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To Dr. Bennings, the PCC Cabinet, and the PCC Board of Directors,
We are in a crisis here at PCC: a crisis of trust, a crisis of leadership, a crisis created by short-sighted thinking that is hurting students and workers alike. The pandemic dealt a serious blow to our institution, but we have been increasing our enrollment over the past three years. This is the time to grow our institution, not turn away students who want to learn with us and start building their futures.
The heart of our mission at Portland Community College is to “support student success by delivering access to quality education,” but when administration cancels numerous class sections with a history of filling, we turn our backs on that mission. When the College tries to shut down popular programs that play an important role in the workforce and culture of our city, we betray our mission. When we don’t have the flexibility in the budget to meet student demand, we are choosing to fail in our mission.
The bottom line is that cutting course offerings hurts our students. Beyond the frustration of not being able to get the schedule they want, it also means it will take longer for students to graduate or transfer. Students will likely leave PCC altogether for colleges in the area that can better serve their needs. The budget choices of the current administration are actively pushing students out the door when our mission clearly states we need to increase access. Because funding from the state is based in part on student FTE, turning away students not only harms us right now, but risks undercutting future funding from the state, setting off a potentially catastrophic decline of this beloved institution.
In addition to hurting students, cutting courses hurts our most vulnerable educators – contingent faculty members. Part-time instructors bear the brunt of course cancellations because they lack the contractual protections of full-time employees. They are not losing work because of lower demand or poor work performance, but because the College is choosing to fund their top-heavy bureaucracy. These funds should instead prioritize our core mission: education. Management roles have grown 29% since 2018 – at a cost of $26 million this biennium – while Full-time Faculty numbers are down 1%, and Part-time Faculty are down ~18%. With finite resources, our spending should serve to fulfill our mission – meeting student demand for quality education. Without robust spending in this area, there will no longer be a college to support the bloated management bureaucracy.
For many years PCC had a flexible budgeting model that allowed Department Chairs and Deans to “schedule on the margin” – meaning they could add sections to meet student enrollment. The FFAP (Federation of Faculty and Academic Professionals) bargaining team presented a proposal to create a contingency fund with money set aside to add sections to meet student demand. We believe that this proposal would grow enrollment, secure work for part time faculty, meet student needs, all while generating revenue. This is an issue of the utmost importance to students and our members. The College needs to treat this with the urgency that this situation requires.
College Administrators, as they have since at least 2013, are arguing there is not enough money to run the appropriate number of course sections, continue popular programs, and keep employee compensation up with inflation. We reject this argument. If we do not have enough money for students and workers, why has the budget for College Administration gone up 23% ($37.1M) since the last biennium? Over this same period of time, the budget for Academic Affairs has gone up only 15.7% and Student Affairs has increased a paltry 1.6%. How many sections of Writing 121 or Anatomy and Physiology or Sound Production could that pay for? Or any of the other programs and course sections on the chopping block due to “budget constraints”? How many more Academic Advisors could we hire? And this is without taking into account the $35M the College chose to spend on the failed Workday implementation!
All of this highlights the need for a participatory system for making better decisions, together. Indeed, the value of shared governance was articulated in our last contract, which spurred FFAP and our sibling union FCE (Federation of Classified Employees) to convene a Shared Governance Workgroup of about 60 employees and several ASPCC representatives in the Spring of 2024. This group of volunteers worked for almost a year and a half researching and discussing potential shared governance models for PCC. And what has the College Administration done? Have any of those new, well-paid managers sat down with the Shared Governance Workgroup in the spirit of collaboration? No. Ironically, PCC has spent $190,000 (with the potential to increase to $324,000) to outsource shared governance to a corporate consultant. Thankfully, we are making some progress in this regard, but it is unfortunate that the College felt the need to spend this extra money outside of the school instead of taking shared governance to heart and working directly with our in-house experts who took initiative because they care about PCC.
All of this takes place while the College stonewalls both FFAP and FCE at the bargaining table. After six months, FFAP has only met with the College team eight times. Out of 30 proposals, they substantially responded to three (one being the 0.35% COLA offer), and refused to bargain, or flat-out ignored, the other 27. This is not bargaining in good faith, and because of that, both unions have requested help from a state mediator. This will drag out the process even further, costing more money, and the College’s intransigence now makes the possibility of both unions going on strike that much more real. No one wants to strike, but we are ready to do so in order to protect our jobs, our programs, and our college community.
What we need, as a show of good faith from the President and the Cabinet, is the following:
- Stop the cuts to courses and programs that meet student demand.
- Instruct the College bargaining team to provide substantive responses to our proposals.
- Publicly respond to this letter by Monday, January 5th.
PCC students and workers deserve better. Let students study. Let us teach, serve, and support them.
Sincerely,
The Executive Council of the PCC Federation of Faculty and Academic Professionals, AFT-OR Local 2277