Portland State University has strengths in attracting talented faculty and diverse students due to its location, but also has weaknesses such as an emerging brand, bifurcated faculty, and uneven practices across departments. The document proposes embracing changes in higher education by allowing students to design affordable, flexible educations combining online and in-person learning. This could boost enrollment and revenues if lower-cost courses subsidize more intensive ones, outdated costs are cut, and programs lacking strength are reduced while protecting academic freedom.

1. THE OPEN UNIVERSITY:
PORTLAND STATE
Let Knowledge Make the City; Let the City
Make Knowledge Free

2. What are our weaknesses?
We are cash-poor.
We have an emerging but not emerged
"brand".
We have an increasingly resentful
and frustrated bifurcated faculty
workforce (TTF and NTTF).
We have uneven practices and visions across
the university (this does not have to be a
weakness but often is as units work at cross-
purposes and fail to leverage overlap).

3. What are our strengths?
Portland attracts top faculty and draws
international students, lifelong learners, and
high-achieving students.
Portland supports progressive politics (this
means it supports learning and social justice
and will organize against labor practices
perceived to be exploitative).
Portland encourages a high degree of creativity
and experimentation.
We have highly articulate leadership.

4. What are we not?
We are not an elite university that can tap
wealthy alumni and venture capitalists.
We lack the brand that leads a person to take a
MOOC from a PSU rather than a Yale
professor.
We are not in Ashland.
We are not in Eugene.
We are not in Idaho.
We are not on the East Coast.

5. We are Portland State University,
which means we are about:
Free inquiry challenging received
wisdom/pieties and delighting in creativity
Social justice and sustainability
Fairness and dignity in employee relations
The Pacific Northwest and the Pacific Rim
零八宪章!

6. WHAT'S THE NEW HIGHER ED.
PICTURE?
Credentialization is increasingly decried.
Online options multiply exponentially (favoring
universities with already established "brand").
Credits become more and more readily
transferrable across different kinds of
institutions and organizations.
Students require more international experience
to prepare for the transformed economy.

7. Higher Ed. Picture II
Focus on defining and assessing student
learning outcomes. Focus off university
rankings. Employers want guarantees
(badges/certificates) of knowledge/experience.
Students can get the more intensive aspects of
their learning -- the hands-on experience and
in-person collaborations, the small seminar, the
lab, etc.-- in cities where they would like to live
rather than worrying about whether the school
was ranked in the top third or bottom third of
the second or third tiers in the 1990s.

8. This is a rosy picture for PSU. Why?
We embrace the new picture by making it easy
for students to design their own education with
the most affordable price tag. We play to our
strengths (place and ethics). We develop
services that help students achieve their credits
with a combination of the most credible,
cheaper, online versions available and the rest
from our faculty who excel in their fields, who
identify long-term with PSU, and have earned
the academic freedom that fosters innovation.

9. But how is this possible
budgetarily?
If lower-division courses subsidize upper-
division courses, if cheaply delivered SCH
subsidizes expensive SCH, won't this mean
that we are in even worse financial health than
we already are?
Not necessarily.

10. Eliminate existing costs
We eliminate the costs that add up from being
a sprawling enterprise that tries to be all things
to all people. A workforce that has been
created for short-term cost savings but
unsustainably, with increasingly emergent costs
as this workforce organizes, is replaced by
technology and partnerships. We increase
enrollments in select areas by aggressively
seeking out the international student and the
lifelong learner and we create an infrastructure
to support these students.

11. What's the proposal then?
We create an advisory board to work with
departments/units/cross-disciplinary
combinations to identify areas where we have
strength and permanent investment (tenured
faculty, for example) as well as a dependence
on unsustainable adjunct instruction. We
generate concrete, actionable plans to reduce
reliance on NTTF instruction by 50% while not
losing relationships with any of the students
that would have sat in those classrooms.

12. What is on the chopping block?
Our professional identities. (In practice, this
might mean revising tenure and promotion
guidelines such that TTF are more directly
involved in the work of rethinking PSU and
more involved in the services that will be
needed to create the infrastructure of student
support).
Components of, or entire, programs/units
where other cheaper but credible opportunities
are available for our students.

13. What is not on the chopping block?
The culture of creative, intellectual, and
scholarly freedom that drives innovation,
energizes people, and attracts talent.