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| Paris on September 1, 2016 |
In early August 2025, the Trump administration extended its shakedown of higher education, which had previously focused on elite private universities such as Harvard and Columbia, to target the University of California (UC), the nation’s largest and most prestigious public university system. Beginning with UCLA, the administration froze hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research funding and demanded a $1 billion ransom along with other changes, including an end to gender-affirming care. In response, the UC has launched a glitzy PR campaign enlisting alumni (including UCLA grad and Lakers legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) to make the case for the university while urging Californians to “Stand Up for the UC.”
Trump’s cynical attacks on higher education for supposed antisemitism are of course nothing more than a thinly-veiled authoritarianism that builds on a decades-long campaign on the part of the political right to defund and neutralize American colleges and universities. But given its current leadership and actions, it is fair to ask, why should we “stand up for the UC”?
I raise this question somewhat reluctantly as not only as an alum (UC Berkeley ‘94) and the child of UC staff members, but also as founding faculty at UC Merced (2005). In my twenty years as UC faculty, I have devoted substantial time to university service, including multiple terms on the systemwide Academic Council, chairing numerous local and systemwide committees, and receiving the Midcareer Leadership Award for my contributions to the Academic Senate.
During this time, I have frequently and often strenuously disagreed with Regents, university administrators, and even my own fellow Senate members. Prior to this year, however, I chose to keep those disputes behind closed doors rather than splashing them across the pages of newspapers. Recent heightened threats to the UC, however, have highlighted the inadequacy and bankruptcy of university leadership at both the administrative and faculty level. The UC may be worth saving, but not under a failed leadership that is as much to blame as Trump for the situation in which we now find ourselves.
The UC leadership that is now pleading for help in standing up against the authoritarianism of the Trump regime spent the previous year and a half violently cracking down on anti-genocide protesters while appeasing the same Zionist zealots whose warped logic has become the basis of the current assault on higher education in California and nationwide. When UC students joined people of conscience around the world in setting up encampments to stand up for Palestinian life in the midst of a U.S.-backed Israeli genocide, UC leaders failed to heed the call and instead on multiple occasions, including at UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, and UC San Deigo, dispatched the police to violently crush student protest. Hundreds of students along with faculty, staff, and community members were arrested, with some receiving life-altering injuries in the process, all at the cost of more than $29 million to California taxpayers. This was accompanied by suspensions, firings, and other discipline as well as a new draconian set of restrictions on faculty and student expressive activities.
In choosing to crush those who would stand up for Palestine, UC leaders were explicitly adopting the position of the same Zionist activists whose cynical claims of antisemitism are now being employed by the Trump administration in extorting American universities, including the UC. In a meeting of the UC Academic Council in July 2024 at which I was present, then-UC president Michael Drake compared the student encampments for Palestine to George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door to protest against integration at the University of Mississippi in 1962. This language directly mirrored an email sent to Drake by the Jewish Faculty Resilience Group (JFRG), a UCLA Zionist organization that privately lobbied the UC Regents to adopt a speech code that equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
A little more than a week before the Trump administration made its ransom demand on UCLA, the UC declined to fight a patently absurd lawsuit, Frankel v. UCLA, that contended that an encampment that prominently included many anti-Zionist Jews and held Shabbat services was somehow a “Jew Exclusion Zone.” Instead, the UC opted to pay out $2.33 million to Zionist groups that included a prominent pro-Israel organization, the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), headed by a former UC president, Mark G. Yudof. Doing so has surely helped provide ammunition for the Trump administration’s assault on higher education.
In May, new UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk, rather than defending UC students, faculty, and staff who stood up against genocide, lamented that “we have an antisemitism problem in universities. Denying it would be dishonest. . . . What we are telling the Department of Justice and others is yes, we acknowledge, and we are fixing the problem.” Among Frenk’s signature initiatives has been to implement the recommendations of a task force whose remit includes combatting “Anti-Israel Bias.” Frenk and other UC leaders have willingly done the work of the right-wing Heritage Foundation and Project Esther in using policing, policy changes, and other forms of intimidation to break the movement of students, faculty, and staff for Palestine.
Though they now feign surprise and outrage, it was UC leaders who opened the door to the spurious charges of antisemitism that are now being weaponized by the Trump administration against the system. The most obvious culprits are the UC president and chancellors who have sought to crush internal dissent while utterly failing to stand up to Trump.
Even as they cracked down on pro-Palestine protesters, UC leadership was quietly making overtures to the Trump administration. At an emergency meeting of the systemwide Academic Council in response to the administration’s attacks on universities on March 17 of this year, then-President Drake embraced a strategy of appeasement, telling faculty that the UC needed to "find things that we can do to indicate to them [Trump] that we are hearing their message.” Arguing that the UC should not be the “tallest nail” and should instead concede some things to the Trump Administration, he revealed that the university would be outlawing the use of diversity statements in faculty hiring (a change announced publicly later that same week).
This strategy was not only cowardly and ethically bankrupt, but also, it predictably failed to appease an administration that has only been emboldened by the concessions made by university leaders.
The failed strategy of appeasement that began under Drake has now been inherited by the new UC president, James Milliken. While only on the job for less than a month, Milliken’s track record is not encouraging. In his previous position as chancellor of the University of Texas system, he oversaw the dismantling of 21 DEI offices and the termination of over 300 DEI positions and almost 700 programs or contracts at the behest of the Texas legislature and tarred pro-Palestine protestors by claiming that “certainly elements of it [were]. . . fairly anti-Jewish and antisemitic.” Prior to that, as Chancellor of the City University of New York (CUNY) system, he publicly denounced a call by graduate students to divest from Israel as part of the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
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But while the UC president and chancellors have been the public face of the university’s repression of student protest and capitulation to Trump and Zionist extremists, the real power behind these moves is the Board of Regents. Composed of un-elected political appointees who serve 12-year, renewable terms with little or no accountability, the Regents, most of whom have no experience with higher education, set the actual policy of the university.
Even prior to Trump, the Regents demonstrated their political and moral cowardice by refusing to move forward with a plan to offer employment to undocumented students (Opportunity for All), in part because of pressure from the Biden administration. It was under direct orders from the Regents that Drake announced the preemptive capitulation to Trump’s assault on DEI in March 2025 (though Drake’s willing implementation of this order marks him as a craven opportunist).
It was also the Regents who helped direct the crackdown on the UC encampments and then initiated a sweeping series of policy changes designed to curb student protest, restrict faculty speech, and discipline those who dared to speak out. Rather than reconsidering their actions in the wake of crushing the encampments, the Regents in September 2024 approved the purchase of military-grade equipment, including grenade launchers, drones, and AR-15 assault rifles to be used by campus police.
While the Regents as a whole are culpable for their gross mismanagement of the University and the concessions to Trump and Zionist activists that facilitated the current set of demands, a handful of Regents have played a particularly egregious role in this respect.
Regent Jay Sures, whose “qualifications” for the job include being vice chairman of the United Talent Agency (UTA) and representing CNN anchor Don Lemon, has spent the last two years on a crusade to impose Zionist orthodoxy on the university. When a group of UC ethnic studies faculty wrote UC leadership to decry their lack of respect for Palestinian lives in October 2023, Sures responded directly on regental letterhead and took to the pages of the Los Angeles Times, attacking these faculty as “surrogates and supporters for Hamas’ destructive actions.”
Sures subsequently pushed for the adoption of restrictions of the ability of academic departments to make public statements and in a bizarre appearance at the January 2025 Regents meeting denounced faculty governance, insisted on the need for harsh discipline–with “everything on the table”--all while prominently displaying a rifle cartridge on his desk.
When protestors gathered outside his multi-million dollar Brentwood home in February 2025 to draw attention to Sures’ role in repressing students and faculty and defending genocide, he responded by singling out a student for a restraining order, claiming that he was the ringleader of an antisemitic mob. Sures’ case was so flimsy that not only did a judge deny the restraining order, she ordered Sures to pay over $150,000 in legal fees under California’s Anti-SLAPP law.
Sures is far from the only Zionist zealot on the Regents (Richard Leib and former Regent John A. Pérez have also falsely smeared student protesters for Palestine as antisemites), but the fact that the board continues to tolerate this unqualified, thin-skinned bully is an indictment of the entire body and its complicity in repression at home and genocide in Palestine.
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While Regents and administrators are the most obvious culprits for the situation that the UC finds itself in now, faculty, and particularly the Academic Senate, also bear a share of responsibility. The systemwide Academic Council and its leadership have failed to issue a single statement decrying genocide and scholasticide in Gaza where not one university remains standing. While the Council raised some procedural questions about the ways in which the UC administration handled the encampments in August 2024, in the past academic year it has not only remained silent on genocide, but also failed utterly to speak up in defense of students, faculty, and staff who are still facing disciplinary sanctions as a result of standing up for Palestinian life.
Unsurprisingly, a faculty body unwilling to confront the moral crime of genocide, one in which the UC itself is deeply complicit, has also proved entirely inadequate to meeting the challenge posed by the Trump administration. After leaking President Drake’s plans to preemptively capitulate to Trump in March 2025, I voluntarily resigned my position on the Academic Council in order to not present a distraction at a time when united leadership was desperately needed.
Instead of standing up to the UC president, the Regents, and the Trump administration, however, the Council has issued an anodyne statement on “The Defense of the University” that fails to call out by name any of the challenges – whether they be authoritarianism or Zionism – that actually threaten the UC and other universities.
Less than two weeks after issuing a statement pleading, “Let the future historical record show that we rose to the challenge of defending the University of California, and we did so in ways that did not betray its core values,” the Academic Senate quietly did the Trump administration’s dirty work by voting down an ethnic studies admission requirement that had been initially approved in 2021. At a time when the lives and livelihoods of our students are under threat and faculty governance is under attack from both Washington and the Regents, the UC Academic Council and its leadership has been unable to even muster the basic courage to speak plainly about the threats we face, much less offer tangible protections for students, faculty, and staff who have been targeted for their principled stand against genocide.
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How, then, should the people of California respond to pleas to “stand up” for a university system that has repeatedly demonstrated moral and political cowardice in a time of genocide and rising fascism?
The cynical attacks from Trump and the Right are in some ways a testament to the fact that, for all their myriad flaws, colleges and universities offer not just an education in skills or job-training, but also the potential of liberatory spaces where we can come together to think, learn, work, and study together to build a better world. The encampments and people’s universities that spring up across the nation in spring 2024 are a beautiful testament to what higher education could be like at its best. At the current moment, however, standing up for or “saving” U.S. universities, including the UC, all too often means protecting and empowering the same ethically bankrupt petty autocrats and cynical careerists, at both the administrative and faculty level, who helped bring this crisis upon us in the first place.
So yes, Californians, and Americans more broadly, should “stand up” to defend higher education, but not a system that is led by those who bear significant responsibility for the current crisis.
What does this mean in practice?
First, Californians should embrace a vision of university governance that reflects the needs of the community, not the dictates of autocratic presidents and chancellors or an unelected Board of Regents composed of second-rate Hollywood talent agents, Sacramento lobbyists, real estate developers, and wealthy socialites. The power of the Regents is enshrined in the California constitution, but could be modified by a simple majority vote in a ballot referendum in order to replace them with a more representative body. Similar action could be taken to ensure that California community colleges (CCC) and state university system (CSU) are governed by qualified leaders with ties to the community rather than unelected trustees or politically-compromised state legislators.
Nor should faculty be let off the hook. All too often faculty, even those with nominally “progressive” credentials, are happy to pontificate on injustices and inequities over which they have no direct control while treating students, staff, and junior colleagues at their own university as if they were lesser beings. A university worth saving would include a fundamental shift in faculty governance that flattens the artificial hierarchy that gives us our titles and brings together faculty, students, and workers in a truly shared educational endeavor.
This would include forming productive partnerships with faculty, staff, and student worker unions which have been repeatedly subject to unfair labor practices and other attacks by the UC administration. In turn, the leadership of these unions must heed the voices of their rank-and-file members calling for justice in Palestine and an end to militarized policing on our campuses. No organization or institution – faculty, student, staff, or administrative – willing to quietly abide a genocide in order to protect its own interests should have a place in governing the University of California.
A UC worth saving would also need to fundamentally reconsider its relationship to the world in which it is embedded. There are those who long for a return to a supposed “golden age” of higher education in the 1950s and 1960s in which universities were flush with funding and stood at the pinnacle of American society while offering unprecedented class mobility. We need to acknowledge, however, that this “golden age” was only made possible by a corrupt bargain that rendered the American university the handmaiden of a militarized U.S. Cold War empire.
The dependence on federal funds that has allowed the Trump administration to effectively blackmail large American research universities can be directly traced to the embrace of a largess that was driven by Cold War military and diplomatic priorities. It is not a coincidence that the gradual defunding of American higher education directly overlapped with both the waning of the Cold War and the entry into colleges and universities of women and people of color who had largely been shut out of the “golden age.”
This history can be overcome and federal dollars can be converted for good purposes. But that would require the university to actively engage in making ethical choices rather than blindly accepting federal, corporate, or donor dollars that are often linked to the very forces that are funding a genocide in Palestine, undermining what is left of our democracy, and destroying our planet.
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To that end, a UC worth saving must divest from militarization, repression, and genocide both at home and in the larger world. Practically speaking, this would include at least three important steps. First, the UC must financially divest from both genocide in Palestine and the larger military industrial complex. An analysis by a group of researchers at UCLA identified “$18.8 billion of UC assets in public equity, private equity, and private credit that should be targeted for divestment based on their links to war, settler-colonialism, apartheid, and genocide.” And while the UC now cynically celebrates its role in divestment from apartheid South Africa, Regents and chancellors have repeatedly refused to even consider similar steps in the midst of an ongoing genocide in Palestine. There is absolutely no reason why any institution of higher education should be investing billions of dollars in companies that profit from death and destruction around the world.
In addition to financial divestment, the UC must cut ties with federal projects that directly threaten the health, safety, and well-being of both Californians and the human race. Foremost among those ties is UC’s longstanding relationship with the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. In a video since made private, the UC responded in part to the Trump administration’s threats by highlighting its contributions to “national security” through its role in helping to manage two labs, Los Alamos National Laboratories (through a partnership with Triad National Security, LLC) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (though Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC). We can debate whether the threat posed by a potential Nazi atomic bomb justified the pivotal role played by the UC in the creation of nuclear weapons as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II. In 2025, however, at a time when the United States possesses 3,748 nuclear warheads, there is no plausible justification for an institution of higher education to be directly involved in the creation of weapons that make nobody safer or more secure and threaten the very existence of life on this planet.
Fittingly, Regent Sures personally embodies all three of the major areas from which the UC must divest if it is to be an institution worth saving. Not only is he inexplicably the chair of the board of Triad National Security (yes, a Hollywood talent agent is in charge of a nuclear lab), Sures is also on the board of the LA Police Department Foundation (which raises money for the LAPD) and his firm, UTA, represents the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an anti-Palestinian hate group that has helped to lead the campaign against American universities using manipulated claims of antisemitism.
In addition to divestment from nuclear weapons and the military industrial complex, the UC must divest from harmful and militarized policing on its own campuses and in the community and cut ties to Zionist organizations, institutions, and donors that have supported genocide in Palestine while lobbying for punitive measures against UC students, faculty, and staff. In the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020, the Cops off Campus coalition of students, faculty, and staff demanded an end to repressive policing at the UC. Instead, the UC has increased its policing budget from approximately $161 million dollars in 2020-2021 to $202 million in 2024-2025 while purchasing military grade hardware and working with local law enforcement to arrest and brutalize anti-genocide protesters across the system.
In the interests of humanity as well as its own students, faculty, and staff, the UC must also divest from the violent, supremacist ideology of Zionism and cut its institutional connections to groups such as the ADL, AEN, and Hillel as well as donors such as the Diller Foundation, the Koret Foundation, and Resnick Foundation. Even before the current genocide in Palestine, these Zionist organizations and donors offered material and ideological support to Israeli apartheid while helping to encourage attacks on UC students, faculty, and staff through their financing of extremist groups like Canary Mission and the Israel on Campus Coalition. At the current moment, as the world’s watches a live-streamed Israeli genocide and mass famine in Palestine and Zionist groups and donors are leading an attack on the very foundations of the American university system, the UC must divest from Zionism for both moral and practical reasons.
Some will undoubtedly dismiss this vision of the university outlined above as the pipedream of a crackpot professor. Perhaps. But it is less of a pipe dream than the notion that universities can – or should be allowed to – continue business as usual in the midst of genocide, fascism, and the accelerating destruction of our planet.
I am sympathetic to my abolitionist university colleagues who believe that the UC – and indeed most forms of institutionalized higher education – are beyond saving. But whether we fight to reclaim the university or abandon it to build a new structure, our fundamental task in this moment remains the same. If any form of higher education, including those not tethered to traditional university structures, is worth fighting for, now is the time to organize, build power, and actively confront the forces of militarism, imperialism, and Zionism so that we can make something better together.
Nothing about this will be easy, but as we often tell our students, it is the challenging things that are most worth pursuing. Let’s stand up together for an educational institution that represents the interests of the people of California and the interests of humanity rather than oligarchs, political cronies, and Zionists.
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