The DA and PPB continues fail trans and LGBT people. There is a man who has warrants for property damage at a business and is also terrorizing and torturing, kidnapping a transgender man, and law enforcement does not care. It has been almost a MONTH, with multiple case numbers, and restraining orders, and this man is still loose terrorizing the business’ employees. Once again law enforcement proving to be useless and not giving a shit about protecting our community.

Following staffing cuts in June, another round of layoffs is coming at the University of Oregon, with entire departments potentially on the chopping block as the university seeks to address a projected budget deficit. 

In a June town hall, University of Oregon (UO) President Karl Scholz announced that the university was facing a significant budget shortfall due to a failure to meet its out-of-state enrollment targets, uncertainty about federal funding levels, and a variety of other costs. 

Later that month, UO, whose main campus is in Eugene, laid off more than 40 employees in its College of Arts and Sciences—and now more cuts are on the way as the university faces a projected $25 to $30 million yearly deficit in its education and general fund.

The cuts could be significant, including to the university’s reputation: UO is the state’s flagship university, particularly for the study of the humanities, with more than 20,000 undergraduate students. 

While the university has not yet publicly announced who will be affected by its next round of layoffs, United Academics of the University of Oregon, the campus faculty union, has sounded the alarm that a number of humanities departments may be facing elimination in their entirety. 

Sources said departments under threat of elimination include religious studies, classics, and language studies including German, Scandinavian, and Russian. Faculty, including those with tenure, may also be laid off in departments including history, women’s studies, gender, and sexuality, physics, and mathematics.  

In a statement shared with the Mercury, a UO spokesperson said the university “is in the midst of budget reduction conversations” to address its structural budget deficit and that the process “will not conclude for at least another two weeks.” 

“Any reports suggesting that decisions have already been made—including any decisions to close or reduce programs—are inaccurate and premature and may be harmful to many in our community,” the statement reads. 

The statement requested that media outlets “refrain from speculative reporting.” But as the budget reduction conversations happen across campus, speculation is nevertheless running rampant among faculty and staff about the futures of their departments and livelihoods. 

Maram Epstein, a professor of Chinese literature, said her perception is that the university is proceeding in an irrational manner. 

“The university seems to have gone into panic mode—and instead of considering things that we considered during the pandemic such as furloughs, asking people to take voluntary pay cuts, or perhaps involuntary if they’re at the high end of the payscale, they’re not engaging in any kind of creative thinking about how to meet this budget deficit,” Epstein said. 

In the June town hall, Provost Christopher Long said furloughs would not be enough to make up for the loss of money from research grants and out-of-state tuition.

Nevertheless, professors in the College of Arts and Sciences have questions about why the university—which was running dozens of new faculty searches in the spring, including for departments now facing cuts—has so suddenly found itself needing to make drastic cuts. 

“The interesting thing about that is they say the deficit is between two and three percent, which is certainly not an existential threat, but the cutting of humanities programs is an existential threat to education in Oregon,” Michael Stern, a professor in the department of German and Scandinavian, said. 

The university has said employees facing layoffs will be notified during the week of September 7. As that date approaches, some—including tenured faculty who have taught at the university for decades—have been left in the dark as to whether they will still have jobs next year. 

“Everything’s been done in the shadows,” Stern said. “I know that my position is threatened, but I’m not quite sure what’s going to happen. I just published a book, so it might be a case of publish and perish.”

Jeff Schroeder, a professor of religious studies, said he expects to have his position eliminated. 

“I’ve dedicated my life to this line of work, as have my colleagues, and this will, very likely, end our academic careers,” he said. 

Professors said that while the university has not said so publicly, their sense is that declining enrollments are part of the reason why they expect cuts to be concentrated in the College of Arts and Sciences. The number of humanities majors at colleges and universities has declined over the last several decades, as students have prioritized degrees emphasizing career readiness. 

Still, Epstein noted that the university continues to have general education requirements in the humanities—and that the value of humanities study, particularly at a moment when democracy and academic freedom are under threat across the country, is not entirely quantifiable. 

That line of thinking was a motivating factor behind the Schnitzer family’s gift of $25 million to the Schnitzer School of Global Studies and Languages earlier this year. 

“It makes no sense to me to be cutting back humanities and languages, because these are the courses that force students to think outside the constraints of the culture in which they grew up,” Epstein said, adding that artificial intelligence is threatening to scramble the job market anyway.

The potential reduction in humanities offerings poses larger questions about how the university understands its mission and broader direction. 

Schroeder, for one, said he feels the university is using the projected budget deficit as an opportunity to enact a broader restructuring of the university away from the humanities and the liberal arts and toward professional programs and research and development. 

“It feels like the [university] is just moving in this direction of trying to train workers, turning the University of Oregon into a factory for workers, and losing sight of their mission to educate the whole person,” he said. 

Epstein similarly criticized the university’s spending priorities, characterizing them as out of step with the university’s stated aims and noting that it could make it more difficult for the university to attract both students and top faculty in the future. 

“The corporatization of the university in terms of branding, communications outreach, seems to outpace what they are putting into the academic mission,” she said. 

If the university does decide to fold some of its humanities departments, it will be following in the footsteps of a number of other state universities who have scaled back their humanities programming in recent years and laid off tenured faculty.

Some of those universities, like Indiana University in Bloomington, have had their hand forced by Republican-controlled state governments. That is not the case in Oregon. 

“We’re a blue state—the state is not asking for this, the governor is not asking for this, it’s the UO president, provost, and the Board of Trustees that has their vision for how higher education needs to shift,” Schroeder said. 

Ahead of its final decisions on layoffs, the university is facing a considerable amount of dissent. The faculty union is arguing the university has not fulfilled its obligation to meaningfully consult the faculty before changing its academic offerings, and faculty members have been in contact with a range of elected officials who represent the Eugene area, including U.S. Rep. Val Hoyle. 

Schroeder noted that Gov. Tina Kotek, who has not yet weighed in publicly on the situation, was herself a religious studies major at the University of Oregon and protested against cuts to the department during her time on campus. 

Though many students are not yet back on campus, the university’s student government and student workers union have spoken out against the possibility of cuts. There are also rallies planned on campus. 

For now, however, faculty and staff have to wait as their fates are determined.  

“I love this city,” Schroeder said. “I love this state. I don’t want to leave. I want to stay here and fight for the University of Oregon, if at all possible.”

Portland might not have professional tournaments or world-class tennis academies, and many of the city’s public courts have seen better days. But Portlander Tyler Pell sees potential in the city’s community tennis culture. He wants to make sure other people see it, too. 

Enter Portland Tennis Courterly: The stylish, quarterly (get it?) newsletter devoted to all things Portland tennis. 

The Courterly’s first issue, published in spring 2023, was short and straightforward. It was printed on white, tabloid-size paper—Pell used the Multnomah County Library printers for the first few issues—and featured a tennis advice column, an interview with the director of the Portland Tennis Center, and a brief news update about the center’s recent weather-related woes. 

That first newsletter’s design was neat but stylized, foreshadowing the Courterly’s coming evolution. Pell, who came up with the idea for the Courterly with a friend from college, sought out more contributors and collaborators. By the following spring, he was printing using a risograph technique and had secured a few advertisements. Today, over two years in, the Courterly features a masthead with more than a dozen names, and its coverage goes well beyond tennis basics. 

In February, Tennis Courterly published a 30-page issue focused on pickleball (the Courterly is firmly against it), supported by a $5,000 Portland Arts Project grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC). It contained an in-depth, reported feature by Pell about an Irvington couple fighting the rise of pickleball in their neighborhood, an anti-pickleball manifesto originally published by a leftist tennis club, a paper doll “fun section,” and an essay titled “Beyond Pickleball,” which featured the scathing pull quote: “To be good at tennis is to be beautiful. To be good at pickleball is to be good at pickleball.” 

Normally, the Courterly is presented as a newsletter—one long piece of paper, with text on both sides, folded to create three panels. Pell drew inspiration from the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability’s Curbsider mailer, which contains information about the city’s garbage and recycling systems and is distributed free of charge. 

Pell said he chose the newsletter style because he thinks it’s “the perfect way to present something as serious and worthy of reading.” This is in contrast to the zine format, which he thinks is unfortunately not as well-regarded by the masses. 

Jay Boss Rubin, Tennis Courterly’s managing editor, is a writer and Swahili translator. He’s also a longtime tennis enthusiast and was excited to find an outlet to combine his passion for the sport with his literary background. Rubin says the newsletter isn’t “a secret literary magazine, nor is it just for tennis people.” 

This has allowed the publication to find a diverse set of contributors, from professional writers to people who had never been published before. Rubin compared this range of writing experience to the different levels of tennis expertise a person might experience on Portland’s courts.

“There’s something really special happening where it’s not just about always trying to play up and play better. We’re in community with players of many different levels and different ages,” he said. “There’s a nice way we could all play together.” 

From the beginning, Pell’s goal with the Courterly has been to “rebrand tennis in Portland,” and build on the groundswell of enthusiasm he sees for the sport. “Tennis Courterly began in an attempt to change perception, to bring people together and build a political consciousness around tennis and public resources in Portland,” he said.

Pell also hoped the publication would help introduce and acclimate new people to Portland’s tennis scene, which he said can be “very opaque, with all these different rules and barriers to entry.” 

“It didn’t seem like anybody else was trying to encourage other people to understand and get into tennis,” he said. “It feels like a lot of Portland’s tennis clubs are really just talking to themselves and to people who already know about it.” 

In addition to the publication, Tennis Courterly has begun hosting community tournaments at Portland parks. In July, the Courterly team staged the Mt. Tabor Open, their biggest event yet. Pell said the tournaments and in-person events make up an important part of the whole project’s mission, which is to encourage real-world participation and engagement with Portland’s tennis courts and public spaces. 

“There’s been a tremendous void of meaning in our lives, and I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that everything feels gray and homogeneous and the same when we live online,” Pell said. While the publication has a noticeable Instagram presence, which Pell said helps get the word out about the newsletter and events, it’s “sort of antithetical to the whole point.” 

“The whole point is to go to the park and pick up a physical copy, and read it and hopefully enjoy it,” Pell said. To reinforce that physical engagement, only some of the Courterly’s stories are available online. The best way to read the newsletter is to pick up a print copy, which you can find at some tennis courts, as well as Players Racquet Shop and Old Town magazine store Chess Club. 

There’s more going on for the Courterly, too. The publication is supporting the release of a photo book, Full Western, by newsletter contributor Jake Arvidson, which celebrates Portland park tennis. They’re planning their next tournament, the H2Open, for the end of October, and their next issue, “The Wet Issue,” for release in November. Pell is also working to schedule a production of the play Bimbo Tennis, a Chekhov adaptation written by Emma Gardner, for next spring or summer. 

But in the end, Pell said, it’s all about tennis. 

“People can be coaxed to the tennis court if there’s something bringing them out. You don’t have to be really good at tennis to like to play tennis,” he said. “It’s just a great way to engage with your friends, or to meet new friends, or you know, rivals or enemies. All of this is possible on the tennis court. If there’s something fun at the center of it to bring people out, people will come out to play.”

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The Full Western release party will be held at One Grand Gallery, 1000 E Burnside, Sept 5, 5 pm, check @tenniscourterly for more.

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Good Morning, Portland! We’re out here this morning like “Name an instance of bullshit that I went for!” Last Friday, Earl Sweatshirt dropped the contrarian and beautiful Live, Laugh, Love, an album laden with both irony and earnestness. While the vibes of that particular lyric feel real, the artist freely admits it’s a flex. “I’ve been duped so many times,”he said to NYT culture reporter Joe Coscarelli, during an interview. Anyway, if you know me, you know I’m making everything about this album, and you want me to shut up about it. SO LET’S GET TO THE NEWS. ⚡

IN LOCAL NEWS:
• This story has been rightfully everywhere; US Border Patrol agents entered a firefighter worksite on Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula—where a crew of 44 was battling a blaze for a privately owned company—checked their identifications and took two into custody. One man is an Oregon resident, OPB reports, but his attorney has not been able to contact him since Wednesday when border patrol agents dissapeared him.

• Portland City Councilors Jamie Dunphy, Candace Avalos, and Mitch Green will fly to Vienna next month to spend six days learning more about city’s world-renowned approach to social housing, the Oregonian‘s Jonathan Bach reports. The Councilors’ offices have said that they will pay for the trip from their office budgets. This might be the number one thing your conservative uncle will be yelling about at your family’s Labor Day picnic, but Vienna’s Gemeindebauten have led to it gaining the title of “world’s most livable city.”

• The other story your uncle is upset about this weekend is the revelation that Councilor Avalos has been using OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT to compose the three columns she’s so far published on her city webpage, along with social media posts and on the record remarks. According to the Oregonian, Avalos revealed she used the chatbot after “a reporter contacted her about her potential use of generative artificial intelligence, which can produce subtle but recognizable writing styles and patterns.”

• Even after losing federal grant funding, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art pushes forward with a Time-Based Art Festival festival filled with queer opera, Native storytelling, and radical soundscapes. If we want risk-takers to keep showing work in our city, now’s the time to support them, yeah? Check out Lindsay Costello’s picks for the fest.

• Today in news to meeeee, I ran past Paradox Cafe, and it’s closed! Closed for since a month ago! Dang. RIP to a real one. Most who recall the cute lil diner think of it as a vegan breakfast spot, but the Oregonian’s  Michael Russell pointed out that “for its first couple of decades at least, the paradox behind the menu was that grass-fed beef burgers and chicken-apple sausage links sat alongside the tofu-veggie ‘ScramBowls.’”

• Local burrito chain Laughing Planet is still going strong! 25 years! 

Laughing Planet celebrates 25 years at Belmont Street Fair on Sat Sept 13. Everyone I know bags on em, but TBH it’s nice there’s a place where you can get a kind of bland burrito when you just cannot possibly have one more thing go wrong.

— Suzette Smith (@suzettesmith.bsky.social) August 26, 2025 at 1:10 PM

• The Oregonian‘s Veronica Nocera has written yet another story that I wish I’d done. Fucking incredible—here is a mother. fucking. list. of where all the mother. fucking. Spirit Halloweens are going to be this fall.

• When you wipe your jaw off the floor, you’ll want to make plans for whatever it is that’ll hold you over til you can get into a mother. fucking. Spirit Halloween near you. A concert? Could spark joy. EverOut has the lastest round-up of concert tickets going on sale this morning!

IN NATIONAL NEWS:
• The Daily spoke with Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the recently resigned director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, about his decision to resign on Wednesday, following President Trump’s firing of the agency’s director Susan Monarez. “No one from my staff has ever briefed [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] on anything,” Daskalakis told the Daily, “I believe that CDC science is going to be compromised by HHS. If that science becomes biased—if it becomes unduly influenced, then I can’t have my name on that science—as something that I think should be used for important decisions for people’s lives.” Daskalakis also posted a scathing letter on social media. Fun fact, the person Daskalakis sent this resignation letter to also resigned. (That’s actually not a very fun fact.)

• A federal judge in DC will hear Lisa Cook’s request to allow her to continue to serve on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors’s board while she contests the President’s attempt at firing her on Monday. Despite assertions that Cook’s firing is related to mortgage paperwork discrepancies, her firing has largely been viewed as part of the President’s wish to fill the Fed with his loyalists, after the board refused to lower interest rates at the President’s request.

The future of the Federal Reserve and whether it will continue to operate as an independent institution or become subject to the whims of the White House rests largely on Lisa Cook’s shoulders after she filed a lawsuit challenging her attempted dismissal by President Trump.

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— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) August 29, 2025 at 8:40 AM

• A senior White House official told the Associated Press that President Trump has revoked Secret Service protection for former Vice President Kamala Harris. That sounds very petty, but AP notes that former vice presidents usually get six months of protection after leaving office and that President Biden had quietly extended it before leaving office.

• I don’t know if people can still watch and enjoy Neon Genesis Evangelion if they aren’t a depressed teenager because it’s pretty weird, there are several (many!) moments in the story when a rational adult would just “nope” right out of there. But it is a prerequisite to understanding the joke I’m sending you into the weekend on. My friend Justin says the joke also works for Metal Gear Solid.

• Okay okay here’s one for the normals—just kidding, if you weren’t a depressed teen who watched anime you don’t get to enjoy this moment of pure joy! Yoko Takahashi still has it!