Author: David Yaden
Portland State University is about to hire a new president. She (both finalists are women—hooray!) will confront daunting immediate tasks to stabilize enrollment and revenue, and to succor faculty and staff demoralized by years of overwork and uncertainty. She might be excused for keeping her head and heart buried in the campus.
However, as the old saying goes, why waste a crisis. The challenge for PSU extends beyond its campus. The city’s civic culture and capacity for effective governance is ailing. PSU can help. For the good of PSU and of its community, it should step up a bigger role on our civic stage.
(Before getting to that, we owe our gratitude to outgoing President Steve Percy for the work he has done to keep the ship afloat and on course through Covid, financial distress, and in the wake of the bumpy departure of the previous president.)
For 75 years, PSU has made the most of it’s underdog status among Oregon public universities. Sadly, it still finds itself playing that role. Just as sadly, lack of resources and perpetual money worries seem to get in the way of it taking on a much more significant civic role in the region.
With our recent but seemingly intractable civic dysfunction, what the region needs is for PSU to punch above its weight as a space where civic problem-solvers from across many sectors, communities, experiences and levels of authority convene to do their best work. Below I suggest three roles for the university toward that end.
Former PSU President Judith Ramaly energized the school around it’s urban mission with the motto “Let Knowledge Serve the City.” The school has done a marvelous job of integrating many of its programs into the community so that students and faculty have manifold opportunities to get experience with and assist local governments, businesses, organizations.
What the school has not done is leverage up on that foundation so that civic leaders look to PSU as the essential think tank and convener around the most significant urban problems and opportunities we confront.
My take on envisioning Portland State as THE urban university in THIS region (Not just another “urban-serving university”) comes down to amplifying these roles and institutional skills:
- Convener
- Civic institution
- Collaborator
Convener
Portland State is uniquely situated to be the convener of intellectual, political, civic, and business leadership to define and give shape to public agendas on the most pressing regional problems and opportunities. In brief, who today is looking broadly at our civic dysfunction, our transformation from a region admired as a model of urban innovation to a late-night punching bag. Who is setting the table where that happens?
There is no lack of voices offering up ideas and advocacy around homelessness, public safety, affordable housing, climate…. However, there is no place where the babel, the discord gets knit together into some sort of broadly understood and supported strategy. No place where the forces in dispute and contention leave their rhetorical weapons at the door. (A friend talks about the babel as a bunch of voices offering up “you oughta…” to governing officials. And too many contestants in wars of words yelling “yah but.” Portland today: too much “yaawda” and “yabut.”)
Portland State “oughta” be a primary place where civic leaders convene in a variety of ways to try to make sense of it all and turn the babel into a shared sense of direction. It can start modestly. As long as the ambition and intention is clear, I’m willing to bet it can attract resources.
Civic institution
Think not just as a university, rather as one of the most important civic institutions in the region. Who else is going to play as many important roles in the region, from relevant research to workforce preparation and business incubation to helping us restore ourselves as a leader among urban regions for innovation and civic engagement. This requires of the faculty and the university a stretch beyond disciplinary focus. It requires of the university valuing “service.”
It also requires that the school earn the reputation. It is one thing to remind the region of Portland State’s value. It is much more powerful when others do it.
As a start, with downtown Portland struggling to return to daytime vitality, the challenge and opportunity is for the PSU campus to become alive—and open—with people and activities and events that draw Portlanders.
Another example: the Institute of Metropolitan Studies at Portland State at one time published a series of key indicators of our overall health as a region. Time for that again.
Collaborator
Portland State does not have the alumni base nor endowment to be a powerhouse academic institution. It does have collaborations on many levels with PCC, OHSU, PPS, OMSI, foundations, governments. These need to deepen and broaden. More importantly, collaboration as a value needs to imprint on everything PSU does. Not every activity lends itself to partnering, and often it is more headache than opportunity. But “can we partner on this” should become ingrained as a question.
(I was part of initial meetings several years back among OMSI and area university presidents about creating an Innovation Quadrant as an intentional, large-scale and intensive collaboration around teaching, research and enterprise. Today there is little sign that very much has come of it.)
Welcome, new President
Portland State does a terrific job already on many levels across all three dimensions, especially engaging students and faculties in a myriad of learning experiences. However, my interactions across civic and governmental organizations tell me it is far from reaching its potential.
A few years back, Robert Putnam, author of the book Bowling Alone, identified the Portland region as the exemplar of civic engagement and “social capital”—the capacity to get big things done. Today we are a bad example. If faculty and staff at PSU are demoralized, so are Potland’s citizens. Rebuilding trust and optimism is a big job within PSU and beyond.
The work I outlined above for PSU might be called civic knitting. That is the process of forging common purpose out of disparate issues, complaints, hopes, viewpoints. In the past, our region has done that well, even as we acknowledge that it was far from inclusive of people of color. Working to repair our tattered civic fabric seems a worthy piece of work for our urban university.
The two finalists for the PSU presidency come with sterling resumes and both talk a good game when it comes to “Let Knowledge Serve the City.” The temptation and gravitational pull will be inward, to square up to the enormous pressures within the campus. It will be a test and opportunity for the new president to also work to bolster PSU’s role as an essential civic institution.