Earlier this year, you sent nearly 900 total letters to Governor Kotek and her advisors, and this enabled member-leaders of PSU-AAUP to meet with the governor and top legislative leaders. But there’s much more work to be done, and now is the time for us to make an all-out push to convince the governor to invoke a higher ed emergency and use just over 5% of the $1.2 billion Education Stability Fund to stop the cycle of systemic crisis and mass layoffs at PSU and in Oregon’s public universities.

Governor Kotek’s response to this crisis will help shape her legacy, and there’s room for her to be a decisive, courageous leader in this moment. Students, faculty, and staff can ill afford it if Salem allows the impacts of Trump’s HR 1 to further degrade learning conditions and working conditions. With a narrow window of just weeks before the legislative session begins in early February and concludes in early March, we must move now to demand with all our energy that Governor Kotek use stability funds and a revised budget to help Oregon do better than 46th in the country in funding public universities. Oregon’s universities face a severe crisis compounded by decades of divestment, and the time is here to demand that the governor take responsibility for the future of opportunity and success Oregonians deserve. If we don’t act now, and if the governor doesn’t act in this legislative term, Oregon will effectively abandon its commitment to public universities, falling to the bottom of the nation in its level of support, and will leave aside the billions of dollars of economic impact that a real investment in higher education would produce.