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| Selling The Catalyst, UCSB on April 12, 2014 |
University boards and presidents have not formulated common aims much less a joint strategy to fight the most powerful attack in higher education’s modern history, one already more destructive than McCarthyism. They have followed the mantra of corporate America: shut up, suck up, and try not to stand up. I’ve noted that all the fighting has come from faculty groups and some professional associations.
The split between universities and the Trump Administration is one problem, and the internal split between university administration and faculty is another. While faculty groups have called on their administrations to reject Trump’s illegally-compelled deals, their managers have regularly accepted them. Northwestern, Virginia, and my PhD alma mater Cornell are three that capitulated since I discussed Columbia and Penn and UCLA hanging by a thread.
In this post I will discuss this management—faculty split, which I nominate as the most important internal trend of 2025. I’ll discuss new revelations about the fraudulent federal case against UCLA, revelations which haven’t obviously stiffened spines. I’ll then analyze the UC budget as a paradigm of top-level administrative groupthink that has lost touch with educational reality (sections 3 and 4). The final section will discuss the larger historical exhaustion of the current regime as the context in which academics will need to ponder building of the shadow or parallel university.
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The Northwestern University deal was the last straw for veteran academic freedom expert John K. Wilson. He wrote,
It is common to describe these agreements as a surrender to the Trump regime, but it’s actually much worse. This isn’t capitulation; it’s collaboration. This is complicity, not compulsion.
Northwestern officials made an agreement with the Trump administration, not because they were forced to, but because they wanted to do it. . . .
Bowing down before the Trump administration only makes sense as a strategy when both sides share the same goals. These agreements allow administrators to impose tighter controls over almost every aspect of campus life.
Wilson notes that the deal defied a Northwestern faculty vote of 595 to 4 against “any capitulation on the part of Northwestern University to these or similar demands that undermine constitutional rights, democratic principles, faculty governance, institutional autonomy, and academic freedom.” He states that “the Northwestern agreement includes a long list of right-wing demands related to race, sex and politics.”
Wilson has been making patient arguments on behalf of academic freedom for thirty years. I’d say his patience has now run out.
Until administrators suffer the consequences of an alumni and campus backlash, they will continue bowing down to the Trump administration, sacrificing academic freedom every time they are forced to choose between free speech and the spigot of money.
This is true. He continues:
Students, faculty, staff and alumni need to create a subversive alternative university lurking within the shadows of the university itself. This shadow university is essential because trustees, administrators and wealthy donors ultimately control the structure of universities.
The first step is financial: encouraging alumni to cut off all donations to the university. The problem is that when progressive donors withhold money, progressive causes at the university will tend to suffer the most. So the solution is to create a shadow fund, an independent non-profit that alumni can donate to continue support for these goals. In the case of Northwestern, it could include independent funding for efforts being banned in the Trump agreement.
After offering some detail, drawn in part from AAUP-Northwestern’s president Jacqueline Stevens, he concludes, “We need shadow universities to preserve academic values and academic freedom at a time when they are under attack by government officials and campus administrators.”
There’s been quite a bit of thinking about this over the years, and that thinking’s time has come. I’ve previously pondered storefront or bootleg universities in which already-employed tenure-track faculty would teach one course a year for free while hiring otherwise-adjuncted scholars for regular pay. Figuring out how to fund this would be fun. Some colleagues in Bologna, Italy, run courses as an International Parallel University out of a bookstore.
Wilson and Stevens imagine something similar being run from or next to a major university, and perhaps integrated into it with an autonomous funding and governance structure. The autonomous governance structure could serve as practical experiment in democratized, bottom-up academic governance of a kind now purged from the country’s colleges and universities, to their intellectual and also financial detriment.
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The University of California would likely have followed Columbia, Penn, Brown, Northwestern et al. had Gov. Gavin Newsom not publicly threatened to cut state funds to UC in exact proportion to any state monies and student tuition the UC Regents sent to Trump. To repeat, Harvard remains the only university in the United States to have sued the Trump Administration for obvious violations of the federal statues it is using. UC faculty had to sue the Administration on their own to recover blocked research funds that a district court verified where withheld unlawfully. It’s been a terrible year for the credibility of university managers as people who stand up for the integrity and autonomy of the sectors over which they have unilateral authority.
The university presidents all claim that their accords with Trump preserve academic freedom and university values, but these are self-interested and superficial readings of what is happening. MAGA is waging total war on knowledge and expertise, and as culture war discredits knowledge workers, their motives, and their expertise, budget wars undermines the material resources that allow them to do their research and teaching.
University managers err in thinking that compromising university principles attracts mainstream admiration. This past week saw signs that self-censoring professors (as at the University of Texas at Austin) are losing the trust and respect of their students. There are also signs that students are now rejecting campus surveillance culture: see Timothy Burke’s excellent piece on the growth of this culture over the 2010s and student opposition at Swarthmore.
In keeping with the year’s theme, new reporting by Jaweed Kaleem at the Los Angeles Times reveals how the investigations of UC campuses by Trump’s Department of Justice violated the Department’s professional standards. The front-page headline is hard to misunderstand.
Figure 1
The federal investigation was rushed and inadequate, while its conclusions were determined in advance by political appointees and then publicized with a PR campaign that was “’essentially saying workplaces or colleges were guilty of discrimination before finding out if they really were,’ said one attorney, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.”
Another former investigator said, “It shows just how unserious this exercise was. It was not about trying to find out what really happened.” The DOJ attorneys assigned to UC managed to narrow the charges from multiple UC campuses to UCLA, where they felt there were Title VII violations that justified a lawsuit, though even there the attorneys “believed that such a lawsuit had significant weaknesses.”
Kaleem’s findings come too late for UCLA, which already confessed to enabling antisemitism by settling a lawsuit for $6.45 million. UC statements about the settlement sent the message that UCLA must be continuously monitored for signs of antisemitism. This confirms cultural warrior claims that universities are hotbeds of prejudice rather than being, in general, less prejudiced that society as a whole and dedicated to professional research that reduces prejudice over time. Antisemitic atrocities like the heartbreaking mass murder of Jews at Bondi Beach in New South Wales, Australia by father-son killers should help us see campus protest and critique as the benefit it is, as even in our grief we refuse to run everything together.
Put another way, UC’s response to orchestrated culture war attacks does not emerge from the educational practices of the campuses over which officials preside. These practices are hardly perfect, but their standards of argument, evidence, and at least semi-respectful dispute are demonstrably superior to those of their accusers and of political knowledge more generally.
When administrators or Board chairs accept and echo generalizations about antisemitism and other systemic bias on U.S. campuses, they insult the intelligence of the academics on those campuses while dumbing down the university in the public eye.
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Having financial resources would give universities a chance to fight their way out of this corner—if their executives would allow it--but those are under continuous attack as well. Here I turn not to Trump’s savaging of research funding—nicely parsed this month by Aatish Bhatia et al. in the New York Times, and Anil Oza and J. Emory Parker in STAT—but to the UC Office of the President’s own budget requests for the 10 campuses of the system.
UC’s Office of the President (UCOP) presented its 2026-27 budget proposal at the November Board of Regents Meetings. These are Groundhog Day for me: the arguments and inadequate dollar increments repeat themselves again and again, as does their inadequate theory of the university: higher learning is to be measured in degree outputs, production time, and costs of production. That educational theory is pretty much what UC students started to complain about around 1964. Here’s the version in the budget item for November 2025 (page 5).
Figure 2
Four of the six goals are about getting students onto campus in the first place. A fifth is about using ed-tech to make it unnecessary to go to a campus in the first place. The sixth defines a university education as job training.
Once UCOP defines UC’s B.A. degrees as commodity outputs measured with those metrics, then it can, year after year, request state funding that’s at best flat when corrected for cost inflation (higher than CPI) without the Senate or anyone else saying that yet another inadequate request will hurt UC quality, even though it clearly does.
UCOP also foolishly continues to overenroll students, defined as admitting students for whom the state doesn’t pay (4,047 of 210,635 in 2024-25, Display 3). Student throughput continues to increase at no cost to the state, which teaches the state that payment for student infrastructure is optional. The conditions of education stagnate or decline.
So, the budget request: in 2022, UCOP signed a multi-year Compact with Governor Newsom that locks in stagnant state budgets: UC is to receive a 5% annual increase in its base state allocation, conditioned on increased enrollment in resident undergraduates. UCOP thus asks for this percentage for 2026-27, which comes to an additional $262.8 million, or around 2.5 percent of “core funds” (these are nearly $11 billion combining state outlays with all forms of student tuition and fees).
UCOP also asks for an additional $401.5 million that the state owed but failed to pay when it promptly reneged on its Compact. Odds and ends bring the requested state increase to about $703 million. UCOP further requests one-time funds of $1.36 billion for “Capital Support for Facilities Renewal, Enrollment Growth, and Clean Energy Projects.”
The regents’ discussion cast this as a bold request. It’s not. It’s a remedial budget, and a very incomplete one at that.
In reality, UCOP’s funding requests have locked UC campuses into structural deficits—structural in the sense that with efficiency measures already taken, and operating at capacity, costs consistently exceed revenues. UCSB calculates a $120 million deficit heading to $160-180 million in the next couple of years. UC Davis estimates a $53 million deficit just on tuition and state funds, with campus losses from federal government follies of $118-$408 million. In their September meeting, the regents saw UCSD’s chancellor visualize his campus’s $132 million deficit.
Figure 3
UC Santa Cruz had a deficit of $95 million at the end of 2024-25 and a larger one this year. UC Irvine claims to have reduced its deficit to $31 million, but only if every unit achieves cuts that analysis suggests are destructive and unsustainable (Part 1 and Part 2). Though UCLA has withheld an official quantification of its deficit, it is serious enough to have led to 10% cuts in administrative units along with others that prompted a nearly-unanimous Senate Resolution for full disclosure and budget collaboration with faculty.
If we conservatively estimate $100 million in shortfalls per campus, these add up to a systemwide “structural deficit” of $1 billion for 2025-26. The total is likely larger. Campus deficits have become recurring, campus allocations don’t follow need, deficits are likely larger than publicly stated, many cuts have already been factored in, and none of the deficits count federal withholdings. Therefore, even “full” compact finding will not close the campus gaps.
UCOP officials didn’t mention that the University of California lost a lot of money on operations in FY2025: $5.9 billion (Table MDA.3). It lost $8.3 billion in FY 2024 and nearly $9 billion the year before that. Obviously this suggests a broken funding model that cohort tuition and state Compacts don’t address.
These large losses are apparently being covered with borrowing (see below), but my point here is that they aren’t being discussed and confronted in the open session on budget and finance.
UCOP declines to educate the Board on the institution’s budget history. They can therefore pretend that any given current 2-3 year period of flat or falling state funding is a temporary pause in decent growth in a healthy system. In medicine, this would be malpractice: the actual budget context looks like this.
Figure 4
All the additional student tuition (green line) does not bring UC to the per-student funding it would receive if its budget had grown in proportion to state per-capita income (blue line) and to enrollment growth (yellow line).
These data also falsify UCOP’s claim that state budget challenges cause UC cuts (page 1), since these challenges don’t diminish other state agencies in the aggregate.
Figure 5
The gap between the purple like (overall state budget) and the red line (UC's state appropriation) shows that UC's record of receiving state funds is, in the company of CSU, uniquely terrible.
Insufficient funds over many years has meant a double reality on the campuses. First, faculty of every kind along with graduate student employees teach and research their hearts out in an effort to achieve the highest possible quality. Second, their working conditions steadily deteriorate out from under them, for years at a time.
Examples abound, though they remain uncollected: Program ambitions are quietly downgraded, projects are discontinued, great ideas never see the light of day. All universities now desperately need to intensify personal instruction in response to “AI,” but, as The Economist recently recognized, they lack the money to do this. Above all, budgets control, even pre-empt, academic initiatives, which curtails academic freedom. Programs for teaching and research, justified by faculty expertise, are instead subject to the decisions of budget officials, who rarely if ever share their data or their thinking with their campuses.
Since students and faculty generally love their schools and feel loyalty to them, open discussion of quiet, steady quality declines is taboo. Academic needs get lost when the professional half of the PMC relates to the managerial half via loyalty without voice. Silent loyalty is repaid by decline. The silence enables chronic mis-budgeting on the UCOP level.
Though this is not our intention, we very effectively hide budget damage from the public with our silence. Faculty and students will need to be much more public about the effects of enshittified budgeting over many years.
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This section offers some detail about UC’s budgetary inadequacy as a primary source of vulnerability and decline.
–Visible Shortfalls: The regents who responded to UCOP’s budget openly disbelieved its estimates for deficit size and closure. Regent Lee’s plausible guess was that a $400-500 million gap would remain even by UCOP’s narrow and misleading definition.
—Capital Projects: In the long-time absence of state capital project support, two-thirds of the 2025-2031 Capital Financial Plan, requiring $48.3 billion, has no identified funding source (page 130). The one-time request for $1.36 billion invites non-repetition. Spread ambiguously across new projects and deferred maintenance, the amount is one-sixth the cost of the deferred maintenance backlog on UC’s existing buildings. That is seven times larger than it was a decade ago.
Figure 6
—Tuition Increases: These are bad for students without doing enough for UC. UCOP led with evidence that UC student debt has declined, and that 2/3rds of residents graduate debt-free, which is a genuine achievement)
Figure 7
Figure 8
A student earning $20 an hour would need 500 hours to fill that gap; in reality work hours are likely quite a bit more. “Debt-free” means high workloads, including working while a full-time student. Student financial stress is another example of a problem that insufficient state increases makes unsolvable.
UCOP’s plan was to add one percent to the renewed cohort tuition plan (first passed in 2021), and earmark it for campus capital projects in student services. This was rejected by the Board, which approved an additional 1% but converted it to any campus use at the chancellor’s discretion.
UC’s policy of cohort tuition increases revenue annually by about one-fourth of the (up to) 5% (to be 6%) increase on each new class of students. This is a pretty big increase, getting close to the Arnold Schwarzenegger Compact of 7% annual increases (for all students) of 2004. The discussion made clear that the regents like the automatic nature of the increase so they don’t get blamed. They like the ratchet, and they like not having to re-approve the policy for years at a time (one regent suggested revisiting it every 7 years). Of course a regent who doesn’t want to receive and respond to criticism of their voted policy should immediately resign—this is a public policy position after all. As if.
—Student housing. This is an ongoing problem that adds mightily to students’ Total Cost of Attendance. The state withdrew support for new student housing years ago. The result is that even on-campus housing is geared to off-campus market standards, where developers had figured out that they can charge students by the bed rather than the room. UC responds by offering on campus housing at 79% of (an unaffordable) market, to cite the UC Santa Barbara case. UCSB’s student housing project—delayed for a decade by the Yang- Munger “dormzilla” fiasco—is to happen on a campus whose capital program is 78% unfunded (page 108). A set of astute, detailed questions to the campus officials from Student Observer Isha Khirwadkar (@2’10”), suggested its future customers already don’t like the project’s very high cost per bed ($883 and up). Campus housing now extends the affordability crisis rather than cutting against it.
—Research Funding. Maintaining the air of budget normality depends on bracketing out the federal threats to up to one-third of UC’s overall budget, most of that tied to research. This issue was simply ignored. Equally ignored, as always, are all universities’ structural losses on research: adding up institutional fund expenditures on R&D in FY2023 for the 3 big medical campuses (LA, SD, SF) comes to well over $1 billion (Table 22), to say nothing of losses at the other campuses.
It’s irresponsible to continue to ignore these costs in a major research university budget, and to not use the current crisis to move towards a sustainable research funding system.
–Institutional Debt: In the absence of adequate state funding, and with necessary limits on tuition increases, UCOP has turned to annual debt increases as an additional revenue stream. It added $7.1 billion in debt in FY2025, and $4.9 billion in FY2024 (Table MDA.2)
Long term debt in FY2025 is $36.2 billion (page 30). It is triple the debt in 2009-10 of $12.5 billion (“09/10 Annual Financial Report, my archives), and nearly double outstanding debt of ten years ago ($20 billion, Annual Financial Report 15/16, page 6).
UC’s net position is positive, there are lots of reserves and revenue streams, and for such reasons nobody seems to care. But really for how much longer at today’s interest rates can UC borrow its way out of shortfalls in state support for operations and capital projects? It’s a failure of the management system to have no public generation of discourse and ideas about this.
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It’s a truism to say that universities are now banks with a sideliner in education, but that’s all the more reason to work seriously on the reversal. Financialization actively harms UC education and that of other public universities. The whole period has erased the previous era’s interest in advanced education for non-elites. That interest was limited to the white middle-class, but it also underwrote the period’s free public colleges. The Trump war on knowledge and universities is an opportunity to undo our own era’s maladaptations, which rest on a bipartisan consensus that social resources should go disproportionately to elites because they uniquely know how to maximize returns on investment. Jerry Brown saw public universities as remedial, and tech as where value came from. Gov. Gavin Newsom means the same thing when he mis-sells higher ed as a “conveyer belt for talent” into the workforce. They both mean public universities are for worker bees, so if a Latina bookworm has to work 3 full shifts a week to stay in your lit course, well, there’s just no money to fix that.
If you poll people about whether college should lead to employment, of course they will answer yes. Unemployed people suffer and die in America, and no one will go into student debt for that. But a job is baked into college expectations and existing funding levels, meaning the public is okay with keeping the university even with inflation but can’t see why “workforce development” earns it meaningful new investment.
More importantly, working-class and other non-college people value thinking as much as college grads. This should be obvious, but in any case I make this generalization on the basis of decades of teaching mixed-class courses in public university. The future’s parallel university is going to center on offering the non-market, intellectual benefits of university and not the job training.
Quantity has always eclipsed intellectual quality in mass higher education. Massification entered a new phase around the turn of the century, when a critical mass of politicians and business people, with a lot of help from the right, began to doubt that a generic BA degree added much value to the economy or society. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s multi-year cuts (2003-05) operationalized a disdain for egalitarian quality. That was twenty years ago, but UCOP has never developed the educational theory to unearth the roots of permanent austerity.
The Canadian higher ed analyst Alex Usher recently explained that international higher education has never developed a sustaining justification for quality massification. First, “We increased access but allowed the already-privileged to hold on to their near-monopoly at the top.” This creates a pervasive link between universities, economic inequality, and mass mediocrity.
Second, “there are huge swathes of the population that deeply resent the idea that they need to spend more time in school in order to enjoy a middle-class life. . . . [A] lot of the social polarization and populism comes down, I think, to the belief that the front-of-the-class kids, the swots, whatever you want to call them (us), have monopolized good jobs.” I’d add that job training is precisely what non-college people do not want from colleges: they rightly see it as overpriced overkill if you’re just trying to get a job.
Third, “from the perspective of government, once higher education becomes something that is nearly universal, why should it be treated differently from secondary schools?”
In reality there is an evident answer to that last question that admin refuses to provide. Universities create cognitive gain, public knowledge, and social self-understanding on a mass scale. Our ancestors used to bundle these elements as “education for democracy.” It is the best way yet devised, in tandem with social movements and other institutions, of getting a whole population in position to solve complex and frightening problems without today’s elevated levels of fear, revulsion, and violence. Universities are the main systemic developer of the capacity to go a little deeper – on a mass scale.
The parallel or shadow university will need its separate governing structure. And it will also be able to grow on the basis of now-hidden intellectual missions that, I believe, will enjoy mass popularity that job training does not.
In the meantime, please say in any format you can what is happening to you. We need an outpouring of tales from the front.
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