On June 18, 2020, PSUFA’s Chair of Bargaining, Ariana Jacob, testified during the public comments of the PSU Board of Trustees meeting asking for a more equitable campus for students and staff. We are sharing it here.
Dear President Percy and Members of the Board of Trustees,
I am adjunct faculty in the School of Art + Design and the Co-Chair for PSUFA, our adjunct union.
I am speaking to you today filled with hope for this moment of transformation, which has opened up in the midst of all the layers of crisis we are experiencing together.
It is clear that now is a moment that we MUST, CAN, and WILL make significant changes to PSU so we can become a more equitable institution. Economic and racial equity are not lofty goals, they are essential to the survival of PSU.
We can no longer afford to be an institution where some of our administrators and faculty are paid more in one month than our adjuncts can be paid in one year. For the survival of our school I ask that you cut all PSU salaries to no more than $160K/year, which will mean they are still in the top 5 percent of income earners in the United States.
Rather than raising tuition this fall, lower it. We cannot keep charging our students more money for fewer services; they will stop coming. It isn’t right to raise tuition when our campus will almost certainly be closed. We are capable of creating a budget that doesn’t require tuition hikes, and now is the right time to reprioritize our economics towards economic and racial equity.
We must become accountable to our claims of valuing equity. To do that we can begin listening to Portland’s Black leadership and community at large, who are calling for PSU to disarm. The proven consequences of armed security is the loss of, in particular, Black people’s lives, specifically Jason Washington’s life. We can no longer ignore the fact that armed security is incompatible with our equity mission.
Please, let us not be hypocrites when we say PSU cares about our diverse students, faculty and community members. It is clear that if we are accountable to our Black, Brown, and Indigenous community we will disarm PSU.
As many of you know PSU was originally founded as Vanport College, a college for the working class multiracial people who came to Portland to build better lives for themselves around the second world war. The Vanport neighborhood was the origin of Portland’s vibrant black community. When Vanport City was destroyed by floods in 1948, Vanport College moved to our current campus site and became Portland State University.
The white neighbors from Vanport were able to pick up their lives and integrate into the rest of Portland, but due to housing and employment discrimination based on race the Black neighbors were kept segregated and economically disenfranchised, marking one of the major moments in our civic history when Portland failed to care for the lives of our Black community members.
Portland State University as Vanport College was founded to be in service to our multiracial working class community. We have a special accountability to the legacy of working class, Black, and immigrant descendants of Vanport and their peers. The legacy of Vanport is both painful and beautiful. PSU belongs to that history. Let’s live up to our responsibility by transforming our institution into a powerful civic force for racial and economic justice. Anything less is dishonoring our own history.
Thank you for your work, and your time considering this.
Ariana Jacob
Adjunct Faculty School of Art + Design
Co-Chair of PSUFA
We are proud of Ariana and echo her words. If you would like to read a sampling of other testimonies from the meeting, many calling to disarm our campus security officers, you can read them here.