Judith Aitken Ramaley served as president of Portland State University (PSU) from 1990 to 1997, the first woman president in the Oregon University System. In that role, she protected PSU’s graduate programs, defined its role as an urban grant university that embodied the motto “Let Knowledge Serve the City,” and encouraged nationally recognized curricular innovation that connected students and faculty with the Portland community. After retiring as president of Winona State University in Minnesota in 2012, she returned to PSU as Distinguished Professor of Public Service in the Hatfield School of Government and as a member of the Portland State’s Board of Trustees (2019- ).

Judith Aitken was born in 1941 in California. She earned her undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College in 1963 and a PhD in anatomy from UCLA in 1966, followed by a postdoctoral position at Indiana University. She married Robert Ramaley in 1966; they had two sons. As a new faculty member at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Judith Ramaley quickly found her niche in academic administration. She became assistant vice president for academic affairs at Nebraska; chief academic officer and then executive vice president for academic affairs at the State University of New York at Albany; and executive vice chancellor at the University of Kansas (1987-90). She worked to support and increase the number of women scientists and was an early president of the Association for Women in the Sciences (1978-80). In 1990, she accepted the positions of president and professor of biology at Portland State University.

PSU in 1990 offered both opportunities and challenges. It was a growing university in a city that was entering an era of economic and cultural growth, but it bore scars from academic retrenchment in the economic recession of the early 1980s and the brief presidency of Natale Sicuro (1986-88). The Oregon University System had the authority to allocate programs and resources, and Portland State was considered at best a utility infielder by the other long-established members of Oregon’s higher education team (the Oregon University System at that time had the authority to allocate programs and direct resources among the state's public universities).  

Externally, Ramaley fought for Portland State’s survival as a full-fledged university and for the resources needed to sustain growth. She found out that the Governor’s Commission on Higher Education was planning to recommend transferring all the university’s graduate programs to other Oregon institutions, leaving it a purely undergraduate college. She mobilized community leaders and built a case for PSU’s unique mission within the state based on the definition of urban-serving universities under Title 11 of the Higher Education Act. The Commission’s final report accepted PSU’s identity as an “urban grant university,” parallel to a traditional land grant university but with a special mission to serve the Portland metropolitan region. Nevertheless, the university in 1996 faced a new effort to carve out the engineering and business schools for the older universities—a step that Portland State was again able to prevent by rallying metropolitan area leaders.

Internally, many faculty were ready for new initiatives. The University Studies curriculum, adopted in 1993 and encouraged by Ramaley, provided a sequence of courses emphasizing community engagement taught by teams of faculty from multiple disciplines. Students in senior capstone courses partnered with local governments and community organizations to work on practical problems. In conjunction, Ramaley supported the redefinition of faculty evaluation and tenure criteria to recognize community-focused teaching and research. She also connected faculty research to the needs of area governments by establishing the Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies along with initiatives focused on K-12 education and international trade. This burst of innovation established Portland State as a national model for community-oriented learning. During this time, PSU was expanding its footprint in the south end of downtown by completing the University District Plan.

Lobbying the state higher education system for adequate resources and battling to keep Portland State’s engineering and business programs ultimately consumed Ramaley’s political capital and made her persona non grata to many in the state’s educational establishment. She was told that her continued presence at Portland State would be damaging to its future, prompting her departure to become president of the University of Vermont (1997-2001). There she engaged the university in promoting collaboration across the range of public education from K-12 through college.

After leaving Vermont, Ramaley assumed an impactful position as Assistant Director of Education and Human Resources at the National Science Foundation (2001-2004), where she managed a budget of over $900 million and emphasized improving science education in elementary and high schools and broadening the participation of women and minorities in the sciences. She also changed the agency’s SMET acronym to the much catchier STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), giving it semi-official status and popularizing a now widely recognized terminology. The department was subsequently renamed the NSF Directorate for STEM Education.

Ramaley’s final fulltime position was president of Winona State University in Minnesota (2005-2012). Under her leadership, the secondary campus developed community-based programming with Rochester Community and Technical College that enhanced the urban community and opened pathways for degree completion.

After leaving Minnesota in 2012, Ramaley returned to Portland State University as a Distinguished Professor of Public Service in the Hatfield School of Government. She joined the Board of Trustees in 2019. In the fifteen years since her tenure as president, her vision, mentoring, and consensus-building has had a transformative impact on PSU, bringing it national recognition as a center of educational innovation at a time when the Portland region was attracting national attention as a model for good planning. Her leadership at Portland State opened opportunities for community engagement and increased access to higher education in an urban setting. She helped Portland State to be, in her words, “a pathway to opportunity for people of all backgrounds and a partner in responding to the needs of the metropolitan region.”