates and engaging with the community to strengthen Portland as a whole.” The next step is to answer the question: is PSU living up to those values?
Let’s look at PSU’s Black Studies department. The administration has been criticized for barely funding the department; Dr. Ethan Johnson, chair of the department, said in an interview it has “some non-tenure track faculty and some adjunct faculty, but I would say we’re not really a department…the university knows that Black students are not graduating…they have known this for a long time and…I would say it’s intentional. Inaction as an action is just as intentional.” To PSU’s credit, the Black Studies department will increase its full-time faculty to four professors after losing two on its 50th anniversary. “To me it’s not some huge gain—it’s really getting us back to where we were 10 years ago, because we’ve been losing faculty,” Johnson said. This isn’t PSU fully embodying its values; rather, it feels like they’re scrambling to catch the Black Studies department up to standards after the explosion of racial justice protests last summer.
Speaking of racial justice, let’s look at PSU’s campus public safety officers. The administration promised in August that CPSO would disarm in the fall of 2020, after years of activism by students and after Jason Washington was shot and killed by campus police in 2018. PSU said CPSO would have all firearm-free patrols “before or during the month of October,” as part of a plan to “dismantle systemic racism.”
In November 2020, the university announced campus police will not disarm until the “end of the academic year,” citing “delays in negotiating a new operating agreement with the Portland Police Bureau and rewriting 500 pages in policies and procedures.” If PSU were truly acting in good faith to disarm campus police, why would they not be up-front about these challenges in August instead of setting a deadline they knew they couldn’t meet? And if they didn’t know what the challenges were, why wouldn’t they find out before announcing a date for disarmament?