Authors: Jacob P., Teddy B., Daniel J.
Western Oregon University facing budget cuts is not unique, many universities have been facing similar financial issues, however, what was unique is that the WOU admin were proposing cutting a quarter of their staff, specifically half of their non-tenured teachers (NTT’s). The admin predicted that their deficit would continue and in 5 years WOU would be $5 million in debt. There are some obvious problems with this, but the only one that’s necessary to mention is that cutting your staff and shutting down programs that bring in money definitely isn’t going to make your financial situation any better.
WOU is a big education school, in fact education is their number one major, and that’s why I (Jacob) started to go to the school, I had gotten my AAOT from Chemeketa Community College (CCC) and WOU was the most affordable school for teaching, as well as it wasn’t too far from where I live. When I visited the campus I also liked how small the campus was, yet it seemed very alive, lots more people around than CCC. My favorite part of WOU is that most people go to that school to start a career in a field that takes care of people, most people at WOU want to enter a career that helps their community so they think very long term and have an optimistic view of the world.
Starting WOU YDSA
Organizing for WOU YDSA began slowly in the Fall term 2024, but accelerated after the presidential election and the Democrats’ inability to effectively oppose Trump. This led many politically disinterested students to feel the need to make change themselves. When they joined, nearly all the WOU YDSA organizers knew little of socialism or didn’t identify as socialist, but what mattered most was that they wanted something different, and when they heard what we stood for, they agreed.
I did my first class wrap towards the end of Fall term and then our first recruit from that helped us table the following day. At our very first tabling session, we gathered 180 interest form signups, an incredible response at a school of about 3,500 students, but turning that energy into action took effort, making a chapter takes work. I advertised our first leadership kickoff meeting for early February to the interest form sign ups and friends and we applied for school club status. As that application was working through the bureaucratic functions we met weekly to start planning our kickoff meeting. Our immediate goal was to do as much outreach as possible to promote it. There were many bureaucratic hurdles, and in hindsight, having more confidence and being willing to bend or ignore certain rules would’ve made things easier.
Choosing a Campaign
We had our kickoff meeting late in Winter term, with 26 attendees. During the meeting, we passed out notecards, and each member wrote ideas of things they wanted to see changed on campus. There were quite a few ideas, including free Plan B, unionizing, and tuition assistance, but the most popular issue was fighting the teacher cuts; nothing else came close. At the second general meeting, we voted on which campaign we wanted to tackle first, and unsurprisingly, the teacher cuts won. As a new chapter, there was a lot to consider for taking on a seemingly impossible task: informing the public and rallying support against the cuts, organizing actions to escalate pressure, and how we actually can force the administration to change course.
Fighting The Cuts
The first action we took was creating our petition and gathering information from students and faculty for clarity on the situation. Once our petition was finished, we immediately started canvassing our campus to inform them of the cuts, as well as collecting petition signatures and reaching out to our teachers to get more concrete information surrounding the cuts. After our efforts had started, the teachers started to take notice and appreciate our support. We would have random teachers come and say thank you to us when we were out petitioning and it brought us great joy. Even our student workers at the cafe brought us free food, it really felt like the community was coming together.
Shortly we got notice that the teachers union wanted to meet with student groups on how to support each other and we were invited. We quickly started to become the main group supporting the teachers and a counter to the general thought that we couldn’t do anything to stop the cuts. I remember sending a message to our student government, ASWOU, asking what we could do and they said nothing sadly. I emphasized the feeling of hopelessness, but we refused to let that hold us back, so we continued the struggle.
We met a couple more times with the teacher union and that was imperative for us to know much more information about what was going on and later on to confirm any successes in our campaign. It was somewhat of an unofficial coalition with the teachers union, but nonetheless we built great connections with our teachers and their union. Additionally, through talking with WOU students, we discovered that almost every student we talked to felt strongly about the cuts, and nearly half of them were unaware that these cuts were even being considered in the first place. We talked to students and faculty members about how they felt, what they had heard, and asked them to attend further escalating actions to stop the cuts, and overall 401 students as well as 567 total members of our community signed the petition to stop the cuts.
Most of our signatures were in the first 2 weeks and the first escalatory action we planned for was telling students to go and voice their concern at the Town Hall where all the admin were going to be. The town hall was organized by our student government (ASWOU) and they had invited the school’s administration to attend the meeting with it being recorded. It was essentially just a Q&A session where audience members would either submit questions online or raise their hand in person to ask the board questions. The turnout was decent, garnering about 60 students, a vast majority from YDSA or recruited to the event by YDSA canvassing, and YDSA had captured the entire messaging of the event, all but a couple questions were about the teacher cuts and the administration was terrified and fumbling. Little did we know that the administration was invited to this event not knowing exactly how it was structured nor that it would be recorded until the day of.
The Town Hall
The town hall itself was the turning point in our fight to stop the cuts and ultimately led to winning. The administration was not expecting this much level of pushback nor this much pressure from students against these drastic cuts. I believe this shocked them that the students were so well informed and core to putting an immense and unexpected amount of pressure on them, at the cost of sounding a little liberal, informing people can be a radical experience. Most people are living day by day and unaware of the corruption surrounding them to any detail, only in the vague sense. So by informing people of the corruption and immediately providing a solution to fight it that they can do themselves gave them power.
Around this time is when all students had gotten an email that seemed to indicate the cuts were stopped but we weren’t certain due to “most teachers getting their allocations” among other wording that was a little too vague for comfort, but after research and meeting with the teacher union we got the confirmation we needed, confirming that practically all cuts had been dropped, need I remind you that they were going to cut a quarter of the ENTIRE TEACHING STAFF, targeting half of our NON-TENURED FACULTY. Some departments would’ve been functionally extinct with 0 teachers scheduled to teach the department.
It took less than three months to stop the cuts overall since hearing the rumor and only a couple weeks to go from petitioning to winning our campaign. An important part to note is that the admin cutting an entire program went against the contract and that allowed the teacher union part of our coalition to employ legal means to also threaten the administration to step down from their preposterous declaration, we functioned in tandem with our professors to deliver a decisive blow to our admins threats of annihilation.
Conclusion
It is often shocking when organizers win in general, this was especially the case for a relatively new chapter like us, where the goal itself seemed barely within reach, but despite this we succeeded in a relatively short period of time. We were in disbelief due to previous organizing education that prepared us for a much bigger fight, along with a general distrust of administration that had been growing ever since the rumor of cuts started, but once we were able to confirm that we had won, and the realization set in, we were ecstatic.
After much analysis and historical research, our best guess was the combined factors of the illegal cuts and that WOU had done similar tactics in the past to try and undo past gains won, we think they might’ve been bluffing their cuts, but a couple years back, one of their bluffs was real and they did in fact cut our philosophy department heavily so it’s hard to be certain, what we do know is that we did have an impact and were able to help stop cuts, whether or not they were really going to be that big, and we revitalized solidarity with teachers, built massive community, and made YDSA a serious power player for making change on campus and being trusted in the community.
The WOU administration really didn’t expect any fight to be put up at all, least so from the student body, we were able to succeed in accomplishing this seemingly impossible task because we met the students where they were at, informed them of the issue, and organized an effective way for them to direct their frustration towards change.
