- www.pdx.edu
Portland State University last week gave some of its students surprising, if perhaps welcome, news: No school this summer.
In the middle of exam week, mere weeks before summer courses were set to commence, the university sent out e-mails to students enrolled in a number of classes, saying they’d been cancelled due to “budget constraints beyond our control.”
But people affected by the cancelations are wondering how that pencils out.
“All these courses were beyond capacity,” said Greg Twiss, a pre-med student who’d counted on taking an Introduction to Genetics course this summer. “There were already three people on the wait list for it. What’s the budget cut logic there?”
According to an email he received June 10 from the PSU biology department, Twiss’ best bet to take the course is now to enroll this fall.
“Due to budgetary constraints beyond our control all sections of this course, as well as the associated recitations, are being cancelled for summer 2013,” the e-mail says. “We apologize for the inconvenience this will undoubtedly cause, and recognize that this is a truly unfortunate situation for all. BI 341 Genetics will be offered during Fall term 2013.”
That’s a message Twiss was surprised to receive weeks before the class was set to begin.
“They opened registration for these course months ago,” he said. “If they were gonna make a policy decision to make these changes, it would have between great to know sooner.”
The cancellations apparently go well beyond Twiss’ genetics course, but university staff has been unresponsive to my calls so far today.
PSU Adjunct Professor Carey Booth, who’s sounding the alarm on the cancellations, says they appear to be aimed at saving money on outside staff—Booth is a lab instructor at Reed College, and only teaches at PSU during the summer.
“They won’t explain to me or (Biology Department Chairman Jason Podrabsky): What is their logic?” Booth says. “How do they pencil this out?”
According to her own calculations, which Booth concedes are simplistic, the university stands to make something like $40,000 from her classes alone this summer. Here’s her logic.
More on this when (if) the university decides to call me back.
UPDATE, 3:06 pm: Documents available to PSU students indicate the university is also slashing more than half of its summer economics offerings. According to this list [PDF], PSU had 17 summer courses in economics listed as of Monday.
Today, according to a screenshot Twiss sent, that list has been pared down to eight.
I wonder if this is part of the upshot of PSU eliminating the School of Extended Studies (who ran Summer Session the past several years) and moving Summer School under new jurisdiction. It’s obviously working brilliantly this year.
It’ll be interesting to see if this is what students can expect out of PSU in the foreseeable future. My bet is that it will. As always, a potentially great urban, flexible university . . . with counter-intuitive aspirations to be a residential research institution.
These cuts in Biology have also affected grad students who were given teaching assistant (TA) positions for the lab components of courses that have been cut. Most grad students are able to focus on their research during the academic year by teaching in exchange for tuition remission and a small stipend. There are already far fewer summer teaching opportunities than there are during the regular academic year, so they’re not guaranteed, but several students had been told they had a teaching position for the summer only to have the course cut two weeks before it was due to begin. This leaves people scrambling to find outside income for the summer on incredibly short notice. The cuts are coming from the office of the dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, and also appear to be occurring in the Chemistry and Geology departments.
Cutting summer courses can also jeopardize students who need only one or two classes to complete their degree, and have been accepted into graduate programs in the fall, conditional upon completion of their undergraduate credits over the summer.
The logic is unfathomable, and the dean seems to have forgotten who the consumers are in higher education.
This is just another in a string of actions that directly compromise the educational mission of PSU.
I’ll believe they are in real financial hardship when they stop hiring Deans and Directors of Sustainability and Diversity and stop building ridiculously expensive new building on the south waterfront–what are they going to use the buildings for? I’m guessing they won’t be able to afford to, you know, actually teach people.
If they continue following their current path, PSU will become a set of sleek buildings where a bunch of administrators congratulate each other for talking about nebulous feel-good ideas like sustainability, and very little actual research or education gets done.
PSU could save a lot more money by eliminating much of its bloated administration.
The Mercury needs to look into the South Waterfront project. Talk about PSU mismanaging their money.