UC Irvine Is Once Again Laying Off Faculty and Staff to Pad Its More than $800 million in Core Reserves (Guest Post)

 

UC Irvine on April 13, 2018     

by Trevor Griffey, School of Humanities, UC Irvine

Last May, 2025, I had the radicalizing experience of successfully lobbying for three months as part of a labor union coalition to prevent $270 million in proposed cuts to the University of California (UC) general fund allocation from the State of California, then watching multiple UC campuses go forward with tens of millions of dollars of budget cuts anyway. 

It was a level of cynicism and exploitation that I frankly hadn’t expected from a public sector employer. For months, the UC office of the President (UCOP) mobilized students and Regents to personally lobby legislators to prevent budget cuts that would be “devastating” to students. Legislators, facing tough choices about how to close a multi-billion dollar budget deficit, heard our pleas and protected us while passing on cuts to other government programs instead. Then UCOP said nothing when campus Chancellors, citing structural deficits compounded by uncertainty in the Trump age, went ahead and and made some of the same cuts that legislators had explicitly given UC money to prevent.

University of California, Irvine (UCI) was one of those campuses that unnecessarily cut tens of millions from its 2025-26 school year budget. In May, I wrote about UC’s “betrayal” of its faculty, staff and students for Chistopher Newfield’s blog, Remaking the University. In June, 2026, I led a protest against budget cuts to the UCI School of Humanities that drew more than a hundred students, faculty and staff. I also worked behind the scenes to help an outstanding teacher who was fired after four years of teaching write an op-ed about what it felt like to be fired to pad the reserves of your school in the name of navigating fiscal uncertainty— but unfortunately I couldn’t find a venue whose editors were willing to publish it. 

This May, 2026, UCI is re-upping on its unnecessary budget cuts while building its core reserves ever closer to $1 billion. As I write this, on May 7, my colleagues in European language instruction are being told that second year language instruction will be restricted to majors in the School of Humanities, a cost-cutting measure that could result in the end of Russian Studies and possibly other programs [note from May 22: this proposed change has been stopped for 2026-27]. In Asian languages, four teachers were recently put on notice that they will lose their jobs at the end the 2026-27 school year. These are career-ending budget cuts: two of those teachers being laid off in Asian languages have been teaching at UCI for over 20 years.

Why are these layoffs happening? UCI administrators would say that structural deficits must be addressed by reducing low-enrollment programs. UCI School of Humanities leaders would say quietly, behind the scenes, that UCI has adopted a new budget model that rewards high enrollment and punishes programs such as arts, writing, and language instruction that are taught best in seminar formats with small class sizes. 

Both explanations are partly true, and I’ll write about both UC’s structural deficits and its budget model in separate posts.

But there’s an addition reason for the budget cuts taking place to language instruction that UCI hasn’t made clear to faculty. UCI is intentionally limiting the amount of tuition and state allocation increases that it provides to its schools. 

In his January 27, 2026 memo to Deans, Vice Chancellors and Principal Officers, UCI Provost Hal Stern announced that “Current campus-level planning assumptions include a 6% increase in state funding, 3% increase to tuition and student fees, projected drops in ICR funding (5% drop in FY27, 10% drop in FY28, 5% drop in FY29), and 3% increase in general and administrative assessment (G&A) funds available.”

What Stern didn’t say is that (per the Legislative Analyst’s Office):

• UC will raise tuition for the 2026-27 school year by 4.4%, not 3%
• The Governor proposed a 7% increase in the state’s general fund allocation to UC for 2026-27, not 6% 
• The Trump administration has not followed through on its threats to place caps on ICR, nor has Congress substantially reduced the budgets of either the National Science Foundation or the National Institute of Health, making a projected 20% drop in ICR funding seem excessively cautious

In other words, UCI is planning to withhold 30% of UC’s tuition increases and 14% of UC’s state allocation increase from its schools in the 2026-27 school year. It is also making excessively cautious budget projections regarding declines in research grant funding that will compel even more cuts to UCI schools. The likely result is that UCI will be generating a surplus from funds that are intended to go straight to services that support students. 

Having talked to multiple state legislators and their staff both this year and last year about state budget issues, I can tell you that in a moment when politicians are mostly holding firm against pressure to eliminate support for health insurance for undocumented immigrants, they don’t increase the UC’s budget so it can pad its reserves while cutting services to students. 

As Christopher Newfield identified in a UCI Budget Town Hall that I co-hosted on February 13, 2026, UCI’s core fund reserves (excluding its medical centers and auxiliary operations) already exceed $800 million.

   

That’s approximately 8 months of operating reserves. UCI continuing to skim money away from what it extracts from students and receives from the state not only leads to unnecessary cuts in student services. If word gets out to the state legislature, this level of excessive skimming could politically backfire on UCI and the whole UC system.