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| UCLA Royce Hall on May 14, 2018 |
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 5th, 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 8th). (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 17th, 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 7th 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 5thresolution 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 29th, 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 6th.
One week later, on February 13th, 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 17th, 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 29th 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 19th, 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.
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