Genoa, Italy, on June 26, 2024   

You aren’t likely to have looked for criticism of Trump’s illegal war on Iran from college presidents or governing boards.  If you did type the search string, “university president criticizes war on Iran” early on March 5^th you would have gotten a string of university professors commenting as individuals (“Law school professors say strikes on Iran violate international law”).  I got the same result on March 8^th.

This is an established pattern: university professors go out in force and use their expertise to affect public debate about a major issue. Universities practice “institutional neutrality” and say nothing. The justification, as explained by an advocate, Daniel Diermeier, president of Vanderbilt University, is that an institutional position “risk[s] establishing a ‘party line’ and stifling debate among students and faculty.” 

The only exception to college presidential silence I could find was Rowan University President Ali Houshmand, interviewed in his capacity as an Iranian-American.

"I'm not a fan of the Iranian government. I consider them as a terrorist government," Houshmand said. "I don't like them, but at the same time, I'm worried about people, I'm worried about the country, I'm worried about both sides."

Worrying about people while not criticizing the US government that started the war. This is good about the people. I’m dissatisfied about the missing other half of the comment, but this humanitarian view does set out an ethical baseline. Yet even on this basic point, Houshmand as a university president is out there all by himself.

Isn’t it strange that in a country with nearly 6000 colleges and universities, one is more likely to find conceptual leadership in late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel than in the presidents of Harvard, Princeton, UNC or the University of California? (Kimmel’s “Lie-A-Tollah” has a superb condensation of the war’s stupidly incompatible rationales @4’40”.) 

Maybe it’s not strange. We’re used to the story of universities as institutionally irrelevant to public life. Many may prefer to join Diermeier in calling this “principled neutrality,” but it adds to the public impression that universities do not address, much less solve, everyday problems. As institutions, it seems, they put themselves above the issues that torment regular people. High cost, student debt, and ludicrously high rejection rates drive home this impression of the university’s passive elitism.  

Making matters worse, senior managers at universities have succumbed to a chilling effect on their own speech, obviously encouraged by repressive U.S. governments like the Trump-McMahon regime and the state legislatures that have suspended academic freedom (Texas, Florida, Indiana, and North Carolina).   The university’s institutional silence is very bad for universities as well as for the country, now in the grip of a government that can’t and won’t think straight, and that scorns the knowledge that universities exist to produce. 

Michael has two recent posts about this issue of self-neutralizing management. Discussing “Minneapolis lessons for higher education,” he praised the state’s senior Democratic officials: “At a moment of intense threat they have stood up to the federal government at potentially great personal risk.  How many of our college and university leaders can make the same statement?” 

In the other post, Michael meant by “Achieving Our University” that faculty must “challenge the managerial class's monopoly on definition and meaning.” He wrote that “it is now up to faculty as faculty to openly defend and define the mission of colleges and universities.”

This is a mild-mannered call for professionals to take back their universities from a floundering managerial elite.  I certainly agree.  

And taking back is a theme of our time. I’m writing this post just after an ISRF workshop on ”Redesigning Finance for Climate Justice,” which involves taking economic planning back from private equity and related powerful actors, and just before a workshop on “Reframing AI,” which involves taking human learning back from its AI-industry definitions.   

Here I want to specify one feature of this taking back of universities, which is taking academic freedom back from institutional “neutrality” or “restraint.”

∞∞∞

Under Trump-turboed pressure from governments and from a loud minority of heavyweight trustees, university presidents have largely muzzled themselves.  Looking for a shield, there’s been a national rediscovery of the Kalven Committee report, composed at the University of Chicago nearly 60 years ago, in 1967, and supplemented by UChicago’s “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression” (2014). What are sometimes called the “Chicago Principles” stress institutional neutrality and “free expression” in debate. The core claim is that you can’t have free inquiry without institutional neutrality.  The 2014 report added a rejection of downshouting or deplatforming of “controversial” speakers” along with language about “time place and manner” restrictions on protest.

In July 2022, Kalven was adopted by the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees and few other places. More generally, its sensibility has been adapted as “institutional restraint” at prominent universities like Princeton and Cornell, who prefer “restraint” to “neutrality.”

Although Kalven argued that only the “neutrality of the university” could protect free inquiry it noted a “university mission” exception: the institution should speak when “the very mission of the university” was at stake.  Kalven is not widely seen as providing criteria for identifying the university’s unique missions.  It’s more a prudential principle of restraint—stay out of every fight that isn’t yours. 

This is perfectly sound advice, but then the question is begged as to which fight is and isn’t yours.  Commentators (Robert Post, Jennifer Ruth, the AAUP’s Committee A) have shown that Kalven did not forbid all university statements and did endorse self-defense of the university’s core values and procedures. It specified that a university could legitimately speak about “situations involving university ownership of property, its receipt of funds, its awarding of honors, its membership in other organizations.” 

With its ambiguities unresolved, Kalven concerns were reignited by the national (and international) wave of university statements about the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020.  Did so many official statements mean that racialized police violence affected core university values and operations, including the work lives of its faculty, staff, and students?  A very large number of university presidents felt Floyd’s murder was their business, and perhaps that if they didn’t condemn the murder they would be seen as cowardly or complicit. Were they all violating Kalven’s ethos of neutrality or restraint?

University presidents reacted in a similar way to the Hamas incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023 that involved the mass murder of Israeli civilians.  Harvard’s then-president Claudine Gay and other senior managers signed a statement on October 9th: “We write to you today heartbroken by the death and destruction unleashed by the attack by Hamas that targeted citizens in Israel this weekend, and by the war in Israel and Gaza now under way.” The statement also noted “an interest from many in understanding more clearly what has been happening in Israel and Gaza,” which of course falls squarely within the mandate of a university.

This was considered too even-handed by some, so the next day Gay herself added, “let there be no doubt that I condemn the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.”  The concern was not that Harvard’s president hadn’t stayed neutral but that she had been too neutral.

Princeton’s president Christopher Eisgruber is a leading advocate of institutional restraint.  His October 7th comment began, “Even in a world wearied and torn by violence and hatred, Hamas’s murder and kidnapping of hundreds of Israelis over the past weekend is among the most atrocious of terrorist acts.” It went on to discuss multilateral outreach efforts and scholarly analyses and panels to come.  It did not strive for neutrality by, for example, describing efforts to understand the politics of the Occupation or the situation of the residents of Gaza.

Harvard and Princeton both operate in the restraint ethos, and Harvard’s Institutional Voice Working Group recently made it official.  Their official statements appear to respond to the strength of outrage in their community—to its affective investment in an issue—under conditions in which no counterweight comes from political and business elites. This seems to me to typify Kalven in practice: not triggered by a stable list of authorized institutional topics, but by an impassioned university community to which donors and legislators are at least not opposed. This lack of heavyweight opposition lasted for only a day at Harvard in October 2023, but the point is that senior managers can’t look to Kalven or to a related principle of restraint for a clear line between university and non-university topics.

∞∞∞

Neutralists haven’t given up, however. A leading advocate, Vanderbilt’s President Diermeier, had advanced “principled neutrality,” and insists a line can be drawn between the university and non-university matters.

According to Diermeier, principled neutrality applies only to issues “that do not affect the university directly”.

Admissions, which is a “core function” of the university, is fair game for him. Abortion, however – another strongly polarising topic in the US, which the Supreme Court ruled on in 2022 – is not. He feels there’s a key difference.

“It affects the members of my community, but not more than other members of the community. We will not comment. That’s the principle.

The problem is that this argument smuggles in a new and unsupported claim: an issue cannot simply affect a “core function” but must affect it more than other communities. This arbitrarily sets aside the connections between academic conditions on campus and existential conditions (social, cultural, political) that shape Vanderbilt people and their professional lives.

In May 2023, Diermeier was severely taken to task by one of his faculty members, Brian L. Heuser, on exactly this point. Since Diermeier’s manifesto, “Principled Neutrality,” Heuser wrote, “the Tennessee General Assembly has eviscerated women’s reproductive rights, maltreated our transgender citizens, persecuted our immigrant population, moved to dismantle our Nashville Metropolitan Council and significantly restricted academic freedom and faculty autonomy.”  The refusal of one of Tennessee’s leading dignitaries to oppose any of this had helped to degrade Vanderbilt University’s “core functions” by harming many of the people who perform them. The “very mission of the university” in reality depended on having a non-toxic political environment.

The stakes of this argument are enormous. Institutions that don’t control their environments are prey to them.  When universities throw their trans students under the bus, it harms those students while also weakening universities. 

I’d make a similar argument for action at a distance.  Universities that can’t control their national intellectual environments are prey to them. The mental cratering evident, yet again, in Trumpian war-making harms the people of Iran and the Middle East while also weakening the universities whose intellectual practices these actions suggest do not matter.

I realize this second claim about the knowledge environment is more complicated than those about the university’s immediate environment, and I’ll work through it in other posts. But I believe it’s correct and I’d be more than happy to have help with it.

∞∞∞

I’ll end this post by saying that universities should stop letting the Kalven tradition silence their institutional voices. Robert Post is certainly right that Kalven and its successors have failed to draw a principled distinction between external matters and matters that pertain to “the very mission of the university”—that this distinction is an empirical and, I would add, an affective matter.

But I think the Kalven Inhibition is a bit worse than that. Institutional restraint actively makes universities less valuable and less safe.  The tradition has the following effects.

1.     Kalven isolates universities from the wider population’s everyday concerns. Without intending this, it deepens the divide between college and non-college sectors of the population.

2.     Kalven turns nearly every external or environmental factor in university functioning into a political intrusion on the core mission.  It teaches faculty, staff, and students, that even existential matters like state funding policy are outside the purview of their jobs and expertise. For example, Princeton president Eisgruber gave the Clark Kerr lectures this winter, where he analyzed three trends that shape the contemporary university: the rising dependence of higher education on student loans; accelerating nationwide competition; and the role of colleges and universities in addressing issues of racial equality. Having done this research, should Eisgruber not work to persuade Princeton University to issue an official statement favoring (to replace his conclusions with mine) free public colleges, national minimums for per-student educational expenditures at 25% of Princeton’s, and new forms of race-based affirmative action? Factors like student debt directly shape the “very mission of the university,” and yet under Kalven universities should normally remain silent about them.

3.     When it claims that a university’s “collective action” comes “at the price of censuring any minority who do not agree with the view adopted,” Kalven grants a minority veto over collective action.  The Kalven tradition invents a conflict between academic freedom and democracy. This is not good for an institution that claims to be democracy’s backbone. Also, Kalven in effect endorses the theory behind the Trump Administration’s sole-complainant doctrine, e.g. at Columbia University, in which one affronted person can cause the Department of Justice to bring a federal case.  Kalven says academic freedom requires open debate, but then that academic freedom is trampled by a debate that leads to a democratic vote and democratic agency.  

4.     The Kalven tradition splits the faculty from the university as a part of public life, deepening class conflict between academic professionals and their managers. For example, the main point of the restraint doctrine defined by Cornell’s “Presidential Task Force on Institutional Voice” is that the institution’s voice belongs exclusively to a small handful of top officials: “Only the board, president, and provost speak for the university.”   The report spells out that deans don’t speak for the university. Nor in this document, does anyone else below them. In other words, the academic core of the university doesn’t speak. If it does, it speaks at the discretion of the board and top two officials and even then it doesn’t represent the university.  This institutional restraint effectively scrubs the university’s institutional voice of its academic life, making it weaker as well as generally boring.

The upshot is that the university’s institutional voice should be co-authored by officials and the members of the academic core the officials claim to protect. This is my variant of Michael’s “challenge [to] the managerial class's monopoly.”

If there’s no progress there, then academics, students included, will need to work the direct public communication channels that do not pass through the president and provost—teaching and protests, both sites of struggle, as well as research publication and “extramural” speaking into all possible media.

Research, scholarship, teaching and lecturing:  These things don’t “speak for the university,” but the university does speak through them.  And these academic channels should speak directly about the intellectual catastrophes that do so much pointless harm to the world today.

 

UC President Mark Yudof Reviews Demands Nov 2011  

Chris here: I've criticized pervasive info failures in higher ed, from campus budget opacities to the inability of national associations in the humanities to gather data that can be used to strategize and build positions, organizations, and infrastructure.  Here's a group doing something about that.  The Coalition for Action in Higher Education (CAHE) and the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace have launched a project called "Know Your Governing Board."  

One major element of it is a survey that they are asking campus groups across the country to fill out.  There's research involved! It will be worth it.  

A second major element is that campus groups organize Know Your Governing Board events on April 17th, in conjunction with CAHE's third annual Day of Action.

Their statement follows. 

§§§

On behalf of the Coalition for Action in Higher Education and the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace, we share with you a template titled “Know Your Governing Board.” 

We envision this questionnaire as an intervention in the ongoing crisis of US higher education. We hope the answers you and your colleagues generate will serve as a prelude to developing strategies to criticize, challenge, and ultimately remake the governance structure at our colleges and universities. As such, we view this template as a participant in allied struggles to fulfill the promise of higher education as a truly public good.

In recent years, especially but not exclusively in so-called “red states,” the governing boards at many public and private institutions have imposed regulations that undermine institutional autonomy, subvert faculty participation in governance, compromise academic freedom, and subordinate the conduct of higher education to the cause of ideological conformity. 

If we are to understand and combat these attacks, we must render these bodies visible; make their work transparent; and disclose their links to other loci of power. Accordingly, we encourage faculty members to share their findings in public forums on their campuses and with colleagues at other institutions.

To do so, we first ask faculty to organize a “Know Your Governing Board” forum on their campuses, either in person and/or online, on April 17, 2026. This date marks the third annual Day of Action organized by the Coalition for Action in Higher Education (https://www.dayofactionforhighered.org/). 

Second, by April 15, please email your responses to this questionnaire, whether complete or partial, as an attachment or a hyperlink to our email address: whorulestheacademy@proton.me. Unless you specify otherwise, we will post all submissions on the Who Rules the Academy caucus page of the Coalition’s website.

We view this template as a living document and, accordingly, urge you to modify its questions in any way you think appropriate for your home institution. 

We hope you will embrace this task, and we are eager to assist you in any way we can.

UCLA Royce Hall on May 14, 2018   

By early spring of the annus horribilis 2025, the UCLA Senate had lost patience with a UCLA Administration that had locked it out of any meaningful role in major decisions.  

The new CFO, Stephen Agostini, appointed in 2024, wasn’t working with the Senate in established ways. A new chancellor, Julio Frenk, had arrived in January, was to be inaugurated on June 5^th, and seemed okay with increased opacity.  The Senate chair, Kathy Bawn, must have been worried that something much worse than shared governance could get locked in by the new administration. 

 

The campus budget was also bad. Although the Trump Administration wouldn’t unlawfully freeze UC federal funding until late July / early August, UCLA had already decided that its 2010s revenue formula would no longer work, had started budget clawbacks in 2019, doubled them the following year as COVID-19 settled in, and by late 2021 had developed a new Bruin Budget Model for the 2020s.  Though the BBM would reallocate expenditures towards units that were growing fastest, it wouldn’t do much of anything to increase revenues. 

 

In this context, Chair Bawn wrote a two-page letter to EVCP Hunt on March 17, 2025. I’m going to block-quote Bawn in this letter and a later one to emphasize the necessarily confrontational nature of an assertion of rights.

 

 Bawn cited the Senate’s establishment clauses and then stated:

 

Effective shared governance depends on meaningful Senate consultation at all stages of decisionmaking. For this reason, we are particularly concerned about the recent practice under your leadership  in which workgroups related to budgetary issues (in one case, on the funding of graduate education) are convened without Senate representation. Our repeated requests for Senate inclusion in campus planning have been rebuffed with promises that Senate leadership would be regularly briefed  separately: to date, no such briefings have been scheduled. More importantly, briefing of Senate leadership post hoc does not constitute meaningful Senate consultation.

 

After condemning the misuse of confidentiality to “avoid transparency,” she continued,

 

Senate exclusion from budgetary planning groups is but the latest in a series of steps away from meaningful shared governance. . . . Weak shared governance leads to an all-too-familiar pathology: scarce resources invested in projects  that don’t contribute to the academic mission. More important, it leads to mistrust. Faculty are keenly  aware of the magnitude of the threats we currently face. There is growing concern that the  administration is unwilling to defend our core mission of research and teaching.

 

Bawn’s call for renewed collaboration was accompanied by an insistence on openness: 

 

Following Senate norms of transparency, we will post this letter on the Senate website, as we have done with other recent letters. We hope that you will respond to us in writing with concrete steps you will take to restore meaningful Senate consultation, particularly in budgetary planning. We would be  pleased to post any response you provide to us on our website as well.

 

To her point, Bawn got no response from the EVC.

 

It was a very bad summer for universities.  Cuts and restrictions increased at UCLA. UC faculty got no help from senior management in restoring their frozen research funds, though a faculty group won a partial restoration in federal district court in September.  

 

Making matters worse, in June, UCLA’s CFO Agostini announced that he would remove money from departmental and center accounts.  Some UCLA Faculty pick up the story:

These “sweeps” hurt the power of internal units to backfill Trump’s gangster cuts. They seemed arbitrary—accompanied by conflict rationales—and autocratic. They created faculty anger, confusion, and deep mistrust, all of which seem to persist.

 

At the end of her term as chair, Bawn wrote Hunt again (August 28, 2025, DMS 11-13). She noted “some areas of progress” in Senate-admin relations, but added that they “were overshadowed by the magnitude of deficiencies regarding proactive consultation with the Senate on this year’s budget, and the troubling trend of excluding the Senate from critical early stages of decision-making.” 

 

In the absence of consultation with CPB, strategic decisions regarding the budget and deficit reduction were made by an unofficial, behind-the-scenes administrative workgroup from which the Senate was excluded, despite repeated requests by Senate leadership. Similarly, campus strategy with regard to the future of graduate education was developed by an administrative workgroup. Here, too the Senate was excluded despite repeated requests. A letter on this subject from the Senate Chair went unanswered. [This is the letter of March 17, 2025 excerpted above.]

 

Insisting that “Senate consultation must not be shirked,” Bawn moved on to the matter of instructional modality during emergencies. 

 

The administration does not have the authority to mandate remote instruction during emergencies. Only the Senate can make this decision. This authority was breached during the Spring of 2024, when a small (but serious) protest in one building led to a weeklong imposition of remote learning. Campus was open for all activities except instruction. This was a low moment for shared governance, and a clear instance of administrative convenience being prioritized over the academic mission. To avoid further such instances, the Senate developed a protocol for rapid decision-making regarding instructional modality during crises. The protocol was unfortunately not followed by Administration during the early weeks of January’s fire emergency.

 

Bawn goes on to make four demands, starting with, “The CFO will follow historic and systemwide norms in engaging with CPB” (Council for Planning and Budget).

 

This time, Hunt replied (September 8^th). (This letter is available in the same compendium, DMS-7-10). He wrote that the Senate letter “requires correction.”  He was offended that the Senate saw “the Administration as routinely violating protocol,” and seemed to take Bawn’s statements as claiming a Senate “expectation of unilateral authority or veto power.” He defined shared governance as “respecting distinct roles,” in which it was the Administration’s separate role not only to decide and act, but to deliberate as it chose.  This included, though Hunt didn’t say so, unilateral control over budgetary information. He also didn’t agree that the Academic Senate has primary authority over instruction: “Instructional authority resides with the Senate in normal conditions. In emergencies, the Administration must act”--apparently without consulting the Senate.

 

The incoming chair, Megan McEvoy, responded (September 17^th, in this same web file, DMS 3-6). Stressing points of agreement, she nonetheless insisted that administrative committees with a handpicked professor or two amounts to a workaround of the Academic Senate, not shared governance. She proposed additional town halls, a survey, and other modes of collective communication. 

 

However, the Senate’s core criticism, its lack of systematic budget data and justification, stayed unaddressed throughout the fall. Somewhat softer stonewalling by Frenk, Hunt, Agostini, et al. led directly to a “Resolution on Financial Transparency and the Restoration of Shared Governance in Budget Planning.” It is hardcore.  It passed the Legislative Assembly by a vote of 115-1, or 99.13%).  

 

The Resolution’s 7^th Whereas clause states, “this absence of transparency and consultation undermines financial accountability, shifts burdens to Senate faculty to seek extramural funds to address deficits, and weakens the University’s ability to uphold its core academic missions of teaching, research, and service.”  

 

The recitals of fact lead to 5 separate resolutions regarding changed policy on budgetary data. The 5^thresolution itemizing 9 specific categories of data the Senate requires (e.g. “past and anticipated changes in campus debt service obligations).  

 

This is the single best data demand list that I have ever seen from an Academic Senate.  You can marvel at it in the Legislative Assembly’s January 2026 compilation on budget consultation (DMS 14-16).

 

After transmittal to Chancellor Frenk and EVCP Hunt, they responded with the claim that what, we’ve been talking with you this whole time.  And amazingly, they said, to paraphrase, that you already have all that stuff you’ve wanted—anyway the first 7 of the 9 categories of data. (December 18, 2025, DMS-9-11).

 

This bought them a rebuttal. On January 20, 2026, Senate Chair McEvoy sent, “Corrections of Fact on Your 12/18/2025 Letter on the Legislative Assembly Budget Planning Resolution.” She broke their letter down into five separate screenshots and logged the gap between their claims and actual instances of administrative consultation: “October 13, 2025: CFO Agostini presented three slides at the CPB meeting, which were neither shared in advance nor after the meeting [itemization omitted]  . . .  October 27, 2025: CFO Agostini presented five slides at the CPB meeting, which were neither shared in advance nor after the meeting . . . “  

 

McEvoy wrapped up: “Again, the intention of this corrections of fact letter is to promote meaningful shared governance and transparent communication,” which she showed had not occurred. 

 

Then, time sped up.  On January 29^th, CPB issued a labor-intensive report on the UCLA budget. It offered some important findings that I’ll summarize below, and was also at pains to emphasize that the deliberate incompleteness of the data provided by the Administration had blocked a conclusive Senate analysis. Reporter Natalia Mochernak covered it in the UCLA Daily Bruin on February 6^th.

 

One week later, on February 13^th, Mochernak broke a huge story about alleged systemic budget incompetence at UCLA, whose source was none other than CFO Agostini.  In “Financial mismanagement contributed to $425 million annual deficit, UCLA CFO says,” Agostini made some full-metal accusations.

 

He claimed that “the unaudited annual financial reports the university has posted on its website since 2002 are erroneous.” He claimed, “I spent a long time in the federal government … I have rarely seen the kind of financial management flaws and failures that I see here when I got here.”  He advertized that he "would prefer not to advertise how badly the place has been managed financially.” He asserted that the new Ascend Finance Transformation Project isn’t the solution to UCLA mismanagement but a symptom of it.  

 

Having burned his bridges with his senior management colleagues, Agostini went on to blame the deficit on academics: “There has been an observation made that the reason we have this problem is that their growth has been solely in administrative units,” Agostini said. “That’s not correct. It really has been in schools.” 

 

Finally, he claimed that the financial situation is dire.  “[H]e is currently looking at how long UCLA can continue to function and meet payroll without developing a cash reserves problem, as the school is currently spending money it does not have.”

 

This was quite a performance.  I have no idea what Agostini thought he was doing. I don’t know any UCLA faculty who think he’s a whistle-blower: The Senate experienced him as a player of budget shell games and not as an honest broker or truth-teller.  Maybe he thought he could regain lost stature with the campus by taking the Trump stance, “only I can fix it."  Having described the Administration as incompetent and the faculty as a money pit, whom did he think he was rallying to his side?  The strategy makes no sense, and casts everything he said into question.  (As far as I know, his claims haven't been refuted or challenged either.)

 

Agostini was soon pushed out of his job: Frenk announced his departure on February 17^th, having found an interim replacement. Management took the opportunity to issue a blanket denial of the $425 million deficit Agostini alleged.  Having apparently learned little from the Senate’s many letters, they didn’t state what the deficit actually is. 

 

Maybe Agostini was doing damage control in relation to the January 29^th Senate Interim Report (IR) that I mentioned, which cast him in the unflattering role of data Withholder-in-Chief.

 

CPB’s “Analysis of UCLA Campus Structural Deficit (FY24–FY27)” describes its arduous procedure as dictated by having received very incomplete data, I assume from Agostini, and, amazingly, only in the form of PowerPoint slides.

 

Data were manually transcribed from tables embedded in PowerPoint presentations (no machine readable files provided, despite the existence of database systems). Coverage is incomplete, with notable absences in high-impact areas (DGSOM, OCCS, Athletics, Chancellor’s units). Proxies and deductive analysis were required. In the future, machine-readable data, explicit reconciliation methodology, and public dashboards are expected for effective consultation on budgetary matters. (3)

 

Admin made CPB’s process difficult to the point that they could reasonably hope the Council would give up. But they did not.

 

The following passage is the kind that makes normal brains desperately seek immediate distraction. Do read it anyway: it refers to one of today’s major mechanisms for throttling university policy.

 

The precise relationships among unit-level budgets for General Funds (19900), Core Funds, and Other Funds with respect to the campus-wide structural deficit in General Funds remain unclear. This includes the potential use of General Funds to backfill negatives in Core Funds or Other Funds. Significant recurring deficits in the Other Funds category for operational units such as IT and Facilities (and likely Athletics, though no data were provided for that unit) raise concerns about how these shortfalls are covered. Similarly, contributions from other revenue sources such as investment returns . . .  remain unclear in their relationship to the structural deficit and require administrative clarification. (4)

 

In an admin context, this counts as savage condemnation of data quality.  

 

Yet, in my experience, top university managers generally do try to create exactly the structural data gap with which UCLA’s Senate contends.   Officials may provide top-level summary data with functional categories like “Instruction,” “Research,” “Student Affairs,” “Administrative Support,” and big summary numbers to match. Then, they either provide no unit data (schools, divisions, departments, centers), or they provide some unit data with categories that cannot be matched to top-level data.  What goes missing are data about comparative surplus vs loss in specific units or activities.  

 

This leads to the situation that CPB criticizes: the typical faculty committee can’t see the surpluses and losses created by particularly units that end up creating an overall budget deficit or surplus.  

 

Who runs deficits? Whose surpluses cover them?  These are the central policy questions to which deliberate data gaps prevent faculty from contributing.

 

To repeat, the key academic questions are, where are the losses coming from? And secondly, can the units who cause the losses / costs cover them, rather than making other units who don’t cause them cover them instead? 

 

CPB’s key finding is momentous. 

 

Preliminary analysis strongly indicates that the reported structural deficits (−$280 million FY25, −$274 million FY26 prior to December 2025 additions) are driven predominantly by recent central commitments (yet to be fully mapped), unchecked operational overhead escalation, accumulating subsidies to cover Athletics deficits, and systemwide assessments—not core academic instructional and research activities of existing units. Available academic unit data reveal significant fiscal restraint, with near balance achieved through efficiencies and prior reserves. In contrast, central operational and non-academic areas exhibit persistent and escalating shortfalls. (emphasis added, 2)

 

So, here’s a summary. UCLA was starting to have a deficit in 2018-19, and was already projecting the current large ones.  The 2010s model was breaking by that point, even at UC’s wealthiest campus, but senior UC officials wouldn't talk about it. Now, UCLA's current-year deficit (FY26) was $274 million by December. This means that a full-year deficit of $425 million, Agostini’s estimate, is possible.  Meanwhile, in this as in preceding years, the rule for academic units has been austerity and “near balances” in its accounts. The “solution” to a chronic deficit has been for the academic core to subsidize the non-core, academic austerity supporting relative prosperity in the corporate operation.  And the faculty are to stay away from the issue.

 

On February 19^th, the administration released  the“2025-26 UCLA Budget Book.” Its summary data is stuck in 2023-24. And the data gap CPB criticized is still here—units are presented in isolation, with no links between their summary budgets and the University as a whole.

 

I'll end by emphasizing that long-term academic austerity hits academic quality. You’d think this would be obvious--and urgent to fix as a thousand AI vendors claim to be selling models that can replace teaching. But in the Office of the President and other managerial domains, this is ignored or denied.  In mostly unread administrative papers like the Bruin Budget Model Overview, one can sometimes find examples. 

 

Life Sciences headcount enrollments . . . grew by 49 percent between 2009-10 and 2019-20, but ladder faculty headcounts grew by only 14 percent in the same time period. As a result, the student-to-faculty ratio in Life Sciences has deteriorated from 54.9-to-1 to 71.5-to-1 (a 30 percent increase). Similarly, enrollments in Physical Sciences grew by 43 percent between 2009-10 and 2019-20, while ladder faculty headcounts only grew by 6 percent. For Engineering and Applied Science, enrollments grew by 26 percent and ladder faculty grew by 12 percent. (16)

 

A 71.5-to-1 student-faculty ratio all but eliminates personal feedback and individual responses for the concerned undergraduates. Students absolutely notice this: here's one example from a UC Berkeley undergrad in 2014.  Getting AI help for homework is rational under such conditions.  And yet that’s the on-the-ground reality created by continuous underbudgeting which senior managers accept and conceal. 

 

The overcrowding crisis in key departments on all UC campuses is screened by official UC data that calculates the aggregate ratio as 21.9-to-1, which is already 3 to 4 times more students per professor than at a gold-standard private university.  By these metrics, a UCLA bio major may be competing for a professor’s attention with 12 times more peers than students attending that major private research university. And yet this disservice to core education is off limits for the senior officials who speak for the university--with the educational results that UC faculty know intimately.

 

The BBM Overview treats these ratios as an allocation problem. In fact they are an underfunding problem, one made worse by senior managers’ power to make academics pay for their own continued expansion while not letting them see this overall picture. 

 

The threats to academic quality have no chance of being fixed over any length of time without the full budget data of the kind UCLA’s Senate is demanding. The good news is that the UCLA Senate, Faculty Association, and student press have cracked open the deficit issue. All encouragement for their persistence--and for academic senates to follow suit.