Remembering Norm Wyers

Today I honor the memory of my friend Norm Wyers, who passed away one year ago today.

I first met Norm at a faculty meeting in the School of Social Work at Portland State University in 2015, where I had just begun my new role as its first marketing and communications manager. I found it curious that this emeritus faculty member — who had retired a full 20 years prior — was still showing up at the sometimes tedious faculty meetings, advising Ph.D. students and participating in the school's strategic planning. That kind of commitment and dedication impressed and intrigued me.

I soon learned what a brilliant mind, gifted researcher and beloved teacher Norm was at Portland State. He was a gentle giant with an incredible knack for connecting people, making the complex easy to understand, and doing the hard work needed to make things happen.

Norm treasured and nurtured friends and family and his social circle was broad and deep. But when you were with him, you always felt like you were the only thing to him in that moment. Because you were. Norm was an incredible listener. He did so to understand, confirm, soothe, and support. He was right there with you.

Because of the pandemic, we couldn't gather in person to honor Norm after his death. I'm grateful to his colleagues who indulged my crazy idea of holding a virtual celebration of his life via Zoom last February. While imperfect, that gathering reminded me of how profoundly he shaped, influenced and illuminated the lives of so many.

Norm touched so many. I feel lucky to have known and learned from him. We miss him. I miss him. Godspeed, dear friend.

Roots of Resilience

Written by Kurt Bedell

Portland State’s reputation for being student-centered, enterprising and resilient began with the personality of its founder, Stephen E. Epler. A Navy veteran with a doctorate in education, he saw the need for a higher education institution in Portland to serve veterans returning from World War II. He led the charge to create a new breed of school from scratch, despite natural disasters, political battles and many premature predictions of its early demise. 

Born in 1909 to a Disciples of Christ minister and his wife, Epler grew up incorporating his parents’ strong sense of independence and responsibility into his “indefatigable” work ethic, according to former professor Gordon B. Dodds in his seminal history of PSU, “The College That Would Not Die.” Epler’s study of chemistry at tiny Cotner College in Nebraska and doctoral work at the Teacher’s College at Columbia University in New York taught him the value of taking a progressive approach to educating America’s future generations. After some teaching assignments and World War II service, he and his wife, Ferne Misner, landed in Portland with their children in January 1946.

At that time, few of Oregon’s colleges had enough housing—particularly family housing—for returning soldiers ready to take advantage of the GI Bill. Epler saw this as an opportunity. Why not open a program for veterans at Vanport, where many (including himself) already lived? Built as a temporary housing project for the Kaiser Shipyards in the lowlands near the Columbia River, Vanport offered affordable housing, public services and building space, with many facilities now vacant after the war. So Epler and his resourceful team did just that. In just 86 days, they took the idea of the Vanport Extension Center and turned it into a program serving more than 200 students its first summer term.

But then, not two years after Vanport Extension Center was founded, disaster struck. The memory of this turning point in PSU’s history—the great Vanport flood of May 1948—is forever etched in the minds of Epler’s two children, Charlotte Gezi and Stephen M. Epler. 

Since the student and faculty apartments stood so close to the waterline, the younger Epler, now a retired college president living in Rocklin, California, remembers his dad and other staff were among the first to see the levy give way under the force of the Columbia River. 

“I remember them moving typewriters into one of the big army surplus trucks that they got after the war,” he said. “Dad hopped in the truck and drove to the house where we were and warned the family. Dad went through the building and knocked on doors and warned people to leave.” Then it was off to Portland, with their mother, Ferne, driving their big, black ’38 Plymouth behind the fully-loaded truck.

“The government had put out a notice saying that dikes were safe at present,” remembered Charlotte, a retired teacher now living in Sacramento, California. “They said ‘You’ll be warned. You’ll have time to leave. Don’t get excited.’ Thankfully many of the students and teachers had left Vanport to visit other families because of the [Memorial Day] holiday weekend.” 

Fifteen people perished in the flood, which hit the Black community particularly hard. “Many students carried on rescue work, traffic direction and first aid,” the elder Epler later recounted in a report. “The death toll would have been much higher had it not been for the valiant work of the college students.” 

Within a few weeks, classes started up again, thanks to Ferne securing space in Grant High School where she taught. “I don’t know how my Dad could have done it,” Charlotte recalled. “As people were moving and gathering their lives back together, the school carried on.”

As historian Dodds put it, “overcoming obstacles was a way of life at Vanport.” And that drive, that commitment to persevere despite all odds that was born out of the hope and trauma of Vanport, has come to be a hallmark of Portland State.

“Education is a form of wealth that bankruptcy or depression cannot destroy. If you are more useful to the community and a better citizen after your sojourn here, then Vanport College has succeeded!”

— Stephen E. Epler in first Viking yearbook, 1947

Originally published in Portland State Magazine, Spring 2021. Reproduced with permission.

Appreciating Chris Broderick

Today my PSU colleagues and I bid farewell to Chris Broderick, our associate vice president of University Communications, on the occasion of his retirement from Portland State University.

As is a University Communications tradition, we presented Chris with his own custom issue of the Portland State Magazine, complete with a few tongue in cheek stories appropriate to his tenure. My contributions to that issue follow.

The gilded age of Shoureshi

The tenure of Portland State University’s ninth president was, you might say, gilded. Perhaps it was his demand for custom-ordered gold-plated business cards or his made-to-measure suits and over the top cufflinks. Throughout it all, Associate Vice President of University Communications Chris Broderick encouraged President Rahmat Shoureshi to look at things differently: Perhaps he might actually be able to find a serviceable condo in Portland’s Pearl District for a measly $6,000 a month. Maybe he could skip commissioning the redesign of the PSU presidential mansion in Dunthorpe to his personal tastes. Could it be that using PSU resources for his wearable-shoe invention might not pass the state’s ethics standards?  As much as Chris worked to align Shoureshi to PSU’s more grounded and scrappy culture, ultimately it was not a match made to last. The president quit under fire after barely two years on the job and was later found to have violated multiple state ethics laws.

The $100 million gift that wasn’t

A swashbuckling tech entrepreneur. Top secret meetings at an undisclosed location. Impenetrable multimillion dollar Bitcoin accounts. Plot ingredients for the latest Law and Order franchise? No, just a day in the life of Chris Broderick, associate vice president of University Communications, as he worked to salvage PSU’s credibility during the great $100 million donation débâcle of 2015. The notion that such a large anonymous gift would come to Portland State out of the blue was encouraging, but also implausible. His finely tuned journalistic chops on high alert, Broderick was skeptical, and became the voice of reason as the entire U Comm team was spun up to celebrate the forthcoming gift. And that they did, until the entire house of cards crumbled and the “gift that never was” vanished faster than pot stickers at a Simon Benson House reception.

Reproduced with permission.

Written by Kurt Bedell
Photo courtesy of Portland State University
Illustration by Brett Forman

Voices of the holocaust

Laureen Nussbaum elevates Anne Frank’s literary prowess, and her own story of survival.

Written by Kurt Bedell 

Laureen Nussbaum wishes the world would remember Anne Frank for her potential as a budding author instead of only for her eye-opening chronicle of life as a Jewish child hiding from the Nazis during World War II. But she wouldn’t blame you if you hadn’t noticed Anne’s literary promise. Most American kids read an edited version of The Diary of Anne Frank. Only recently has the unfinished text of the book Anne Frank was working on been published. And that’s thanks in large part to the tireless work of Nussbaum, a Portland State alumna and emerita professor of German language and literature.

Nussbaum, herself a Holocaust survivor by subterfuge, made it her life’s work to get Anne Frank’s epistolary novel—Liebe Kitty or Dear Kitty, named after the imaginary friend she wrote to—published. With its European release in May, this 91-year old retired professor and activist hasn’t slowed down a bit. She just wrapped up her own memoir out this fall entitled Shedding Our Stars: The Story of Hans Calmeyer and How He Saved Thousands of Families Like Mine. In it she chronicles the impact Hans Calmeyer, a German government lawyer, made saving at least 3,700 Jews from disaster by determining them not “fully” Jewish or not Jewish at all, in the eyes of the law.

Born in Frankfurt, Germany, in August 1927, Nussbaum had a stable, predictable childhood. “We were a middle-class family. We were comfortable,” she remembers. But then things began to change.

As early as the spring of 1933, Nussbaum noticed a shift. Long rows of brown-shirted Nazis had begun marching through the streets of Frankfurt. Like many young kids, Nussbaum picked up what was going on around her like a sponge, not always realizing what was appropriate to share.

“One day I was caught in the hall of our apartment, with my father's cane slung over my shoulder, marching down the hall and singing one of the Nazi songs,” she remembers. Her parents did not appreciate her impromptu performance. “I was told to please stop and never do it again.”

As time passed and the Nazi crackdown on Jews intensified, there were other changes to Nussbaum and her family’s daily life. Soon, Jewish families were fleeing Germany for other parts of Europe and beyond.

By the fall of 1935, Nussbaum’s parents, the Kleins, decided to go to Amsterdam in the Netherlands, a neutral country during World War I, joining the Franks who had moved in late 1933. “There was this hope—maybe an illusion—that whatever would happen, the Netherlands would remain neutral again, like during World War I,” she remembers. “So, this would be a safe place.” But safety would prove to be a relative term.

In May of 1940, the German military invaded the Netherlands. Soon the German anti-Jewish laws were enforced in the occupied country. By the fall of 1941, Jewish families were excluded from public cultural events. Those who valued culture took to organizing performances for themselves and others in their homes.

It was through theatre and music performed in their homes that Nussbaum got to know the Frank family even more closely, and where she met her future husband, Rudi Nussbaum. “Rudi played the piano, and was good at sight-reading music,” she remembers.

With Anne Frank and half a dozen other young teens a play was performed in December 1941. Anne had a leading role. Nussbaum herself directed. “Anne was a lively girl and could learn her lines very quickly,” Nussbaum recalls. “But she definitely didn’t stand out. Her later fame did not cast a spell over these years.” Nussbaum admits that given her age she herself was much more interested in Anne’s older sister, Margot, who was just one year older than Nussbaum.

Nussbaum remembers being a high energy kid who helped her future husband’s father with deliveries from the corner drugstore that he ran in their immigrant neighborhood in Amsterdam. “When a customer called and needed something, I would be ready to run or bike over and take it to the to the customer,” Nussbaum remembers. “So, I became sort of an errand boy.”

That’s also how Nussbaum got to know her future husband better. As the Nazi’s crackdown on Jews continued to intensify, as early as February 1941, roundups of young Jewish men had begun in the Netherlands. Rudi and his family decided he too must start to take precautions, moving out of his parents’ apartment and into the homes of various non-Jewish families. Already the “errand boy,” Nussbaum took to delivering the daily meals to Rudi that his mother had cooked for him.

While Rudi had to worry about being targeted by the Nazis, Nussbaum largely escaped such scrutiny and was able to remove the hated yellow star, a symbol that identified one as Jewish, from on her clothes mid-January 1943. Because Nussbaum’s maternal grandmother wasn’t Jewish, her family was able to successfully plead its case to the highest civil authority in the Hague and Nussbaum and her sisters were declared not “fully” Jewish in the eyes of the occupiers. The man who reviewed and adjudicated their case, Hans Calmeyer, helped thousands avoid the bane of being labeled Jewish and is the subject of Nussbaum’s new memoir.

After they won their case with Calmeyer, life returned to relative normalcy for Nussbaum, considering it was still wartime. But there were still terrifying close calls with Nazi police and little time for fun and frolic. “I grew up very fast and started taking on responsibilities very, very young,” Nussbaum remembers. “As I’ve traveled and spoken to many students in America as an adult, invariably they’ll ask, ‘What did you do for fun?’ There was no time for fun. We had to survive. That was our focus.”

After the war, Nussbaum completed her high school diploma, became a fledgling journalist for a while, and spent time at a Quaker school learning Latin and improving her fluency in English. Rudi also continued his education and they ended up back in Amsterdam together doing coursework in chemistry and physics. It was that training that set the stage for Rudi’s eventual career as a nuclear physicist.

After Rudi completed his Ph.D. in December 1954, the family moved to the United States. Following stints in Indiana and California, the Nussbaums decided in 1957, to take a chance on an emerging new school in the Pacific Northwest—Portland State College—the precursor to Portland State University. They loved the climate in Portland and the unusually collaborative faculty vibe they found in the physics department.

Nussbaum went on to earn a doctorate at the University of Washington in 1976, commuting between Portland and Seattle while raising a family and teaching German part time at Portland State. “Those were tough years,” she remembers. Eventually, she secured a full-time, tenure track position in 1978. “Learning a new language is so valuable because any language and every language is full of metaphors,” she says. “Metaphors enrich your view of life and help you understand the thinking patterns of people from other cultures.”

Laureen Nussbaum worked for decades to get Anne Frank’s novel Liebe Kitty published. She was in Berlin in May to see the fruition of her efforts. Photo by Soeren Stache/dpa/Alamy Live News.

Nussbaum’s language expertise has helped in her endeavor to get Anne Frank’s authentic text published and the well-known childhood author’s literary potential appreciated. Her father, Otto, the only member of the Frank family to survive the war, had made editorial decisions when he first published The Diary of Anne Frank, which is so widely read today.

So far, Liebe Kitty has only been published in German in the countries of Germany, Austria and Switzerland due to copyright restrictions. “Anne’s work was an epistolary novel, not just a diary,” says Nussbaum. “And it's remarkable. How a 14- or 15-year-old had the literary prowess and stamina to be writing with such an eye for what it takes to create literature is really amazing.”

Hearing the voices and perspectives of immigrants, minorities and anyone “othered” is critically important to Nussbaum, who sees ominous parallels of today’s immigration debate in the United States to the plight of the Jews in Europe during World War II. To her, there’s no difference between the immigration detention centers along the United States/Mexico border of our time and the ways Jews and other undesirables were marginalized during World War II. “Concentration camps are what they are,” she says, referring to today’s immigrant detention centers. “I know it. There are no two ways about it.”

Yet, she still holds hope. Her husband, Rudi, passed away in 2011 and she now lives in Seattle and enjoys the company of her grown children and grandchildren. She swims and exercises regularly and stays involved in advocating for immigrant rights in her community. And all along, she sees multiple language learning as a critically important. “Learning another language gives Americans a healthy respect for the struggle many immigrants who come to the U.S. experience learning the English language,” she says.

Originally published in Portland State Magazine, Fall 2019. Reproduced with permission.

Always something new and different

Kathryn and John Kirkland reflect on their 31 years telling stories at PSU

Written by Kurt Bedell

Over the course of a combined 62 years of service, Kathryn and John Kirkland have crafted and shaped countless stories of Portland State University people, programs and history for our broader PSU community to enjoy. And along the way, they’ve witnessed significant changes on the PSU campus and new ways that words, images and stories are produced and shared.

More than 100 issues and 31 years later, both Kathryn and John Kirkland are saying goodbye as they retire from Portland State University on August 30, 2019.

John started the couple’s association with Portland’s urban university in the spring of 1987 after Kathryn read a story in the Oregonian that PSU was starting a new alumni magazine. “You may want to just talk to their editor,” Kathryn told him at the time. John did, was hired as a freelancer and wrote stories for the magazine’s first couple of issues.

A few months later, the editor of Portland State Magazine decided to leave PSU. “She asked me if I knew anyone who’d be interested in the job,” John remembers. John did know somebody: Kathryn. She subsequently applied for the position and was hired that October.

Kathryn Kirkland official PSU staff photo, 1987

In her earliest days as editor of Portland State Magazine, Kathryn crafted copy on an electric memory typewriter that had a tiny screen displaying just one line of text at a time. “It had three pages of memory,” Kathryn remembers, “but you had to print out your document to see your mistakes and then find them on your one-line screen to fix them.”

Increasingly, however, computers were becoming more prevalent and Kathryn soon had one of her own to create the magazine. “My manager had one but didn’t like this new fangled thing, the computer,” Kathryn remembers, chuckling. “And so she gave me hers.”

Soon Kathryn was digitally assembling both the magazine and Currently — PSU’s newsletter for faculty and staff. “It was a big deal when we got a modem,” Kathryn remembers. “It was very noisy,” she remembers, recalling the gritty tones that dial-up modems made those days when connecting over the phone lines.

Over three decades, both Kathryn and John wrote and edited hundreds of stories for Portland State Magazine, Currently and scores of other news releases, speeches and stories used by the media. And both have fond memories of their favorites.

For John, it’s probably the story he wrote in the early 1990s about children’s literature that involved interviewing the book editor of the New York Times. Or his work with Mark Weislogel to cover the building and launching of weather balloons with engineering students to photograph the eclipse in 2018. Or his story on Darrell Grant, premier jazz musician and PSU music faculty member. Or perhaps chronicling Oregon’s racist history through the eyes of Darrell Millner, founding chair of Black Studies at PSU.

Curriculum Revolution cover, PSU Magazine, Fall 1994

Kathryn remembers two particular magazine covers. The first introduced a radical new approach to undergraduate general education with the University Studies program in 1994. Kathryn riffed on the revolutionary theme with lady liberty leading the French revolution on the cover. The second ran with a story in 1999 that chronicled the then-proposal to clean and drink water from the Willamette River. “The cover was a cartoon of a scientist underwater and it was really cute,” Kathryn remembers. “I had a lot of fun with covers over the years.”

Both revel at the sheer variety of stories found on a university campus and how that’s kept the work fresh and engaging all these years.

“It's just been so much fun,” reflects Kathryn. “And I have barely ever repeated a story in the magazine through my 31 years.”

John agrees. “At a university, there’s always something new and different to write about,” he says. “At a place like PSU, there’s always a huge variety of interesting stories to tell.”

Making it work

Online student Lisa Allred’s resourceful approach to life is helping her reach her goals.

Written by Kurt Bedell

Portland State students are known for going to great lengths to get an education, but Lisa Allred may have set a new bar.

Currently a master’s student in PSU’s School of Social Work, Allred did some of her undergraduate work in San Diego, and made it affordable by moving to Tijuana, Mexico, and commuting by motorcycle on and off for about 10 years.

“I couldn’t afford to live in San Diego as a student,” says Allred. “For $300 a month I had an ocean view apartment in Mexico that would have cost me thousands in Southern California. It was the only way to be a college student without going into incredible debt.”

The motorcycle was an integral part of her resourceful plan.

“Crossing the border in a car takes at least three hours post 9-11,” says Allred. “On a motorcycle, I could zip right to the front of the line and cross in five to 10 minutes. It was the only way to make the commute possible.”

Now she’s commuting in another way. Allred is in the final year of her three-year online degree at Portland State, which means she reads articles, watches videos and participates in online discussions with her professors and classmates entirely from her Medford home.

This focused and resourceful approach to life has gotten Allred, 36, through years of ups and downs and closer to her dream of becoming a hospice social worker—a role in which she’ll bring care and compassion to people nearing the end of their lives.

She finds the online format perfect for her lifestyle and much less time-intensive and intimidating than she first thought it might be. “My biggest fear going into this program was the technology component,” says Allred. “But I’ve found the online format of this program to be intuitive and very easy to use for someone like me who didn’t have the most extensive technology background starting out.”

She credits her mentor at Southern Oregon University, where she wrapped up her bachelor’s degree in psychology, with her decision to study social work at Portland State. “She and a friend who I had lunch with many years ago highly recommended I consider social work ahead of all of the human services professions,” she says. “I remember my friend saying very clearly to me—social work grads get all the jobs.’ I was sold.”

While working on her master’s, Allred held internships in which she worked with individuals of all ages, from little kids in therapy to seniors looking for ways to battle depression and isolation. Social work students are required to complete 1,000 internship hours as part of their degree. Allred was also selected for a competitive, optional program focused on preparing her to help individuals often unreached by the health care system because of social, economic and cultural barriers.

Allred’s life experiences shaped her decision to work in a helping profession like social work. For example, she had a brush with alcoholism in her teens, eventually going into rehab and doing years of recovery work. Sober for 18 years and counting, she credits her partner, Katie, plus friends, family and mentors with the support she needs to stay strong.

“Getting sober has shown me that I’m capable of much more than I ever would have anticipated and that life is much bigger than I ever imagined,” she says. “I know now that I’m in control of the perceptions in my life and that sometimes I need others to help me see things in a different way. Perspective is everything.”

Allred was also shaped by how she witnessed the death of her stepmom and the deteriorating health of her grandmother.

Her grandmother suffered from Alzheimer's disease for years before she passed away. “I felt lucky that I was able to spend time talking with her about her experiences growing up in the 1920s and ‘30s,” says Allred. “Digging way back into her past and combining those stories with music she recognized really seemed to trigger the strongest memories for her.”

While other family members seemed uneasy with her grandmother’s deterioration, Allred remembers feeling particularly calm and collected through the whole experience. “It was then I began to realize that hospice might be the work for me. I seemed to have the temperament for it.”

Years later, Allred’s stepmother faced a much faster death than her grandmother, and again Allred was able to help her in those final days. She also served as a support to her father and observed how effectively the hospice social worker listened to and cared for her dad.

“She really saw my dad, talked about what to expect next and teared up a couple of times with him, all the while staying professional without going down the spiral staircase,” she remembers. “It showed me how valuable and powerful the work of a skilled hospice social worker can be for everyone when bearing witness to a loved one’s final hours.”

Today, Allred balances the sometimes heavy weight of classes and an intense internship with her passion for playing music. She’s played guitar since she was eight years old and has participated in open mic nights in clubs in every city she’s lived in as an adult. “I like the energy of the crowd and the nervous thrill I feel performing in front of total strangers,” she says. “It’s something completely different for me.”

It’s a thrill that comes from courage and perseverance—attributes Allred has built up through a lifetime and will carry with her into the future.

Caption: Lisa Allred takes online social work classes from her home in Medford surrounded by her pugs.

Photo by Jim Craven.

Originally published in Portland State Magazine, Winter 2019. Reproduced with permission.

Taking a stand

Ed Washington reflects on his life of service.

Written by Kurt Bedell

At 81 years of age, Ed Washington ’74 has spent more of his adult life connected to Portland State University than any other community organization that he’s been involved in during his consequential career.

As the director of community outreach and engagement for Portland State’s Office of Global Diversity and Inclusion, Washington brings valuable life experiences—growing up black in a predominantly white Portland, getting his degree at Portland State and serving as a champion for civil rights in organizations that serve communities of color—to attract and inspire future generations of students of all backgrounds.

This past June, Washington was honored by the University’s College of Urban and Public Affairs with the Nohad A. Toulan Urban Pioneer Award for Public Service. It recognizes community leaders who exhibits values such as public service and civic leadership that are core to the college’s mission.

We sat down with Washington just after he received this award to reflect on his life and the role Portland State has played in his journey.

When did you and your family first arrive in Portland?

I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1937, the oldest of six children. My father got a job working in the Kaiser Shipyards in Portland building ships for World War II, so we moved west. I remember my family arriving at Union Station, taking a cab and settling in Vanport. Vanport was an area outside Portland set up with wartime public housing. Both blacks and whites lived in Vanport and the schools there were integrated. Having black and white kids in the same classrooms and having black teachers was unusual in Portland in those days.

How formative was your early school experience?

As an eighth grader at Irvington School I remember my teacher, Mrs. Hazel Hill, starting class one day by asking for our help. She said that for the next six months we were going to have some new kids attend our school for speech therapy. All the students were wheelchair bound and would need assistance from us kids. “Would you agree to help these kids?” she asked. “A lot of people won’t say nice things about these students and might even say some of those not nice things to you.”

I was among the first kids to volunteer to help, and as I look back I realize that it established the value of service and gave me the courage to stand up for what I believed in regardless of what my friends did or said. I realized that these classmates, whatever their limitations, were just like us. It was a valuable set of lessons.

When was the idea of going to college first introduced to you?

My mother talked with me about going to college beginning at a very early age. When my mother and father separated after the war, she was left with raising six children all by herself. She made it clear to all us kids that no one was going to quit high school early to help the family. Everyone was expected to contribute to the work and health of the family.

In those days there were only certain jobs that blacks worked in. There were very few blacks working for the city of Portland. There was only one black plumber and no black bus drivers. The only teachers were those from Vanport. On the other hand, all the doormen and busboys were black. As were the railroad porters and redcaps hauling people’s bags at Union Station.

As a kid I joined local Boy Scout Troop #90, worked in the Boy Scout headquarters as an office boy and was mentored by the chief Scout executive, George Herman Oberteuffer. Mr. Obie, as we called him, was a profound influence on my life. He recognized that as a black man I would face additional challenges. But he also envisioned a better future. I remember him saying, “I know that things aren’t the way they should be for you. But things will change. And I want you and your brothers to be ready when those changes occur.”

In addition to my mother, it really was Mr. Obie who imprinted the importance of going to college onto me. I remember him saying, “I don’t want to see you pushing someone’s bags at Union Station. You must start thinking about college.”

How did you come to choose PSU for your own college experience?

I went to Grant High School and all my classmates were talking about going to college as they neared graduation. Most were talking about going to the University of Oregon, Oregon State and Linfield College. I wanted to go to the U of O. But in the end my decision to go to Portland State was purely economical. With five brothers and sisters raised by a single mother, there simply weren’t the resources for me to go south to Eugene. I didn’t have that kind of money. PSU was the only avenue for me.

So, I waited a year out of high school and started by going to PSU at night in 1957. In those days Portland State College, as it was then called, ran its night school classes out of what is today the Parkmill building on the South Park Blocks. I studied the preliminaries—English, writing, math and history—and later earned my degree in liberal studies. I was the first in my family to graduate from college.

How did you come to work at Portland State?

I began work at Portland State in January of 1993. I had already been serving as a Metro councilor for a couple of years by then. PSU’s president at the time, Judith Ramaley, approached me about coming to PSU to do community outreach work. She was particularly interested in connecting PSU with members of the African American community, to which I had strong connections given my work with the NAACP and Urban League. In those days the work of diversity, equity and inclusion was just in its infancy. There was no formal office to house the work like there is today. I built relationships with organizations across Portland and made sure those communities were connected with educational opportunities on campus.

What is the most rewarding part of your community outreach work today?

I’d have to say that it’s the regular tours of the Portland State campus that I lead for young people. These tours came about rather by accident. It was the early 2000s, and by then PSU had established an official office of diversity separate from the president’s office. The chief diversity officer at the time, Jilma Meneses, got a call from a kindergarten teacher in Beaverton. She was interested in arranging a tour of the University so that her students could get exposed to and start thinking about college. She had called around to the other campuses in the area and none of the others were willing to do a tour for kindergarteners. Would PSU be interested? I jumped at the chance.

I worked with faculty in disciplines we thought would interest young kids the most. We developed a series of quick, 10-minute learning vignettes of academic projects, from exploring meteors with a geology professor to learning about how the PSU library cares for the over one million volumes in its collection. It became a hugely successful program that has over the years touched nearly 2,000 young people. It’s critically important that these students feel like they have a place here and see themselves fitting into our learning community. Leading these tours and introducing these young people to PSU is the most rewarding part of the work for me. You can just see the lights go on in their heads when they get inspired by a particular professor.

What does it mean to you to receive the Urban Pioneer Award for Public Service from CUPA?

It was the biggest surprise of my life. One of the greatest honors you can receive is to get recognition by your peers. To receive this award from the people at the place where I’ve spent the majority of my adult life is truly an honor and a privilege.

I never thought of myself as a pioneer. But as I reflect now I realize that the pioneer spirit was always part of my life, although I never thought of it that way at the time. I was the first black scout in my Boy Scout troop. One of two black students in my class at Irvington School. The first in my family to get a college degree.

I always knew that I was representing not just myself but the many other sets of shoulders that I stood on. I’ve spent a lifetime studying and working at PSU. I consider myself very lucky for the things people have allowed me to do here and the ways in which they have supported me throughout my journey.

Photo credit: NashCO Photography  

Originally published in Portland State Magazine, Fall 2018.  Reproduced with permission.

The power of diversity

Research reveals that companies with a diverse workforce improve their bottom line.

Written by Kurt Bedell

As the biggest bankruptcy and audit scandal of its time, the failure of the Enron Corporation in the early 2000s grabbed headlines around the world. The unraveling of this Texas-based energy company exposed a tangled web of offshore tax shelters, inflated stock values and questionable accounting practices orchestrated by its executives and board of directors.

What could have led to such systematic and widespread fraud in a major American corporation? And what can be done to prevent another Enron-like disaster from happening again in the U.S.? More regulation? Deeper government oversight?

Research by two Portland State faculty who study corporate governance suggest there may be a higher-level way to prevent the “groupthink” that may have contributed to Enron’s demise: instituting policies and practices that attract and retain a more diverse set of employees at all levels, from boardroom to factory floor.

Jing Zhao and Brian Bolton, who teach and do research in The School of Business at PSU, used big data in separate studies to show that companies that hire a more diverse workforce produce more innovative products and earn higher profits. And for local companies like Daimler Trucks North America, based in Portland, the benefits of a diverse workforce go far beyond the bottom line.

Zhao worked with two colleagues from North Carolina State University to publish her results in a paper entitled “Do Pro-Diversity Policies Improve Corporate Innovation?” They scoured and analyzed data on publicly traded U.S. businesses, looking at new product introductions, patents and other company milestones. They found that companies that had pro-diversity hiring policies and practices produced more innovative products and services along with higher profits.

“With the extensive analysis we completed using publicly available data about U.S. corporations, we’ve been able to demonstrate that more diverse teams deliver more innovations in terms of new products, patents and citations, which in turn increases future firm value,” says Zhao, who teaches investment courses to both undergraduate and graduate students at PSU.

In other words, companies that promote a culture of inclusion, specifically attracting and retaining minorities, women, the disabled and LGBTQ employees, get a wider range of views, backgrounds, expertise and experiences that lead to more innovative problem-solving and more well-rounded business decisions.

“Top corporate leaders, academics and policy makers have long been wondering about the real economic benefits of corporate diversity policies,” Zhao says. “Many didn’t see how hiring a more diverse workforce positively affected shareholder value. Now we have strong evidence that creating a more diverse workplace today results in more innovative outcomes for companies tomorrow.”

Most surprising to Zhao in her research was to see that companies with diversity policies were helped the most during broad economic downturns.

“During the financial crisis of 2008 investors and consumers lacked trust in financial markets and corporations,” says Zhao. “My research shows that companies with diversity policies had an extra layer of protection that helped them weather the financial downturn far better than organizations that were less diverse.”

While Zhao’s research focuses on new products, patents and citations as markers of innovation, her PSU colleague Brian Bolton looks at long-term investment performance. Like Zhao, Bolton uses enormous sets of data about U.S. corporations to draw causality relationships between diversity policies and positive business results. Bolton’s first book, Sustainable Financial Investments, looked at how corporate investments can be good both for a firm’s profitability and the environment, employees or community.

“Case studies or anecdotes are great for relaying specific examples, but the kind of work we do is based on thousands and thousands of observations,” says Bolton. “Our aim is to paint a picture of what’s happening through that large set of data rather than with one case at a time.”

Bolton’s big-picture study of companies looks for diversity of perspective among members of their boards of directors.

“Diversity of perspective leads to better outcomes,” says Bolton. “Period. It’s that simple.” Without it, tunnel vision can set in that can be very dangerous, he says. “Enron’s big downfall was its dominant culture, where aggressive risk taking—even if it resulted in failure—was rewarded. They suffered from a myopic vision of how performance and risk management happened that led to their eventual demise.”

Diversity of perspective can be difficult to achieve. One potential solution is to set quotas for representation of certain populations on executive teams. Bolton points to Norway as an example of a country where legislated quotas enacted in 2003 forced the boards of companies in that country to hire more women.

“They went from 15 percent representation of women on corporate boards to 43 percent in just 10 years,” says Bolton. “The government didn’t care how they implemented it. They just wanted to see it done.”

Reception of the more diverse corporate boards has been on the whole positive. “Having a diverse board is now considered a ‘no brainer’ in Norway,” says Bolton.

One local company hasn’t needed any extra urging to incorporate diversity, equity and inclusion programs into how it conducts its business. As Portland’s third-largest employer, Daimler Trucks North America, formerly Freightliner Corporation, sees diversity in hiring as a strategic priority for its business.

“We think that a diverse organization provides a unique, intriguing and interesting work environment that’s rewarding for employees,” says David Carson, chief diversity officer at Daimler Trucks North America. “We aim to create a workplace where employees say, ‘I can bring my whole self. I feel welcomed. I feel included.’ For us, diversity is much more fundamental to our business than the benefit to our bottom line. It’s about creating a rewarding, challenging and stimulating environment for our people.”

Carson says Daimler has found that diverse teams collaborating on projects always creates a lot of different perspectives in the process of doing their work.

“It creates a lot more challenges for the teams to be able to harness all of those different perspectives,” says Carson. “But ultimately we get a better dialogue that results in better outcomes.

“The world is changing so quickly today,” he adds. “In businesses like Daimler’s the pace of change is faster than it’s ever been. Companies that are able to harness the collaborative power of a diverse group of employees are clearly a step ahead.”

Originally published in Portland State Magazine, Spring 2018. Reproduced with permission.

PSU student designs environmentally friendly wastewater treatment device

Written by Kurt Bedell

It was while crossing the polluted Diyala River on his commute to high school in Baghdad that Bashar Al-Daomi first realized what happens when untreated waste water gets dumped into waterways.

“Every time I crossed the river, I had to plug my nose to shut out the rotten smell coming from the water,” said the PSU environmental engineering student. “The polluted river was ruining the local economy, as no local businesses would locate near the river. I knew there had to be a better way.”

Those daily reminders of the pollution’s impact on rivers on everyday life in his Iraqi hometown were inspiration for Al-Daomi, a Ph.D. candidate at PSU’s Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science, to explore environmentally friendly and inexpensive ways to treat wastewater. After many years of hard work in the lab of his mentor and adviser, PSU engineering professor Bill Fish, Al-Daomi created a low-cost water treatment device that he hopes can one day revolutionize wastewater testing.

“Wastewater treatment is a massive worldwide problem, especially in developing countries like my home in Iraq that can’t pay for expensive municipal water systems,” Al-Daomi said.

Growing up in war-torn Iraq, Al-Daomi learned how to be scrappy, inventive and resourceful in building the devices he needed to complete his research. The Bio CleanTech reactor — the wastewater treatment device that he helped create — is no exception. It was built at the fraction of the cost of comparable commercial wastewater treatment systems, making it a perfect design for communities without many resources to reduce pollution.

Al-Daomi’s reactor purifies wastewater without harmful chemicals. It removes phosphorus and nitrogen from water by using specific kinds of bacteria. It is a smart device in that it can operate itself with less supervision, saving staff time and lab operation costs. Al-Daomi said chemical treatment systems are costly and often require further treatment to remove the chemicals themselves.

“With affordable and environmentally friendly devices like this reactor, wastewater treatment solutions can be built out and rolled out in urban areas that are beginning to deal with their wastewater issues,” he said.

The Bio CleanTech device was created in collaboration with Mohmmad Osman, an engineering designer at Murraysmith, a Portland engineering firm. Osman is also a PSU civil and environmental engineering alumnus.

Since winning the 2018 PSU Cleantech Challenge in April with their invention, Al-Daomi and Osman are now refining their Bio CleanTech device for the next stage of clean technology competition, the statewide InventOR event in June. This event draws teams from a dozen colleges and universities from across the state to compete in Klamath Falls, Ore. for $25,000.

Al-Daomi said there are immediate opportunities for the reactor design to be used in high schools and colleges as a low cost way for students to learn the latest in wastewater treatment technology. Eventually public utilities can use this reactor design to test new wastewater treatment approaches in their communities.

“My hope is that with new options for treating wastewater, future generations of Iraqi children crossing the Diyala River and children living near rivers around the world will have a much different experience than I did,” said Al-Daomi. “No child should have to live with wastewater in his or her backyard.”

Photo by NashCo

Originally published in Portland State University News, May 3, 2018. Reproduced with permission.