Portland State isn’t for sale

PORTLAND, Ore.--One hundred people protested on the Portland State University campus on January 29, sending a message to administrators that any plans to corporatize the school will meet stiff resistance.

This protest was part of an ongoing campaign organized by the Associated Students of Portland State University (ASPSU), the campus student government.

The Oregon University system has suffered as state funding declined nearly 40 percent over the last 20 years. In the same time period, "public safety and judicial" services have seen a 50 percent increase.

Rather than launching a campaign to demand a shift in social service spending at the state level, administrators are caving to the neoliberal policies promoted by the Frohnmayer report--named after its author, retired University of Oregon President Dave Frohnmayer.

The plan outlined in the report aims to restructure the public universities as public-private corporations. Student speakers highlighted the results of such a restructuring: corporate management, tuition increases, lack of student voice and restriction on faculty curriculum, to name a few.

These have been the result at nearby Oregon Health and Science University, which switched to the corporate model in 1995. Since then, it has become the most expensive publicly funded medical school in the country, is marred by reckless investments, and recently announced 500 to 1,000 layoffs on top of reducing employee benefits.

The bottom line for "Corporation University" would be profits, not education. Students chanted, "Money for jobs and education, not for corporate privatization" and "Student power," as speakers linked the attack on their public university to the current student struggles in California and the larger attempts to corporatize K-12 schools around the country.

Zaki Bucharest, a member of Student Veterans Association and ASPSU's chief of staff, put it eloquently:

Under the guise of philanthropy, corporate projects will be the priority, not freedom of educational inquiry...We are all for economic growth here in the city we love. But we will not sacrifice the academic integrity and noble purpose of our public universities for corporate profit. We will not stand idly by as corporate interests debase these halls of learning that belong to the public.