Yet American schools and libraries — including those in Oregon — are facing an intense culture war that jeopardizes this progress. The debate centers around protecting and serving youth while upholding constitutional rights and promoting high-quality literature and fresh, independent voices. In recent years, a political movement has emerged to challenge and cancel books, displays and events in schools and public libraries ostensibly on grounds of child welfare and parental rights. Last year the number of attempts to ban or restrict books in the U.S. reached a 20-year high. While challenges are lobbed from different political sides, PEN America reports that the vast majority of materials targeted for removal feature LGBTQ+ characters and/or characters of color, or they cover sensitive topics like race, racism, LGBTQ+ identities or sex education. Some groups fueling the censorship crusade have been associated with extremist organizations and anti-government groups. Conservative legislators in various states have enacted measures to make it easier to restrict access to content and even impose criminal penalties on library staff. Thankfully, recent federal court rulings have overturned and blocked censorship attempts in Texas, Virginia and Arkansas, emphasizing the significant First Amendment protection to which all are entitled — including minors. 

Yet, while the core principles of free expression that define our nation have strong protection in the legal system, we must not take them for granted. Proactive awareness, resistance and rejection of censorship are imperative both for our individual liberty and economic future. In today’s marketplace, forward-thinking business leaders recognize that a diverse and inclusive workplace is not just a moral imperative but also a strategic advantage. Soft skills like teamwork, emotional intelligence and crosscultural understanding are now reported by Forbes to be more valuable to employers than technical expertise alone. Studies show that companies with diverse teams outperform their competitors financially.

Reading widely and thoughtfully cultivates those invaluable character traits that are essential for leadership roles. A study in the journal Reading Research Quarterly (2014) found that students who read diverse literature were more likely to demonstrate increased empathy and perspective-taking abilities compared to a control group. The American Library Association’s report, “Why Diversity Matters,” highlights the positive impact of varied literature on youth’s cognitive and affective development and how it fosters empathy, understanding and critical thinking.

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A Puritanical restriction of reading choices risks hindering the development of these essential soft skills in students by instilling fear of reading and of challenging ideas. Literature that tackles sensitive topics encourages open dialogue and helps students become well-rounded individuals with the capacity to embrace different viewpoints. By nurturing empathetic and culturally competent individuals, businesses ultimately gain a labor pool with a deeper understanding of the world, greater flexibility and adaptability.

Rather than retreating from challenging conversations, a more productive approach lies in providing diverse reading options. A robust selection of classic, contemporary, popular and emergent literature allows students to explore different narratives with guidance from parents and educators, promoting an appreciation of language and storytelling and a love of reading, ultimately increasing resilience and competence in their interactions and relationships. One argument being made is that the materials being challenged are considered “pornography,” and therefore, this content is harmful to minors. But that characterization — and reader maturity — are highly subjective. These are assessments best left to individuals and their parents — not the government. Societal standards and norms change over time, often led by artistic expression in the marketplace. 

Just as Elvis’ then-outrageous dancing now looks innocuous, classic books by writers such as Chaucer, Hemingway, Steinbeck and Vonnegut — that were once considered scandalous — are today known as important pieces of literature. And the Constitution requires that works are evaluated on literary merit as a whole, not merely by provocative passages taken out of context. Furthermore, respected therapists contend that the moral panic associated with children and awareness of sexuality is unfounded — and actually may increase children’s vulnerabilities to exploitation and abuse. For example, denying youth the pursuit of factual knowledge about their bodies discourages them from seeking professional and researched materials on the topic, or from discussions with parents and trustworthy adults. As Bronwyn Davies of the University of Melbourne has said, “What is dangerous, more than anything else, is the withholding of knowledge from children — the deliberate construction not of innocence but of ignorance.”

The battle for youth access to diverse literature in schools and libraries has profound implications for the future of our workforce and society. 

We invite business leaders to join us, along with supporters such as Parents Defending Schools & Libraries (PDSAL.org), to champion the preservation of freedom of expression and advocate for nurturing a generation of employees equipped with empathy, critical thinking and adaptability. By protecting the sovereign right to read, together we can shape a more inclusive and prosperous future.

Perry Stokes is co-chair of the Oregon Library Association Intellectual Freedom Committee (OLA IFC), a standing committee empowered by the OLA Board to educate and support the value of intellectual freedom, and to help provide public oversight of any potential violations of the First Amendment in Oregon libraries.

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A research and outreach unit at the University of Oregon’s College of Education has announced a partnership with Irish voice tech startup SoapBox Labs, to integrate the company’s dialectical artificial intelligence technology into the university’s assessment tool.

A press release accompanying the announcement said UO plans to integrate SoapBox Labs’ technology into CBMskills, a program which pairs with easyCBM, the platform the College of Education uses to measure the progress of entry-level readers. SoapBox Labs’ system can accurately assess children based on their own unique speech patterns, accents, and dialects, leading the company to win tech certification nonprofit Digital Promise’s Prioritizing Racial Equity in AI Design product certification in 2022.

The announcement follows two other recent SoapBox Labs collaborations with educational publishers Scholastic and Imagine Learning.  Gerald Tindal, director of behavioral research and teaching at the University of Oregon, said in the press release the incorporation of SoapBox Labs’ technology into CBMskills “[A]llows us to much more effectively and precisely unpack where students are struggling, so we can intervene more strategically and more quickly.”

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“This partnership underscores our commitment to revolutionizing language and reading development through technology, and together with the University of Oregon, we’re continuing to leverage voice technology to help teachers and students,” Martyn Farrows, CEO at SoapBox Labs, said in the release.

UO’s College of Education launched, easyCBM, 15 years ago to assess acquisition of reading skills and inform educators’ interventions to support struggling students. Since its release, the program has been used to deliver eight million education assessments, according to UO. CBMskills is a voice-driven assessment platform which records and assesses timed reading passages to track student’s learning progress in order to identify and intervene with struggling readers.

Using the SoapBox language engine, the assessment tracks a student’s progress through timed reading passages, making it easier for educators to accurately and specifically identify where students are making mistakes in oral language proficiency. For example, a child who skips words or sentences but pronounces the words correctly may have a visual processing problem rather than a reading problem. If a child regularly replaces an “R” with an “lL,” an articulation disorder may also be present. The type and frequency of errors can be highlighted through a voice-enabled learning tool, enabling more personalized instruction and faster intervention.

The College of Education’s behavioral research and teaching division plans to onboard an additional 10,000 teachers with CBMskills by the spring of 2024, according to the announcement.

“I got tired of being poor,” she says with a laugh. 

Though she was highly motivated, Summer’s dream nearly derailed at the last minute. It wasn’t failing grades, illness or outside pressures that put her graduation from Portland Community College’s rigorous two-year nursing program in jeopardy. 

The threat to Summer’s diploma was coming from inside the house. 

In April 2023, shortly before Summer was set to graduate, Lisa Sanchez-Navarro — the director of Portland Community College’s program — resigned her position. That started the clock ticking: Administrators had just 15 days to find a new director and have them approved by the Oregon State Board of Nursing (OSBN) — or shutter the program. 

After a lot of shuffling and searching, and an extra 15-day extension, PCC administrators hired Cynthia Backer as interim program Dean of Nursing. With an approved director in place, Summer and her cohort of new nurses could get their diplomas and start their nursing careers. 

“The Oregon State Board of Nursing works closely with all of the colleges,” says Janeen Hull, PCC’s dean of academic & career pathways for healthcare & emergency professions. “They would never leave students hanging.”

Yet nursing students, nursing educators, hospitals and ultimately everyone seeking health care in Oregon are all in danger of being left hanging. Nurses are in desperately short supply, but fully qualified nurse educators are really hard to find. In fact, though her résumé is long, even Backer does not meet the full qualifications set by OSBN to become a permanent hire. Finding a permanent candidate to meet those full standards will be challenging. 

“The pool of qualified nurses who want to work in education is small,” Hull admits. 

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The nursing shortage, nursing-educator shortage and connection between the two is old news. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) has been highlighting the issue for over two decades, according to an article in American Nurse. Written by Susan Bakewell-Sachs, OHSU School of Nursing dean, along with two other contributors, the article calls the problem behind the nurse-faculty shortage a “matter of great and growing concern.”

A sticky web of interconnected issues — burnout, lack of clinical and lab space, uncompetitive pay for nurse educators, and a fair dose of institutional misogyny — drives this crisis. The COVID pandemic accelerated the pace. And while this is a nationwide problem, Oregon has been hit particularly hard. The state produces the third-fewest nursing school graduates per capita as compared to the rest of the country, according to a study by the Oregon Longitudinal Data Collaborative (OLDC). 

Statewide, stakeholders hunt for coordinated solutions, but the prognosis is unknown. The nursing and nursing-educator crisis has festered for a long time. Can this finally be the moment of change? 

It is not that people do not want to become nurses. Just like Summer, plenty of good candidates dream of starting down this path. For this year’s fall class, Portland Community College alone had 400 well-qualified applicants to their program, according to Hull. The program, however, could only accommodate 32 of them — that is, 8% of total applicants. 

Numbers across the state are a little better, but not much. The OLDC study found that 6,800 qualified people applied to programs in 2020, but only 23% were accepted. On the national level, there were 91,038 qualified nursing applications left on the table in 2021. 

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The fact that most registered nursing programs in Oregon have enough qualified applications and regional jobs to double enrollment is heartening, even as the profession evolves into something more complex. The job has certainly changed from when Backer was in school: “We were trained to give back rubs, help people eat and do bed baths,” she says. “People go into nursing for heartfelt reasons, but there has definitely been a change in expectations.” 

Expectations for nurse educators have shifted as well. The job demands they keep up with an ever-expanding body of health care knowledge, even as textbooks lag behind. 

“You can’t just teach to the book,” says Backer. “Teachers need the most current, online resources and access to real world examples.”

They also need to know how to teach. That means successfully communicating information to a diverse set of students with different learning styles. (Nursing students often need a fair bit of hand holding, Summer says. “We were neurotic,” she says, “and in a state of panic all the time!”)

But anxious students and high expectations are just add-ons to the root causes of the nurse/nursing educator shortage. The biggest problems are a lack of clinical space where students practice and a huge disparity in the pay a teacher can make as compared to a nurse working in the field. 

The situation is no better at private colleges and universities. 

“We absolutely do not have enough nurse educators,” Dean Casey Shillam, School of Nursing & Health Innovations, University of Portland, says.

Even if there were an abundance of educators, the lack of clinical space squeezes the nursing pipeline to a drip. These clinical placements are required for all students. To get them, the schools must foster individual relationships with healthcare placement sites. This forces a competition between the programs where the students are the losers. The longitudinal study found that 95 percent of nursing programs had an individual or cohort denied placement from 2016 to 2020. 

Securing clinical space has always been difficult. The pandemic made it worse. “Placements in off-campus professional practice, hospitals, and community-based, long-term care has all diminished because the health systems are not functioning,” says Shillam. “They have no capacity to take students.”

But perhaps the biggest barrier to becoming a nurse educator is money. Low nursing educator pay is the standard across the nation. According to the latest Nurse Salary Research Report issued by Nurse.com, the median salary across advanced practice registered nurse roles is $120,000. By contrast, AACN reported in March 2022 that the average salary for a master’s-prepared professor in schools of nursing is $87,325.

Payment structures widen the disparity. Nurses are paid hourly; nursing educators draw a salary. That means any extra work outside the contract — like prepping courses, attending orientations or reassuring anxious students — is unpaid. 

Oregon has one of the largest pay gaps between nursing faculty and registered nurses, according to the OLDC study. This makes it easier to lure even the most dedicated faculty away. 

“Even if nurses want to get into academic nursing, the health systems are so desperate for clinicians that they are offering nurses their dream jobs, and I’m losing faculty,” laments Dean Shillam. She reports losing four faculty members this year alone to positions that she admits make her a bit envious. “They are landing fully remote telehealth jobs or working just three days a week in patient intake, receiving full benefits, and making one and a half times more.”

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Why is nursing-educator pay so low, particularly when compared with what medical educators — the professionals who teach doctors — make?

Medical education is supplemented by Medicare. Nursing is not, answers Dean Shillam. And why is that? “Because physicians have more influence in Medicare funding decisions and nursing doesn’t have the same level of influence and impact in how nursing education could be equitably funded.” 

So the nursing-education system is built on the underlying expectation of unpaid labor. Shillam is not ready to call this situation straight-up misogyny but will admit that “historically, physicians were predominantly male and have driven these policies, whereas nurses were predominantly and still are majority female.”

Structural inequities aside, Oregon’s nursing schools and legislators are working to find a solution. 

PCC is expanding its programs, adding options like Certified Nursing Assistant and Licensed Practical Nurse to its course list. These easier-to-
obtain certifications make nursing accessible to students who need to start their careers sooner. The move will hopefully ease labor shortages while giving students a stepping stone to the next level. 

PCC is also opening a brand-new, state-of-the-art nursing education simulation lab at its Sylvania campus. This larger space, filled with sophisticated equipment like simulation mannequins, will make room for another cohort of students, bumping up PCC’s class size from 32 to 40. 

Oregon Health & Science University is hard at work implementing its 30-30-30 plan. Funded in March of last year, the $45 million investment aims to increase the number of clinicians graduated by 30% and increase student diversity by 30% by the year 2030. The money includes an extra $20 million per year to expand class sizes and a one-time $25 million to kick-start the OHSU Opportunity Fund. This money will go to tuition assistance, loan repayment and other resources needed to recruit and retain a more diverse class of learners. 

“We have nurses who are interested in advanced degrees and thinking about taking education coursework that would allow them to teach,” says OHSU’s School of Nursing Dean Bakewell-Sachs. “The 30-30-30 plan is seeking to meet workforce needs for nurses and other professions and seeking to establish a long-term solution.” 

The Opportunity Fund, according to Bakewell-Sachs, is about “building the workforce of the future. We want to align workforces to mirror society. If we increase the diversity of our students, we want to have faculty to align with that as well.”

OHSU also established the Oregon Nursing Education Academy to expand the ranks of preceptors and clinical nursing faculty. This program hopes to train a total of 63 faculty and 92 preceptors from Oregon, Idaho, Washington and Alaska by the fall of 2026. The program is designed for nurses who already have a bachelor’s degree or higher in nursing. 

Nurses that graduate with an associate’s degree from community colleges are already pretty well incented to get their bachelor’s degree. “That’s where the upward mobility is,” explains Hull. “Certain hospitals only want to hire nurses with a bachelor’s.” 

Summer, the recent graduate from PCC, is already planning for hers. She’ll start working as a nurse in telemetry while taking OHSU bachelor’s-level classes online. 

The recently passed SB 523 aims to make it easier and less costly for future community college graduates to get their bachelor’s, particularly for students in rural areas. “The bill tries to capture students who wouldn’t continue on or [would] do it through an out-of-state, for-profit option,” explains John Wykoff, deputy director of the Oregon Community College Association. “This cost-effective option should be more attractive to students.” The program could also help keep rural students in rural communities, where the need is greater. 

But the bill does not wow PCC’s Hull. “I haven’t explored what SB 523 would mean for us,” she says. “I can’t even find enough instructors for our associate’s program.” 

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None of these efforts, however, address the pay disparity between educators and practitioners. The OLDC study analysis found that increasing wages by $6,139 for nine-month nursing faculty would incent and entice instructors. The report stresses that schools should collaborate on pay increases statewide to avoid creating competition between programs. 

Where that money would come from presents another issue. Proposed legislative action, HB 3323, would create a stipend for nurse educators. Hull was a bit more excited about this bill. “Washington state already does something like this. It could be a possible solution.” The bill, however, was still in committee when the House adjourned in June.  

Backer at PCC suggests that some face-to-face recruiting with nurses could help sway them over to teaching. “I see nurses at hospitals that are so good with students,” she says. “We should seek these people out and show them why teaching is a worthy career. We need to advertise to them, let them know it can be fun.”

As far as finding more clinical space, Backer suggests looking for new opportunities outside of hospitals. “What about addiction clinics or homeless shelters? They have to be places where the student is getting nursing experience.”

While these are all good steps forward, fixing the nurse/nurse-educator shortage will be an uphill battle. Burnout among current nurses is extremely high. About 100,000 registered nurses left the workforce during the past two years due to stress, burnout and retirements, and another 610,388 reported an intent to leave by 2027, according to a study released by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing and reported by the American Hospital Association. 

Perhaps this is because of a system that needs nurses yet undervalues their contributions. 

“The system values doctors because hospitals can bill for their work,” Summer says. “They see nurses as a money-suck even though we are essential for patient care.”

Still, Summer holds a lot of admiration for the nurses who helped her along the way. She would like to teach eventually, saying it is on her long-term trajectory. But she’s come across so many nurses suffering from compassion fatigue that she wonders. 

“I chose nursing because I can keep learning. There are a lot of fields to go into, and you can’t do bedside forever,” she says. “Teaching would be a great trajectory. They just need to be paid more.”

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Marsh was the GameChanger Guy. 

For those who haven’t been on the sidelines of youth sports lately, GameChanger is an omnipresent app for livestreaming, scorekeeping and team management. The app has changed the viewing experience for millions of youth-sports participants and families since its founding in 2010 for baseball and softball. 

During a game, users can track each pitch, hit, out, run, steal and more. Anyone interested in a team and granted permission from the coach (since these are minors) can watch the video feed. Afterward, users can send around highlight clips or an artificial-intelligence-generated article recapping the game.

Nearly every parent in the stands that day in Tualatin had their phone open to GameChanger to keep track of their seventh- or eighth-grader’s game—the 2023 version of keeping a scorebook with pencil and paper. 

“It keeps me focused on the game,” Marsh said. “I don’t get to daydream as much.”

As a team parent for the Cleveland Youth Baseball and Softball program in Southeast Portland, Marsh’s job was to enter all the data from the game in real time. He sat on a wooden bench behind home plate, his cell phone plugged into a camping battery to ensure it didn’t die in the middle of the game.

After all, grandparents across the country — from Salem, Ore., to Florida and North Carolina — were following the game in real time, waiting to see how their middle-school grandsons performed. Marsh’s wife was across town watching their third-grader play baseball live in Southeast Portland while also keeping up with the Tualatin game on the app.

“It’s nerve-wracking,” Marsh told Oregon Business between innings, because he could not speak during game play. “I’ve lost the plot a little before.”

Periodically, the parent who was GameChanging (it’s a verb now) for the opposing team came over to compare data with Marsh. The umpire and the coach relied on him occasionally, too. 

“That’s when I get nervous — when the coach comes over,” Marsh said.

About 36 million youth-sporting events happened in the U.S. in 2022; GameChanger scored 6 million of them. It is the No. 1-rated youth-sports app in the country and has been owned by retailer Dick’s Sporting Goods since 2016. About 11,000 Oregon teams use GameChanger, according to the company. It’s available for free on iOS, Android and the web, though users can pay $74.99 a year for a premium subscription, which gets them access to highlight clips, season statistics and “spray charts” of the path of every ball put into play. 

GameChanger’s reach extends all the way to Major League Baseball, which announced a multiyear partnership with the company in June. In addition to MLB, the app is wriggling its way into baseball recruiting, journalism and the 19 non-baseball and softball sports now listed on the app, including basketball, football and soccer.

“In two years, families in six or seven of the major team sports will all use GameChanger the way they use it in baseball and softball today,” GameChanger president Sameer Ahuja tells OB. “That’s ambitious, but I am hoping we get there.”

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Ahuja’s familiarity with GameChanger began after he started coaching his daughter’s kindergarten softball team in Westchester County, N.Y., in 2014.

“At that age it’s mostly just having fun with them, but it was literally the best part of my week,” he says. “I really took to this coaching thing.” 

The app kept the team connected, especially sharing photos of the children with the busy parents who couldn’t make it to every game. In 2017 he got an offer to join the company. “I just kind of jumped in and the rest is history,” he says. Ahuja worked his way up to president in 2021. 

Ahuja says he may be a lifer at the company because working there is both interesting and uplifting. (“This is about as wholesome as it gets,” he says.) He loves being known in his community as “The GameChanger Guy,” because of the affection people have for the app. 

Once, on a family vacation, he wore a GameChanger T-shirt to the airport, and strangers took photos with him when they learned he was the company president. His daughters, now 13 and 10, were appropriately mortified. 

GameChanger merchandise is available at, of course, company parent Dick’s Sporting Goods. One straightforward T-shirt says “Leave Me Alone, I’m Scoring” on the back. 

At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, GameChanger had 45 employees working at the company headquarters in New York, according to Ahuja. Now they have 160 employees working in 30-plus states (three engineers work from Oregon). What changed? In a word: video. 

After introducing video in 2020, GameChanger is now the largest streamer in youth sports in the country. Users can watch games like they’re on TV, albeit with poorer video quality than a professional broadcast and only one camera angle, since the filming is typically done with a parent’s phone mounted to the fence behind home plate. 

“Customers reach out to us and say this is more valuable to them than their Netflix subscription, which is so cool to hear,” Ahuja says. 

Jeff Passan, ESPN’s senior MLB Insider, is one such customer. A Kansas City, Kan.-based baseball dad, Passan has purchased Wi-Fi on a plane to watch his son pitch at a high school baseball game from 30,000 feet in the air. He first used GameChanger this past spring.

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“I was kind of hooked from the jump,” he says. “As a baseball nerd and as someone who grew up loving nothing more than the box-score agate page … the idea that this could be applied to youth sports kind of blew my mind.” 

Passan says he is used to the “spectacular” MLB app with its bevy of information about pitch velocity and a hitter’s hot and cold zones. MLB’s app makes GameChanger look like, well, Little League, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, Passan says. It helps parents get a better grasp of the sport.

“The bare-bones nature of GameChanger is a feature, not a bug,” he says. “As much as it is a tool for following, it’s also a really good teaching tool for someone.” 

Despite a two-decade career in baseball journalism, Passan has not yet been invited to score his son’s varsity games on GameChanger, only the JV ones. The parents take it so seriously in his community that they often lobby the scorer to count errors as hits to improve their children’s batting averages. (Passan doesn’t budge: “I’m pretty strict.”) 

Before games, he used the app to scout opponents so he could warn his son and his teammates which hitters to watch out for. 

He’s not the only one using the technology this way, he suspects. Now that MLB is partnered with GameChanger, Passan sees potential for MLB teams to more easily scout which youth players they want in their pipeline — especially those from small schools that might be overlooked by recruiters. 

GameChanger touts its highlight clips as a tool for youth to attract the attention of recruiters, but the app hasn’t reached up to the college level yet, at least not in Oregon: coaches at Oregon State University, Portland State University and University of Portland all declined interview requests due to lack of familiarity with GameChanger.

While highlight clips are GameChanger’s most valuable feature to customers, Ahuja says, the app’s artificial-intelligence game recaps are also buzzy. Though GameChanger rolled out the recaps on the app back in 2012, the national conversation about AI has exploded in the last year. 

ChatGPT surged in popularity in the last year to much existential hand-wringing. In July The Oregonian announced that it is using an automated tool called United Robots to generate dozens of articles about real estate transactions each week. The Writer’s Guild of America went on strike in May in part to create job protections from AI tools that could threaten their jobs.

Thirty-seven million AI recaps have been produced by GameChanger, Ahuja says, and he hears regularly from customers that they love them.

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“In the event that your kid is featured in them, it’s like your kid’s name in lights,” Ahuja says. “It’s the coolest thing to receive it. Grandparents burst with pride.”

For example, the AI recap of the game Mike Marsh scored in Tualatin began: “Cleveland fell behind early and couldn’t come back in a 9-4 loss to Tualatin on Wednesday.” A chronological recap followed, including some details about the pitcher. “The fire-baller allowed one hit and zero runs over three innings, striking out two and walking one.” 

Passan isn’t fearing a robot takeover of his career anytime soon, in part because he reads GameChanger’s AI recaps.

“As a person who writes about baseball for a living, every time I look at the game story, I am appalled,” Passan says. “It’s a terrible misrepresentation of what has happened during the game.” 

Lori Shontz is a veteran journalist who now teaches at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. She’s covered sports all over the world and now teaches sportswriting along with other reporting fundamentals. At OB’s request, Shontz evaluated the recap of the Tualatin game and said she couldn’t determine if the game even mattered, since the article didn’t include either team’s season record of wins and losses. There are no interviews with coaches and players, of course, and no stakes or tension. 

“The people who do this work really well are the ones who truly put it into a story with a beginning, middle and end with turning points and with some level of analysis,” Shontz says. “And that’s very difficult to do, and sports happen on deadline.”

Shontz lives in the Eugene-Springfield area and has observed the diminishment of The Register-Guard’s sports coverage. (The once-robust newsroom is now down to seven employees after a 2018 acquisition by Gannett Co., Inc.)

“It has been gutted,” she says. “So I completely get that there’s a need for this.” 

GameChanger recaps don’t run in mainstream news outlets, though Ahuja has seen reporters reference them on Twitter (rebranded as X at the end of July). GameChanger partnered with Narrative Science (now part of Salesforce) on the “natural language generation” technology in the early 2010s but has built a good bit of it themselves.

“It hasn’t taken something that humans were doing and replaced it,” Ahuja says. “It just wasn’t being done at all.”

Settled into a low-slung camping chair on the grassy sidelines of the Tualatin game, Portland mom Jessica Young watches her eighth-grade son play ball in real time and then the statistics load on GameChanger moments later on her phone. 

“It’s super helpful, because it is so rare that they ever have a scoreboard,” Young says. “If you don’t use this, you’re constantly asking people the score or trying to keep track in your head.” 

As a mother of four, her children play baseball, soccer, track and football. Young’s phone is cluttered with seven apps to keep track of all those teams: one for soccer, one for club soccer, one for tournaments, one that she just uses for which jersey color her son should wear and so on. “It’s obnoxious,” she says. 

If Ahuja’s plans come to fruition, she could be down to just one app in the next few years. 

Transitioning the GameChanger technology to other sports is the biggest challenge currently facing the company, Ahuja says. Baseball fans are notoriously obsessed with statistics, which is not the case in, say, soccer. Tailoring its product to dozens of new sports, each with their own cultures, is tricky.  

“We have to make sure we’re delivering what each sport wants,” Ahyuja says. “We’re spending a lot of time making sure we’re smart on that front.”

Size of the field or court, pace of play and reliance on statistics (or not) all factor into how new sports will use GameChanger. Basketball and volleyball are easy to film in gymnasiums, whereas soccer and football are on huge fields that are tough to capture with amateur equipment. (Passan thinks that hockey would be “almost impossible” for amateurs to track statistics because of the relentless pace.)

One commonality? 

“The emotion at the parent/grandparent level is the same no matter which sport it is,” Ahuja says. “People are people and they want to be connected to their kids.”

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Cudd became the associate dean for humanities for the University of Kansas in 2008 after spending 27 years as a philosophy professor. She says seeing the university operating model from the other side of the desk brought her face to face with the reality that institutions of higher education widen the economic gaps in society. She says the experience lit a fire in her to make college more affordable. 

“I really felt a duty or a calling to work on affordability-access kinds of initiatives. Just helping students to afford an education was a great need,” says Cudd, who begins her first term as president of Portland State University this fall. “Many students are just not able to afford a great education, and yet a great education is really necessary for joining the middle class, or for coming up with the kind of innovative and creative ideas that our society really runs on.”

Raised by librarian-rancher parents on a horse farm in Ohio, Cudd says her parents’ love of literature and philosophy guided her down the path toward academia. She obtained her doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh — where she would later return to become provost — studying economics and political philosophy, with a specialization in feminist thought and theory.  

As a philosopher, Cudd’s research focused on examining feminist concepts through rational choice theory — a decision-making school of thought pioneered by the capitalist philosopher-economist Adam Smith. Her first publications centered on how people, particularly women, make decisions rationally, strategically and collectively. She says her training as a philosopher helps her consider all the possible angles and outcomes of a decision while also considering the school’s moral and ethical responsibility. 

“I am, after all, trained as a decision theorist, getting the data and having a good sense of what are the likely outcomes of a decision, what are the possible outcomes and what are the probabilities of each of those happening,” says Cudd. “Then also considering very deeply a principle’s perspective; that includes serving the city, opening doors of opportunity, being equitable, and doing everything with ethics and integrity. That’s the overall philosophy of decision-making that I have.”

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At PSU Cudd will face falling enrollment; cuts to faculty and classes; and what the school’s own board chair describes as a bloated, decentralized administrative wing she is tasked with trimming. Cudd says her role as a president is to make decisions necessary to achieving her vision for the school: choices that emphasize affordability for students, foster a creative, team-centered learning environment, and bring in outside partners from the public and private sectors together to solve the city’s most persistent problems. 

An active hiker, biker and runner, Cudd says she was drawn to PSU in part because of the opportunities for outdoor recreation in the area. She also admired the school’s mission of serving the city of Portland. 

“It’s a creative, innovative city. I was a big fan of Portlandia, of course,” says Cudd. “And Portland State is so entwined in the whole culture and ethos of Portland.”

Cudd was also impressed by PSU’s affordability mission. Starting in the fall of 2023, PSU streamlined two of its financial aid packages to create a tuition-free degree program for students qualifying for the Federal Pell Grant. The PSU initiative is referred to as a “last dollar” program, meaning the school provides enough funds to ensure that the student does not have to pay tuition for their classes after a student’s federal and state financial aid is applied, rather than the school’s financial aid being applied first in the process. 

Cudd says the PSU program goes even further than the Pell-matching measures she helped institute at Pittsburgh, which reduced the average debt burden of Pell-eligible students by $4,000 and grew headcount 4% one year. 

Full-time enrollment at PSU dropped 11% between 2019 and 2021, costing the university $18 million. The decline in enrollment is part of a national trend — college headcount declined 8% nationally between 2019 and 2023, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Enrollment at PSU dropped by 3.7% during the 2022-2023 academic year, according to university data. PSU tuition also rose by 3.6% in the 2022-23 school year, compared to the average national increase of 1.8% during the 2022-2023 academic year.  

In June PSU’s Board of Trustees dipped into its reserves for $20 million to fund the school through the upcoming year and cut spending by 1.3% by reducing personnel costs by $14.8 million. 

The school commissioned an operational review by Hillsboro-based Huron Consulting Group in 2021, which found the school functioned on a fragmented operating model. The report also found a fractured student-services department reporting to five separate vice presidents; minimal career growth opportunities for PSU students; and outsized administrative spending that “outweighs all student services, enrollment, and academic program support combined.”

Cudd says PSU’s tuition raises are part of a continuing decline after the college rates peaked during the Great Recession in 2011, and that the college is still affordable. When it comes to streamlining and consolidating functions at PSU, Cudd says she will be consulting the school’s departments and will study the culture, but that ultimately her decisions will be guided by the data collected by the Huron report — decisions that PSU board chair Benjamin Berry says have been kicked down the road by her predecessors.

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Berry, who is in his first year as chair of the Board of Trustees, says Cudd will be expected to streamline the school’s administrative arm, which has become bloated over decades of indecision by former leadership.    

“The reason we’re so decentralized at PSU is because various colleges and groups decided, ‘Well, we’re not getting it done through our administration. Let’s go ahead and hire these other people internal to the college, and then they’ll get it done,’” says Berry. “But by doing that, we are actually spending more money versus trying to standardize and consolidate.”

While Berry is optimistic about Cudd’s ability to lead the school, the decision to hire her also came amid increased tension between faculty unions and the Board of Trustees. In May the PSU chapter of the American Association of University Professors published a blog post highlighting the impact of budget cuts on students and faculty, and mentioning a slide from an April budget committee meeting that proposed allocating a maximum of $10 million of its $20 million dip into its reserve funds to allow for flexibility to new university leadership — what the union described as a “startup fund” for Cudd. 

Emily Ford, president of AAUP’s PSU chapter, says the proposal, which the union’s blog post said was an example of “moral bankruptcy” on the part of the board, caused an outcry because of the pain faculty and staff are experiencing due to budget cuts. 

The school released an official response to questions about how it allocated finances, detailing its spending and ensuring trustees did not vote on the topic of a discretionary fund for President Cudd, nor was any such fund earmarked or established. 

Ford says even though that proposal didn’t advance, faculty and staff haven’t seen more funding. She expressed concerns about disciplines and majors being trimmed down by the college, including the world languages department, which saw its Chinese major eliminated in 2021. This year students in the school’s political science department launched a petition to save the job of a political science professor. 

“Because we spoke up clearly and loudly, I think the board responded, and one of their responses was to just eliminate any mention of flexibility or discretionary money. Unfortunately, people are still not able to graduate, classes are canceled and jobs are cut,” says Ford, who adds that the school’s cost-saving measures should focus on the bloat in upper management identified in the Huron report rather than the faculty and staff. According to Ford, academic advisors at the School of Business Pathways have reported caseloads three times the national average, while advisors in engineering, computer science, and math manage loads five times the national average — all while one-third of managers at PSU oversee fewer than three direct reports, according to the Huron data.

Erica Thomas, an adjunct art professor at PSU and political action chair of the Portland State University Faculty Association, which represents adjunct faculty at PSU, describes the cuts as a disinvestment in the school.

“If you cancel a class and a student has to go somewhere else to take it, or if you raise the class sizes and give them a poorer-quality education, that’s probably the worst possible way you could respond to a slight enrollment dip,” Thomas tells Oregon Business. 

As a former professor herself, Cudd says she understands the squeeze facing faculty. She’s also agreed to quarterly meeting with union representatives to maintain dialogue on issues facing the school. Ford says quarterly meetings with the president were already the norm and that she is hoping to add more frequent meetings to the president’s schedule. 

Cudd says the trend toward increased adjunct workloads is not necessarily a great thing, but that adjuncts who also work in their fields of study can provide students with an insider perspective. She says one role of her administration will be to bring the private sector into the classroom to create research partnerships. She says these arrangements are especially motivating for students, as it can prepare them to hit the ground running toward a career upon graduation, sometimes with intellectual property all their own.   

“This was something that happened at Pittsburgh, especially in computer science,” Cudd says. “Sometimes it would be a small startup company, but sometimes it was Google. They would agree to set up here and say, ‘Here are a bunch of challenges we have right now that seem to connect with your course. Can you have your students work on these things?’ Then you have some kind of agreement about how you’re going to share the intellectual property, because you want the students to own their intellectual property if it’s successful.”

Cudd says programs that give students a familiarity with data science — as well as programs that emphasize collaboration and team-building in a multicultural setting — will be important pillars of the PSU experience precisely because they relate to the needs of the private sector. She also emphasizes the importance of PSU’s arts programs, saying she expects the College of Arts to play a key role in building up the arts and entertainment sector, with the hopes of revitalizing Portland’s struggling downtown, where PSU is situated. 

She also says the school’s Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative — which has already collaborated with Health Share of Oregon and Oregon Health & Science University to generate funded homelessness research — should work alongside the city to generate better, evidence-based homelessness responses. It’s a vision that plays to PSU’s strengths: The school produces 60% of the state’s licensed social workers, according to state licensure data, and Oregon is among the leading states showing an increased demand for social workers, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, which estimates a 15% growth in social work positions in the state by 2028. 

Cudd also plans for the PSU School of Public Health to continue to collaborate with Oregon Health & Science University on programming, and wants to ensure the semiconductor industry continues to build in Portland, citing the $38.2 billion available in direct federal funding from the CHIPS and Science Act. 

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“I think our angle will be urban research and it will be community-engaged research. We have one of the only urban engineering schools in the state. One of the things that we’re good at is smart grids, and that’s a really critical need to creating smart cities and solving the grand challenge of faster computing,” she says.

Through her rise through the ranks of university administration, Cudd says she still thinks of herself as a professor and academic first. She says she has a personal interest in making PSU a place where students and staff get the most out of their time at the college. And she says she has a vested interest in keeping the liberal arts alive at the school. 

“I certainly hope that one day I can retire from the presidency when Portland State is flourishing, and I can come back and be a philosophy professor again,” says Cudd.

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Clark College in Vancouver, Wash., received $1 million in federal funding to purchase clean energy technology and equipment to develop a Center for Clean Energy, the college announced this week. The new center will train students clean energy technician jobs in the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan area.

The funding will come from the 2023 Community Project Fund. Clark College will use the money to purchase a new solar array, hydro trainer, small-scale wind tower, four electric vehicles and other training equipment. That equipment will be used by the college’s mechatronics technology program which trains students for careers in power utilities, its technology program which trains students on the repair and maintenance of various electric vehicles, and its Boschma Farms advanced manufacturing program – scheduled to begin in the winter of 2025, according to a press release from Clark.

The Boschma Farms program will train students on the manufacturing of solar and wind energy products at the new Boschma Farms campus, currently under construction in Ridgefield, WA. 

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In addition to training, the Center will engage Clark College students with local growth industries in solar and wind energy production, advanced manufacturing, and electric vehicles.

“One of the biggest challenges is finding skilled employees to fill the high-wage jobs in these industries,“ Greater Vancouver Chamber of Commerce president, John McDonagh said in a press release. “We are excited to learn that Clark College students who are pursuing clean energy, manufacturing, and sustainable sciences will soon be able to train in these emerging and expanding markets.” 

These clean energy programs will be led by Clark’s dean of workforce, professional and technical education Theo Koupelis.

“We are thankful for receiving federal support to strengthen our current programs at Clark College and to expand our offerings in clean energy-related programs,” Koupelis said in the release. “This support will provide our students with excellent educational experiences and additional job opportunities in areas that will directly impact our community and state.” 

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A bill before the Oregon Legislature this session would localize and make permanent the COVID-era federal child tax credit.

Oregon’s House Bill 3235, which had its first committee hearing on Tuesday, would create the Oregon Kids’ Credit, a tax rebate of up to $1,200 per child for Oregon families earning less than $50,000 when filing jointly, or $30,000 when filing individually.

The bill was introduced with bipartisan support in the House. Eastern Oregon Republican Greg Smith joined East Portland representativeAndrea Valderrama and three other Democrats as the bill’s chief sponsors.

“We’re going to spend the money,” Smith said, testifying in support of the bill during a Tuesday hearing. “Are we going to take care of our kids and help them be healthy and successful and ready to become adults?”

RELATED: A Novel Development

The federal expanded child tax credit expired in December of 2021, but is credited with a 30% decline in child poverty, prompting recommendations from economic experts — including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen— to make the tax rebate permanent.

Oregon’s bill was drafted with help from the Oregon Center for Public Policy, which endorsed the legislation as “an effective and efficient way to deliver resources to the families in greatest need.”

OCPP’s evaluation of the policy says the tax credit would bring nearly 20,000 children in the state above the povertyline, and “lift up” 200,000 more families by providing them with funds for essential living expenses. The center also says the rebate would disproportionately benefit Black, Indigenous, and Latino children, as well as children in rural areas, reducing racial, ethnic and geographic disparities.

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Tyler Mac Innis, policy analyst at the OCPP, tells Oregon Business that despite being based on the expanded child tax credit, the state’s budget priorities meant the Oregon Kids’ Credit needed to be tailored to help families most in need of assistance.

“The reality is at the state level, we have to balance our budgets. We can’t just print money like the federal government can, so we wanted to make this more targeted,” says Mac Innis. “We want to get the most bang for our buck, so to speak, so we want to target every dollar.”

Another key distinction from the expanded child tax credit is that the Oregon Kids’ Credit is refundable, meaning a parent would receive the full tax refund, even if it exceeded their taxes paid that year.

“In the federal version you had to earn a little bit of money before you get that full amount,” says Mac Innis. “If you’re a single parent about to drop out of the workforce in order to take care of your kids, you would qualify for the Oregon Kids’ Credit even if you don’t have a significant amount of income on your state tax return, which is a key difference from the federal version.”

RELATED: A Crisis of Care

The federal tax credit was implemented when much of the population was not working. Oregonians have now returned to the workforce, and the average cost of child care, over $10,000 a year, in some estimates, well above what this tax provision provides.

Chief sponsor Andrea Valderrama tells Oregon Business over email that even though even though people have returned to work, many parents, especially Oregonians of color and rural Oregonians, needed this support long before the expanded child tax credit kicked in.

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“Even before the pandemic struck, more than two in every five Oregon households lacked the resources needed to make ends meet. While many Oregonians have returned to work, they have also faced rising costs, unaffordable housing, and many other economic challenges,” writes Valderrama.

Valderrama added the tax credit is an investment which could produce long-term benefits, citing research which showed children receiving the expanded federal credit would be more likely to attend and complete school.

The measure does not yet have a floor session or a committee hearing scheduled.

On Friday night, Oregon State University announced plans for a $200 million research and education center that which will focus on “team-based research in artificial intelligence, materials science and robotics” in order to solve global challenges in climate science, oceanography, sustainability and water resources.

The announcement follows a $50 million gift to the OSU Foundation from Jen-Hsun Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, and his wife Lori, who met each other while undergraduates in OSU’s College of Engineering. The university has received an additional, anonymous $50 million gift for the center.

A press release from OSU says the school will also request $75 million in state funding during the 2023 Oregon legislative session in order to match philanthropic and university contributions for the collaborative innovation complex.

Artist’s rendering of the center’s NVIDIA supercomputer. Credit: Oregon State University. 

The school is now engaged in a capital campaign to raise the remaining $25 million, President Jayathi Murthy announced Friday.

“It’s a very ambitious and modern platform on which we wish to build future research. The focus is really on things that are deeply important to our economy, all things climate, all things, sustainability, all things resilience. Research in these areas will be possible, based on the platforms that we’re building,” says Murthy, who adds the facility will greatly help support Oregon’s semiconductor industry.

The Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex is set to open its doors in 2025. The center will employ a NVIDIA supercomputer to support faculty in addressing complex and challenging computational problems.

Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang. Credit: Oregon State University.

According to OSU’s press release, the center’s supercomputer will be among the world’s fastest , with enough power to train the largest AI models and perform complex digital twin simulations. The complex will also have a state-of-the-art cleanroom — a space with few airborne particles which is necessary for semiconductor research — and other specialized research facilities.

Murthy says climate science and climate solutions will be a big part of the center’s research, as the supercomputer will analyze forest and life science data.

Murthy also says a water recycling system — which will use the water used to recycle the supercomputer to provide steam heat for buildings on campus — is in the design stages.

Steve Clark, vice president of university relations and marketing, says the center and its supercomputer will be a “playground” for businesses large and small looking to use the center for research and development.

Artist’s rendering of the The Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex. Credit: Oregon State University. 

Clark says the center will serve to strengthen Oregon’s domestic businesses and provide students with more employment opportunities after graduation.

A similar gift from Huang launched a an engineering innovation center at Stanford University in 2010.

“The semiconductor industry is a very important component of Oregon business, and the CIC will support this question as well. We’re hoping that by expanding research in these fields, we will grow employment, we will provide expertise PhD students, undergraduate students, and through science actually advance all the things that are important to our society,” says Murthy.

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“It’s no secret that advanced computer chips are the linchpin of the 21st century economy,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who also serves on the state’s semiconductor task force, said in OSU’s press release. “This state-of-the-art facility provides opportunity for Oregon State faculty and students to make generation-defining discoveries to push our tech industry forward.”

Gov. Kate Brown, who also serves on the task force, said in the press release that the collaborative innovation complex would “further enable OSU’s world-class researchers and facilities to address some of Oregon’s most pressing issues, including semiconductor research and development, climate change and public health.”

“The Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex and supercomputer will help OSU be recognized as one of the world’s leading universities for artificial intelligence and robotics,” Scott Ashford, dean of OSU’s College of Engineering, said in OSU’s release. “It will transform not only the College of Engineering, but the entire university, and have an economic and environmental impact on the state of Oregon and the nation.”

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He said environmental and electronics researchers working in the complex may design sensors for use at sea or in forests to monitor hard-to-track endangered species and then use AI to analyze data gathered. Additionally, OSU faculty, along with collaborators from other universities, business and state and federal agencies, will pursue techniques in the center’s clean room for making computer chips. Robotics researchers and students will be able to use theater-aided simulations of drones and robots operating within real-world settings.

Murthy says the three-story, 150,000 square-foot center will partner with the school’s programmatic diversity, equity and inclusion efforts to get students of color interested in, and access to, the research happening at the facility.

“We are working with a design firm to actually embodied principles of inclusive design in the building itself, and driving collaborative spaces is in the architecture in the art that underlies the building,” says Murthy. “We are situated pretty close to the [Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center] so they’re a part of the conversation, and they’re a part of that neighborhood as well.”

Rural families, especially immigrants, are more likely to put their children in the care of relatives than to use traditional child care, according to a report released last month by the state’s Early Learning Division.

Researchers interviewed 81 families and found an “extreme lack of available child care programs and slots, long waiting lists, and lack of options for families who work weekends, evenings, and part time exacerbates racial and other inequities in access to quality care.”

The study is the third in a series of studies on the state of child care, following two others conducted in 2019 and 2020. This year’s study focused on the qualitative experiences of Oregon families seeking care.

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Researchers published an executive summary along with three reports on specific populations: LGBTQIA+ families, families with infants and toddlers and families with a child who has been suspended or expelled from day care.

In the report’s executive summary, researchers said the state needs to:

• Make child care more affordable, especially care for infants and toddlers;
• Build easily accessible, multilingual options to help families research child care options;
• Invest in a diverse array of child care options and hire a more diverse roster of providers;
• Change the way child care providers are hired, paid and supported;
• Invest in training, coaching, education and quality improvement;
• Work to reduce bias and discrimination among providers.

Researchers found severe lack of child care options in rural frontier areas of the states as well as significant challenges for Spanish-speaking parents looking for child care. Families who participated in the study said they had left their jobs, shifted their schedules or reduced their hours to keep their kids in child care. Many were simply unable to find it, relying instead on family caregivers.

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“We found people are relying on family, friends or neighbor care, but it’s often it’s a compromise in quality,” Beth Green, co-author of all three studies and director of early childhood and family support research at Portland State University, tells Oregon Business. “You know that your sister is not going to discriminate against your kid or call them bad names or bully them, or let bullying happened to them — but you also know that your sister might be more likely to plop them down in front of the TV for a couple of hours.”

Current certification requirements for childcare providers also put barriers between people able to provide high-quality child care and the families that need their services. Licensed child care providers are not required to have a Bachelor’s degree, though some state and federally-funded preschool programs require an Associates Degree.  The state should be less focused on upfront requirements and more focused on providing adequate support and ongoing training to people who want to enter the field, or are already working in it.

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Green also says the private sector will need to play an increased role in offering childcare solutions, and that some larger Oregon companies have been paving the way for other businesses to follow.

“There are lots of things private businesses could do to support child care access for their employees. Nike has built their own early childhood center on its campus, and has got one of the best early learning centers in the state for its employees. A lot of businesses that can’t do that but there’s probably more that could, and should,” Green says.

Green says small and mid-sized companies could invest in onsite child care providers to help with employee child care needs.

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In addition to adjusting state requirements and action by the private sector, Green says federal support is still going to be crucial for developing Oregon’s childcare system, and making child care more equitable and affordable.

“Biden had to cut all of the sort of early childhood and family support kind of pieces out of his original Build Back Better act, so in terms of federal dollars, it’s going to come down to whether the Democrats will hold onto power, because I feel like if they do they’ll continue these safety net programs.

The division’s 2020 study focused on the impact of COVID-19 on providers and families. Researchers surveyed 2,105 parents found that a majority — 59% — of families with children in child care had experienced major disruptions to care, and that Black parents were much more likely than other groups to experience disruptions, with 73.8% of Black or African American parents saying they had lost care.

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Adrien Bennings stepped into her role as president of Portland Community College in July, three months after the college’s board of directors announced she had been hired to replace Mark Mitsui, who led the school from 2016 until June of this year.

Bennings comes to Oregon from Kellogg Community College in Battle Creek, Michigan, where she had served as president since January 2020. Prior to joining KCC, Bennings served as the vice president of administration and finance and chief financial officer at Clovis Community College in New Mexico, and as regional director of small-business development at Texas Tech University. She has also worked in human resources development, academic development and retention, and small-business development. Additionally, she served as president of the Kellogg Community College Foundation, helping to lead the foundation’s strategic planning and fundraising activities, and advocating for equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Bennings joins PCC as the school — along with other community colleges around the state — faces a precipitous drop in enrollment (see Spotlight on p. 20) but also an infusion of workforce-development funding. She spoke to Oregon Business in July about her background, her vision for PCC’s future — and how the school can meet the challenges it currently faces.

This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

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What drew you to higher education as a career?

I started my career in higher education as an executive assistant, in the health sciences library at Texas Tech University. I had a passion for people, so I went to HR and loved it. Then I did something I said I would never do and went into accounting. That led to work in small-business development. After a while, I wanted a greater level of challenge. I was like, “Well, you know, I’ve got my Ph.D. with focus on higher-education administration. I’ve been in accounting, I’ve been in finance, I’ve been in HR, I’ve been in all these realms pertinent to a higher-education administrator.” That’s when I started to seek out a presidency. You know, I didn’t have it in the books for me, but I was like, all these things I can bring together as a president, and I ended up applying for the job in Battle Creek, Michigan, at Kellogg Community College, and ended up becoming president there.

You have a background in small-business development. What’s your sense of how PCC can adapt to workforce needs?

I think there’s a great opportunity for PCC to tap into some realms that are yet to be discovered in terms of workforce. I am data-minded, so part of that does mean looking at what is happening in our service areas, what’s happening regionally, what’s happening statewide and nationally so that we can align our programs to meet those workforce demands.

We need to be flexible and adaptive, enough so that [students] will be able to participate in what we’re offering while at the same time maintaining their life and providing the basic needs of their families. I think that’s a great opportunity here, but I’m not sure what it looks like. We’re in a prime position to really change and shift what the landscape of higher education means, but also to shift how community colleges play a role in that moving forward.

Enrollment is down at PCC and community colleges around the state. How do you think PCC should adapt to that decrease? Do you see it as a part of the long-term trend?

One of the things that we’re investing in and currently in the process of working through is a strategic enrollment management plan. Enrollment doesn’t just start when a student comes to PCC. You’ve got the K-through-12 pipeline, you’ve got families, you’ve got adult learners out there. You’ve got demographic shifts that are happening. You’ve got what’s happening in the high school realm with graduation rates. You’ve got this complex network of factors and circumstances that impact enrollment.

I don’t know what enrollment is going to do over the long term. But I think that we have a great opportunity here to now say, “What can we do differently? How can we meet the needs out there? Part of that also is more flexibility in our learning modalities. You know, what can we offer besides just in-person? How can our scheduling help in this process?” There are so many nuances associated with strategic enrollment management that I think this presents, again, a prime opportunity, combined with our strategic plan and the SEM — the strategic enrollment management framework that we’re currently working toward, to really build that foundation for the institution — to now say, here’s what we’re dealing with, but at the same time, here’s our opportunity.

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RELATED STORY: Enrollment Blues

What types of students would you hope to reach in the future?

All students. There’s the early college dual credit, there’s the K-through-12 pipeline. But I think that there’s also an opportunity for us to enhance our efforts to reach those who may have already been in the workforce. Whether they’re considering career changes or upskilling, or exploring opportunities that, because of COVID, they need to consider other options. When I say all students, when you think “community,” that’s everyone — everyone who is a part of our community. I can’t limit it to just a specific demographic or specific type of student. I think as long as there are humans, as long as there are individuals, there’s always someone to reach. There’s always some life that we can impact through community colleges.

One thing that seems to be coming up a lot with community colleges is, Who do we want to be? Do we want to be a school that is providing career and technical education, because this is what our workforce partners are asking for? Or do we want to be a school that is setting students up to get transferrable associate’s degrees? Very often, you have a lot of both in any student mix. Where do you see PCC’s role in that conversation?

I think for PCC, it’s got to be a “both and” now. I think that, you know, the perception around colleges in general is that it’s to get an advanced degree, but we’ve got certificates. Some students might get their necessities in the lower-level division courses and transfer on to another institution. But then you have those who work very well in career and technical education — welding, agriculture. We’ve got some great things happening in that realm, such as the Think Big project, focusing on technicians for Caterpillars. You see those yellow Caterpillars out there, there’s a need for technicians in that realm. So I really think that we have to keep our mind focused on this colorful array of opportunities out there and not limit our mindset and not limit what we do in terms of providing programs and curriculum and education to our students. We can’t just limit it to degree focus. You might have lifelong learners, and some of those lifelong learners may see an interest in other areas as they partake in opportunities at PCC. It’s got to be a “both and.” We have to make ourselves available to reach and touch the full community. I think with the “one college” model that we have, I think we really are setting the stage to now be a premier institution. We’re large by nature of who we serve and how many students we serve. But now we’ve found our mojo, we’ve found our niche, and now we’ll be able to do even greater things because we’ve reestablished some foundational frameworks and principles of the institution.

What drew you to PCC?

I had only been to Oregon maybe once or twice in my track and field career. I didn’t remember much about it. But what drew me specifically to PCC was its mission. It’s very aspirational. It really sets a guiding point, a north star for what we hope to achieve and become and embed in all facets of how we operate. Given the institution, this size, you’ve got to have — by nature of how we operate — hierarchy. How can we collaborate outside of the silos? That gave me a strong indicator that we were really trying to become and establish ourselves as a team through collaboration.

I also really embrace the diversity, equity and inclusion component and the workforce component of the mission statement. Because of who we serve, our populations are diverse — different experiences, races, ethnicities, identities, ages, all of these things. Equity and inclusion are hot topics in our nation. Just to see that I, as a Black female, could have a positive role in helping to gain momentum and get true action to solidify this as a part of who PCC is — that, to me, was like, “Oh, I’ve got to be there at PCC.”

RELATED STORY: Blue-Collar Wave

What are you doing when you’re not at work?

I’m really intentional about self-care, especially knowing this is a bigger role for me and knowing that there was going to be more responsibility. I start my days at 4:30; I get up and my husband and I go work out. At the end of the day, I do what I call just mindful detoxing, just to rest. I can get so inundated with information that if I don’t allow myself to be intentional about it, it can be really overwhelming, so I just have quiet time. And then I have two fur babies at home. They greet me with a smile, they’re always wagging and want my attention. And I really have a strong support system at home. My husband is very strong, because part of what I call detoxing from the day is just talking through with him how my day went.

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