Editorial: Education, Inc.

As the calendar turned over to 2012, Portland State administrators wasted no time in flexing the considerable financial muscle that Senate Bill 242 has granted them. This bill relaxed the previous limitations on administrators tasked with creating the school’s budget. With a tremendous amount of freedom in spending tuition dollars, and less legislative oversight than ever before, PSU now has a real financial incentive to behave more like a business than a university. And it’s doing just that.

First came the real-estate developments, the rapidly rising tuition and an international program with an explicit mandate to drastically increase enrollment for non-residents who pay higher tuition. Next came tense contract negotiations between administrators and the PSU chapter of the American Association of University Professors, who struggled for months to try and bring their wages up closer to their peers, in spite of the fact that PSU presently has a budget surplus of $54 million. With that, PSU, Inc. officially came of age, and in the spirit of that adolescence is now testing the limits of what it can get away with.

On Jan. 15, the PSU Student Fee Committee, in a meeting attended by Dean of Student Life Michele Toppe, voiced their intent to reclassify numerous student publications’ positions from jobs with an hourly wage to “leadership award” positions that are paid out as a scholarship. 10 positions at the Vanguard were stated for reclassification.

Michele Toppe strongly pushed for the reclassification of these positions, as did many SFC committee members. While the awards were characterized as recognition for students in leadership roles, the truth is somewhat more sinister; it is a calculated business move that will save the university money by denying many of the university’s student workers the basic protections provided under state and federal labor laws. Student leadership award positions are not subject to minimum-wage standards, and student workers classified as such would not be eligible for unemployment insurance or food stamps. The university, meanwhile, will save money in taxes and contributions to labor programs, at a time when the state economy is suffering and many Oregonians are relying on food stamps and unemployment insurance.

Furthermore, the leadership awards are only paid at the end of each term, which means that students who live paycheck to paycheck would likely not be able to afford to hold any of the more important student jobs on campus. And since the awards go straight into a Higher One account, any student leader who was behind on their tuition would not have the option of paying it off in installments, as the amount would be deducted off the top of the leadership award. Many of the important student positions will no longer go to the best-qualified candidate, but to the candidate who has enough money to afford working an entire term before receiving any remuneration.

This is all done with the supposed aim of preventing people from working more hours than they are being paid for, and recognizing student leadership. Not only is this rhetoric patently absurd, but it is also recognition that we can do without. After all, this new system of leadership awards would not prevent anyone from working more hours than they are paid for. What it will do is allow the university to make its own rules concerning many student employees currently protected by state and federal labor law. By simply changing the definition of what it means to be a student employee at PSU, administrators will save untold amounts of money, and student workers will suddenly find themselves unprotected, unrepresented and technically unemployed. This is absolutely Orwellian logic, and any private citizen attempting to sidestep labor laws in such a manner would be prosecuted.

The migration to student leadership awards on a broad scale has been pushed forward by Dean of Student Life Michele Toppe, Vice President of Enrollment Management and Student Affairs Jackie Balzer, and others in the administration for some time, and the SFC seem only too happy to oblige them in the name of saving a few dollars. And while the SFC seem willing to cut the budget of any organization that doesn’t meet their limited view of what’s necessary to the university, they meanwhile feel comfortable increasing the budget and salary for themselves and the rest of ASPSU.

We must demand that our university use the resources that it has to build the reputation of PSU as a place of higher learning, where a robust faculty and intellectually challenging programs are valued above real-estate developments and university system fiefdoms.

With $54 million in reserves in the bank, PSU officials are raising summer tuition by 9 percent and plan to raise next year’s regular academic-year tuition by an estimated 7 percent. They are doing this not because the proverbial belt needs to be tightened, but rather because they can.

If we let them add a new notch each year, how long before we find the belt better fits around our necks?