Ten laid-off Portland State University (PSU) faculty members won reinstatement after an arbitrator agreed with their union that the university disregarded layoff procedures it agreed to in the collective bargaining agreement.
The PSU unit of the American Association of University Professors (PSU-AAUP) said those 10 workers will receive a combined total of up to $380,000 if they are reinstated by mid-December, to account for lost income and benefits during the fall term. In a statement, PSU said it disagreed with the arbitrator’s decision and was exploring its options for how to proceed.
Last December, PSU notified 17 non-tenure track faculty that they were being terminated in June, at the end of the academic year. Ten of those filed grievances that led to the arbitration.
The university had been facing a budget shortfall and discussing the possibility of layoffs for months. But in the layoff notices, PSU cited changing curricular needs, not budgetary concerns.
PSU-AAUP’s contract lays out specific procedures PSU administrators must follow before making layoffs. There’s one process for layoffs made because of changes to class and program offerings, and an even more exhaustive process under Article 22 for faculty cuts made due to budgetary constraints.
“The university was deliberate in its attempt to avoid the lengthy and detailed process required by Article 22,” arbitrator Dorothy Foley wrote in her decision, issued Nov. 6. But PSU also didn’t comply with the requirements for justifying cuts for curricular needs.
The PSU faculty senate issued a vote of no confidence in the administration’s financial sustainability plan earlier this year. The faculty senate’s analysis “underscores the fact that the university made its layoff decisions before it had sufficient evidence to support them. That is a violation of the collective bargaining agreement,” Foley wrote.
