PSU's New Look

Jun Jiao works among ridges and buttes, alien obelisks and tangled deltas, all spooky neon-gray and ashen black.

An icy distant planet? Guess again.

Jiao, a buoyant nanophysicist born southeast of Beijing, runs the state-of-the-art electron microscope lab at Portland State University. The new $3 million facility probes deep into computer circuits and super-alloys, cellular structures and carbon nano-tubes--into super-small realms where bleeding-edge science happens.

"This is the best in the Pacific Northwest," Jiao says of the lab. "Not many universities have this."

Jiao is pretty state-of-the-art herself. Better-known universities courted her before she came to PSU in 1999. Once here, she bagged a National Science Foundation Career Award, a five-year, $400,000 grant the federal agency calls its top prize for "the academic leaders of the 21st century." She's one of only four PSU profs ever to win the honor.

Mind-bending microscopes and all-star researchers aren't the only news at Portland State. The school has become downtown's most aggressive property developer, with more than a dozen building projects either planned or under way. Early this month, it bought the DoubleTree Hotel on Southwest Lincoln Street, adding a four-acre bulge to the campus' southern end, future home to up to a million square feet of high-rise space.

Then there's the enrollment explosion. In 1997, PSU had about 18,000 students. Last fall, the school signed up more than 24,000. The school is growing three times faster than Oregon, Oregon State and the rest of the state university system.

A revolution is unfolding on the Park Blocks, an urban reinvention as dramatic as the blossoming of the Pearl District or the South Waterfront. Once a sleepy teaching college, Portland State is fighting to transform itself into the major university the city has always needed but never had.

"Ten or 15 years ago, PSU wasn't on people's radar," says Jim Craven, a high-tech industry lobbyist and longtime higher-ed watcher. "People would say, 'Why do we have three state universities?' You don't hear that any more."

Heady stuff. Yet some say the renaissance has a dark side.

Faculty pay is at rock bottom. The average PSU professor makes almost $7,000 a year less than the average at the University of Oregon (see chart, page 21). For nearly a year, a professors' union and PSU administrators have battled over a new contract.

Meanwhile, students complain that the buildings they study and live in now are dilapidated. Some say an overstretched faculty doesn't always measure up--particularly galling, given a 9 percent tuition hike last year.

"One class I took, half the sessions were taught by video tape," says junior Amithaba Worchester, a computer systems management major. "Should you place all your emphasis on revitalizing your campus when classes are so easy?"

Even for Portlanders with zero campus connections, the stakes in PSU's evolution are high. Portland State anchors a chunk of downtown as big as the Pearl. The city's acclaimed streetcar--centerpiece of a number of development plans--cuts right through campus. The school is the prime reason officials want to pour millions into a new light-rail line on Southwest 5th and 6th avenues.

"Portland State is so fundamental," says Abe Farkas of the Portland Development Commission, the city's urban-renewal agency. "Its success and the city's success are essentially entwined."

Stand on the corner of Southwest Mill Street and 6th Avenue, and the university's contradictions surround you.

Across the street rises Portland State's Urban Center, brick-and-steel cubes bisected by the streetcar line. The center houses PSU's acclaimed urban affairs college, as well as wildly successful Pizzicato and Seattle's Best Coffee outlets, emblematic of PSU's desire to stoke commerce on campus.

A Tyvek-covered tower looms three blocks away. A $50 million housing complex is in the works at Broadway and Jackson Street, with plans for almost 400 student studios and a wealth of restaurants and retail stores at ground level. Around the corner, a gleaming Native American student center opened last fall. Across campus, brand-new Epler Hall uses a rainwater-harvesting system to irrigate its gardens. A student rec center is slated for 12th and Market--next door to a new garage, a block away from a planned performing arts center...

But walk a hundred yards north, south or west, and you'll see a different Portland State.

You might find yourself in the concrete-walled, graffiti-scarred staircases of Neuberger Hall. Or contemplating the grimy facade of the Ondine residential hall, a grim stack of studio apartments one campus critic characterizes as "straight out of Moscow 1956." Portland cops have logged nearly 60 calls to the Ondine since New Year's Day 2003, for everything from disorderly conduct to rape.

These, then, are physical symbols of PSU's aspirations--and the nagging past of stunted ambitions the school is trying to escape.

Until 2002, Mark Weislogel was living in the Rockies, commuting to work in Denver under sunny skies 360 days a year. An engineer fresh off "an absolutely beautiful job" at NASA, Weislogel had it good.

Except something just wasn't clicking. Hungry for new challenges, he took a job at Portland State--not exactly a professional coup in peers' eyes.

"I definitely got teased," says Weislogel. "They were like, 'You're going where?'"

Where was a school lacking pedigree. Where others saw Nowheresville, however, Weislogel--a ball of verbal energy who uses a picture of Indiana Jones instead of his own portrait on his PSU website--saw new frontiers.

"PSU is like an undervalued stock," he says. "There's an advantage to getting in early. There's a chance to do things that have never been done before at the institution." Such as designing fluid dynamics experiments blasted into orbit on a Russian rocket, which Weislogel did this winter. His work is now aboard the International Space Station, awaiting completion.

Weislogel credits Portland State's administration for aiming equally high, attracting faculty and students eager to innovate.

"New hires here are under the same scrutiny they would be under at any institution in the country," he says. "And the student excitement--they are pumped, and they're good. My students could go anywhere."

Indeed, research at PSU is a different beast than it was a few short years ago. In 1989, the university attracted just over $6 million in governmental and private research funding. This year, it pulled in $31.6 million. Administrators aim to hit $50 or $60 million within five years. Even as average faculty salaries languish, some say PSU offers nationally competitive salaries to some prize new hires.

Jun Jiao, of the electron-microscope lab, says Portland State's determination to pump up research is making a huge difference in the school's prestige--and its ability to attract top-notch talent.

"I came here because I saw the commitment to research," she says. "I saw that everyone wanted change. Funding agencies see the momentum."

The academic ambition isn't limited to the sciences. Portland State's art department has nearly doubled in size in the last five years, while its social-work program is a recognized national leader. But science packs the big research bucks. Portland State's science departments have spent more than $23 million on research since 1998, while arts and letters departments have spent just $3.6 million.

And science is where many think Portland State could make the biggest difference to the city's economy.

"I'm already thinking ahead, to spin out business ideas," says Weislogel. He sees this as right in step with the university's phenomenal enrollment growth and dramatic building boom.

"It's leadership," he says of the school's direction. "It's creative. It's entrepreneurial."

Jay Kenton doesn't seem like much of a riverboat gambler. A mustached Ohioan, Portland State's vice president for finance makes a subdued first impression.

To many, however, Kenton is the brains behind PSU's construction drive. And that takes some moxie--as Kenton himself acknowledges.

"There are days when I wonder, should we do this?" he says.

Portland State's new construction relies on a freewheeling mix of cash. The Urban Center drew on a dozen different funding sources. Portland State tag-teamed with the Portland Development Commission to buy the DoubleTree site, and on a plan to buy up, tear down and rebuild three blocks between 4th and 5th avenues. The school and the urban-renewal agency share ownership of some properties targeted for new buildings. Other PDC-led projects will look to fulfill PSU's development agenda even though the buildings will be privately owned. And 95 percent of the funding for the Broadway housing development comes from bonds against future rent and retail revenues--a gamble on their success.

None of these approaches is unheard-of, but Kenton gets credit for stringing them together in service of a larger strategy.

"He's the most entrepreneurial administrator in the whole state system," says Ron Paul, once chief of staff to ex-City Commissioner Charlie Hales and a member of Portland State's foundation board for six years.

"We're trying to create a neighborhood," says Kenton, who believes the makeover will win Portland State new allies.

"How long does it take to form a perception of a place?" he asks. "Fifteen seconds? Drive down Broadway or 6th. You see a lot of ugly concrete. As you change the character of the place, perceptions shift.

"We're trying to create a buzz, the sense that something is happening," he says. "Because I believe something is happening."

Flashy new buildings, lofty research goals--to some, this future rings hollow in the face of problems the school grapples with today.

Teachers say growth comes at their expense. Salaries are flat, class sizes soaring, and the ranks of part-timers with no job security increasing. These issues lie behind the current fight between the university and the American Association of University Professors, the union representing 967 PSU instructors. The union contract expired last August. A new one is nowhere in sight.

According to AAUP, the expired contract was the only one in the country with no provision regulating workload. And professors say rising enrollment, bureaucratic duties and the school's increasingly intense emphasis on research--which is written into the administration's expectations for all faculty--create a true crunch.

Take James McNames, a Stanford-trained electrical engineering professor considered one of PSU's rising stars. This term, McNames is teaching one graduate-level class, which meets for four hours a week (an academic rule of thumb says there are two hours of prep for every hour of lecturing). He reserves two office hours for those students. That's less teaching than other terms when he teaches two classes, but it's just the beginning of McNames' responsibilities.

There are three or four meetings with partners on various research projects, which typically run a couple of hours each. The five weekly hourlong meetings with his graduate assistants. The student seminar and two senior-project groups--one meets for one hour, the other for two--he directs. The weekly faculty meeting, and the two committees he sits on--not to mention a third committee, which functions solely in cyberspace, because no members have time to meet. A couple times a year, there are grant deadlines that preempt just about everything else for a week at a time. Conferences impose their own deadlines. Last term McNames wrote 1,400 emails and received 1,900--and that's not spam.

Somewhere in there, he gets his own research on biomedical signals done. McNames says the load is tough to manage--and that it affects his teaching.

"It is very difficult to strike an acceptable balance," says McNames. He says he relies heavily on teaching assistants for one-on-one work with students and shies away from complex assignments. Many professors, he says, have taken to giving tests via Internet programs that grade responses automatically,

"I think students would be better served if we had smaller class sizes and projects that require them to apply concepts they've learned in lecture," he says. "But this is unmanageable with large classes and all the competing demands for our time."

Still, he says the payoff for research is compelling. "PSU's in a tough spot," he says, "but if it wants to build itself, research is the way to go."

Another issue that rankles teachers is the increasing use of part-time and non-tenured faculty. Colleges like using part-time and non-tenured teachers because they cost less and are easier to get rid of. At PSU non-tenured instructors teach more than 60 percent of undergraduate classes. This proportion is not out of whack with national standards--it is about the same at the University of Oregon. But the issue still grates on union activists at PSU.

Workload, compensation and part-time faculty's role are all issues in the AAUP's battle for a new contract. After months of mostly fruitless talks, state mediators took over negotiations last month, a move underlining the process's stall.

"We've offered proposals," says Jacqueline Arante, an English instructor who is on the AAUP's bargaining team. "The administration has rejected them. There has been no movement towards salary and benefit improvement, of course, but also no movement on issues vital to academic professional life, such as shared decision-making and workload."

Nor are teachers alone in their complaints. Students, after all, have to cope with packed classes and dingy buildings, while shelling out increasing tuition.

"Students see their classes totally overrun, and they get angry," says Christian Gaston, editor of the Daily Vanguard, the school's student newspaper. "I'm not sure students even know what the university's goals or strategies are as far as building and growth are concerned."

The man to ask about those priorities is Dan Bernstine, Portland State's president since 1997. The trouble is that to many on campus, Portland State's leader is a mystery man.

In the mayonnaise pond of Portland's power elite, Dan Bernstine is a figure apart. The stocky 56-year-old lawyer's big cue-ball head sits squarely on beefy shoulders, and the rest of him is of a piece: meaty hands, barrel chest.

Despite this imposing presence, Bernstine seems naturally humble, at pains to deflect credit. At the suggestion that PSU has reinvented itself on his watch, he smiles and squirms.

"Oh, no," he says. "That would sound too pompous on my part."

Indeed, after seven years on the job--in a profession where presidents last around five years on average--Bernstine remains a remarkably elusive character. The public image one might expect him to cultivate seems absent.

"Dan is an enigma to many people," says one PSU instructor. "He is not a self-promoter, and that's very rare in college presidents. He doesn't seek credit, and that is unsettling to some people."

In some eyes, this modesty runs so deep as to render Bernstine something of a cipher.

"You hear people speculating that he's completely ineffectual," says the Vanguard's Gaston. "You hear people wondering, why is this guy here?"

An uninspiring public speaker with a weakness for platitudes, Bernstine is said to excel in small groups and one-on-one situations. But his low profile sparks sniping, as even supporters acknowledge.

"No one could say [University of Oregon President] Dave Frohnmayer is a figurehead," says one prominent Portlander. "If they wanted to be uncharitable, maybe people could say that about Dan."

And yet something about Bernstine's leadership seems to work.

When he took over the presidency in August 1997, Portland State's endowment fund, the stockpile of contributions that generates interest revenue for the university each year, stood at $7.3 million. By fall 2002, it had reached $20.4 million. In 1994-95, the school took in $1.4 million in grants and contributions. During the 2002-'03 term, it racked up almost $9.8 million. Portland State had five endowed professorships in 1997; now it has 14.

Moreover, a university once bereft of big-money benefactors is increasingly good at finding them. In 1994, PSU received no gifts exceeding $500,000. Bernstine has attracted support from lumber baron Peter Stott, Intel founder Gordon Moore and other heavyweights. Moore, for instance, donated $2.5 million to the construction of a new engineering school--one of 23 gifts of a half-million dollars or more on Bernstine's watch.

The degree to which Bernstine is personally responsible for the new largesse is, of course, hard to gauge. Characteristically, the man himself is quick to credit others.

"I've always seen myself as the person who surrounds himself with very talented people and allows those people to work," Bernstine says. "And I think that's happened here."

But others think that, in his own very subtle way, Bernstine is key to the school's fundraising surge.

"If you see him work a crowd under the right conditions, you get the idea that he knows exactly what he's doing," Gaston says.

Bernstine says he's all too aware that tuition hikes in recent years--and the phasing-out of a system that allowed some students to take up to six credit hours a term for free--have left students in an uproar.

"We are shifting the burden of cost onto the backs of students," he says, noting that state cuts have sliced $20 million off PSU's budget in the last two years. "That gives everyone a lot of pause." But he defends the school's tuition policies. He says that, however painful, they allow the university to maintain quality, and give it flexibility to launch new initiatives. For instance, Portland State offers an increasing number of classes off-campus, to students at regional community colleges, a move Bernstine says tuition reforms have helped.

As for the school's use of part-time and non-tenured teachers, he says it amounts to a way Portland State can enrich its talent pool.

"It is important to maintain tenured faculty," he says. "But in turn non-tenured faculty also serve a very important purpose. It takes advantage of one of the advantages that we have, being located in the metropolitan region, which is so rich in terms of people who can bring working experience that you wouldn't find on other campuses."

As for low faculty salaries, Portland State administrators say they sympathize--but given the state government's tight-fisted ways, there's not much they can do.

"The governor and the Legislature have said there are to be no salary increases for state employees," says Provost Mary Kay Tetrault. She notes that Oregon's three research universities all rank near the bottom of their class on salaries--but hopes a radically refashioned state higher-ed board led by powerful ex-governor Neil Goldschmidt might find a remedy.

Bernstine says that, like Kenton, he sees the future Portland State as the center of a hive of urban activity, and as a hotbed of knowledge creation.

"We should see some very path-breaking research," he says. "And, above all, we'll probably be the primary broker of higher-education opportunities here in the metropolitan region.

"We're not growing just to grow. If we remain stagnant, then I think quality would suffer."

Portland State was born humble. In 1946, the university was founded to educate GIs returning from World War II. Housed in begged and borrowed classrooms in North Portland's dilapidated Vanport housing project--a wartime creation destined to be wiped out in a 1948 flood--the school was overcrowded and understaffed from day one.

Founder Stephen Epler didn't sugarcoat it. "As you know," he wrote to one of the first professors, "we are starting from nothing." And for much of its existence, Portland State was the redheaded stepchild of Oregon education.

So whether or not some of the university's current energy has it headed in the right direction, merely the fact that people now see something worth fighting for at PSU augurs well. For the school, certainly, but also for the city--because if you stroll the Park Blocks at noon on a sunny spring day, you see Portland at its most dynamic and diverse. Even those who are not sold on the rapid growth of recent years say they feel that pulse.

"All of us--faculty, staff and administration--are in the same boat with regard to not having enough state funding," says Arante. "But we're all here because we know Portland State's potential."

And for some, potential is the biggest selling point there is.

"People said, 'Wait, why should we give money to PSU?'" recalls Jun Jiao of her four-year quest to fund the electron microscope lab. "'You're not established. You don't do these kinds of things.' And I said to them, 'Why not? We are no longer the PSU of the past.'"

View the graphs that accompany this story in the print edition (in .pdf format) at www.wweek.com/PDF_Documents/031704_coverstory_graphs.pdf

Officially, downtown's "University District" includes 52 blocks around Portland State's campus. Special zoning regulations give the university right of first refusal on property sales in the area.

Before coming to Portland State, Dan Bernstine was the dean of the law school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also served as the interim dean of Howard University's law school in Washington, D.C.

Bernstine's annual salary is $170,396. Oregon State University President Ed Ray earns $295,000 annually, while University of Oregon President Dave Frohnmayer earns $278,024.

For more on the history of Portland State, see The College That Would Not Die by Gordon B. Dodds (Oregon Historical Press/Portland State University, 2000).

The school was originally called the Vanport Extension Center. The Vanport housing project, built to house shipyard workers during World War II, was destroyed in a flood on Memorial Day 1948. Only three books in the college library survived the flood.

Portland State founder Stephen Epler also invented six-man football.

When asked to name his greatest accomplishment at PSU, Bernstine said, "You mean, besides surviving?"

Portland State moved to its current Park Blocks location when it took over the former Lincoln High School building in 1952. It became a full-fledged university in 1969.

WWeek 2015