An Innovative Community
PSU has an opportunity to lead in a community that is forever changed by the pandemic and the movement for racial justice. A first step is to build a PSU that is better positioned to respond to these changes to serve the future needs of our students and communities. We have learned how to adapt our instruction, programs, and services to meet a future that is being redefined by the pandemic and how we can confront structural and systemic racism in our own work and in the communities we serve. As an innovative community that is driven by long-standing shared values, we should be unafraid to acknowledge what we have learned during this past year and to embrace the challenges that lie ahead. For the last two years, we’ve been exploring what kind of future we want for PSU through the Futures Collaboratory. We’ve affirmed that PSU is an imaginative and equity-centered university that is ready to co-create a new chapter for our university.
ReImagine PSU
ReImagine PSU is an intentional effort to provide spaces to create transformational possibilities at a larger scale. ReImagine PSU allows us to craft the university of the future while meeting our current needs for a sustainable budget and forms a critical component of OAA’s Closing the Gap strategy for addressing our budget challenges. Because ReImagine PSU will only succeed with the engagement of faculty and staff, the Provost is dedicating funds from Academic Affairs to respond to proposal requests for up to $25,000. These funds will be available throughout the 2021-22 academic year and on a rolling basis.
Addressing Challenges and Opportunities
ReImagine PSU provides the dedicated space to collaborate and design mechanisms to address the challenges and opportunities we face. Those challenges include:
- Addressing systematic racism within PSU and working, in collaboration with other campus priorities, to achieve equity in curricular development, access, and assessment
- Accommodating for the changing circumstances of our student's lives, including increasing needs for support with financial aid, housing, mental health services, and academic skills preparation
- Meeting PSU's responsibility to communities and workplaces that are increasingly attuned to issues of racial equity and justice and expecting university graduates to be educated about and able to effect changes relating to them
- Responding to student demands for increased flexibility in the ways they choose to learn, including more options for connecting to instructors and student services
- Recognizing declining numbers of high school graduates and community college transfers in the state of Oregon, contributing to a decade-long decrease in overall enrollments in PSU
- Acknowledging broadening student interest in alternate credentials that support lifelong career goals and learning, such as certificates, stackable degrees, and badges
- Preparing students for careers that are increasingly informed by digital and computational environments, including in fields such as healthcare, education, and social services
- Increasing questions about the value of a college education
- Challenges that require cross-disciplinary and cross-college/school engagement
- Are we organized effectively to address tomorrow's challenges?
Invitation for Proposals
While proposals must be future-facing, they should also be framed by our current enrollment and budget realities. To support the continued innovation of faculty and academic units, I am announcing here a new component of the ReImagine program that specifically targets the development of new programs that:
- Support new groups of students to enroll at PSU
- Support PSU in addressing key business or community needs
- Build substantially upon existing courses and resources
- Support the development of microcredentials or other career-aligned academic programs
All proposals will be vetted by the relevant College/School Dean(s) or Academic Affairs unit head as part of the review process. Proposals should be emailed to provost@pdx.edu for consideration and should include the following:
Proposals should include:
1. Project Title
2. Unit (Department, school, college, etc...)
3. Names of Applicants
4. Lead Point of Contact
5. Project Summary
6. Project Proposal
7. Detailed Project Timeline
8. Project Budget
Proposals should address the following questions:
1. How does your proposed project support creating a future-ready institution?
2. What is/are the key challenge(s) your proposed project is intended to address?
3. What is/are the intended outcome(s) of your project?
a. How does your proposal support our efforts to build a sustainable budget?
b. How does your proposal increase or enhance services to students?
c. How does your proposal increase our ability to achieve our racial equity goals?
A successful ReImagine PSU proposal could consider such questions as:
- How can we organize most effectively to support students in ways that are equitable and timely?
- How can we revise our curriculum to be more inclusive of anti-racist and decolonizing approaches across the university?
- How can we prepare and inspire students for careers of impact?
- How can we update our curricula/programs to meet the competencies needed for the changing world of work?
- How might we unbundle our curriculum to make it accessible to broader populations of students?
- How can we revise our curriculum and staffing to meet the needs of a smaller and changing population of students?
- How can we reorganize our units to reflect the future-facing shape of disciplines and fields and simultaneously enable us to operate more effectively?
- How can we build more effective pathways for students from high schools and community colleges to complete degrees at PSU?
- How can we operate more effectively by sharing administrative resources and services across units?
Proposals relating to the analyses put forward by the Program Reduction Working Group and the principles and priorities advanced by the Ad Hoc Committee on Program Reduction and Curricular Adjustments (APRCA) are strongly encouraged.
You can find information about currently funded ReImagine Projects on the ReImagine PSU Project Information Webpage.
Deadlines for proposals:
Resources for this current initiative will be available immediately and on a rolling basis.