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.

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. 

UC Berkeley on May 29, 2024   

I’m opposed to the University of California’s current responses to the Trump Administration’s multiple shakedowns.  I want to explain why, and suggest an alternative, by starting with Charlie Kirk, shot dead on September 10^th on a public college campus.

 

Kirk’s killing deprives Trump’s movement of its best youth storyteller. Kirk told stories about current issues like migration, the Great Replacement of white people, and universities eating the brains of the people. Kirk worked, like Steve Bannon, in cultural narrative as a power that drives politics and state action downstream. In 2024 he ran his You’re Being Brainwashed Tour through the country’s campuses including Cas Mudde’s, who noted the escalation from his 2018 “exposing lies and leftist propaganda” tour. The Evil University was a central villain in Kirk’s script, not a bit player, and Kirk sought to stigmatize, censor, suppress, discredit, and revile it. He succeeded, as Jamelle Bouie nicely explains. 

 

Paris on September 1, 2016    

By Sean L. Malloy, Professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), University of California, Merced

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.”  

 

No Regrets Sunday Morning, Victoria Line   

I’ve often broached this topic, most recently in relation to the new UC Irvine plan for hyper-austerity (Liner Note 32; budget analysis in 31 and 33).   This question of professionals’ managerial authority is raised again by some faculty responses to the Columbia and Brown University deals with the Trump Administration, and to the new Trump attack on UCLA. 

 

One professor has aptly summarized the current situation as “a strange moment between critique and advocacy [in which] the two are inseparable.”  Faculty are still critiquing the responses of senior managers as lacking cooperation across the sector—Harvard is off by itself in the Ivy League in suing rather than signing with the Trump Administration. Some, like the members of the UCLA Faculty Association, continue to expose the futility of anticipatory obedience.  

Outside Lafayette, La. on October 27, 2018

By Leslie Bary, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

I just wrote a mini-grant for $858, to cover flight and hotel for a speaker. To justify the choice of speaker and the validity of event, I composed a few hundred words, to explain to an audience out of field and possibly outside of academia why one invites speakers from other institutions to share their expertise. My speaker is a full professor and department chair at a major research institution. They are a noted scholar in our field of Latin American Studies. Their appropriateness as a speaker is not in the slightest doubt. 

In the past, the $858 would have come out of a departmental speaker budget. I would not have to spend the afternoon explaining in words of one syllable why the event was being held and who the person was, nor creating documentation to prove I really had looked up and compared flight costs. But that was how I spent a lot of time today that would otherwise have been dedicated to research and teaching. 

I have been a professor for many years and before that, I was a graduate student with a teaching role. I have written many small internal grants. Initially, it was only one every couple of years, for special activities like summer research travel. Now almost every routine activity requires a mini-grant. The five-year vita I recently prepared listed ten in a category I now call “Selected Internal Funding.” A complete list would have crowded the document, since as departmental budgets shrink, funding requests for everyday operations are needed more and more often.

I have never been turned down for a funding request. Never. I suspect the reason is that the institution funds all legitimate proposals. I repeat, these grants are for amounts that in the past department chairs or deans would have controlled and would have simply authorized. They would do this not out of corruption or favoritism, but because they were familiar with the field and could exercise good judgment about it.

When I raise this issue, some faculty say they have given up writing mini-grants and only apply for major external grants. I am also a good writer of these, but major grants, at least in my field, do not fund everyday operations. And by major grants I mean grants from national research organizations like the NEH or ACLS. I do not mean fundraising. I also lobby civic organizations to support campus projects, but such fundraising covers different kinds of activities than do research grants to the Guggenheim Foundation. 

The mini-grants address needs not covered by other mechanisms. That is why I continue to apply. I do have some better paid and wealthier colleagues who dispense with the mini-grants and support university activities with personal funds, but they are few. Others take consulting gigs to substitute for the mini-grants, pointing out that if it takes five hours to write and then administer a mini-grant for $750, and they can raise $750 in three hours’ consulting, they’ll do the consulting. 

My research office suggests that applying for mini-grants helps us to reflect and articulate our research programs to ourselves. The fact is it doesn’t. Writing a book proposal or a major external grant can do that, just as updating and reformatting a vita can help rethink a career trajectory. But explaining basic things like why we go to conferences or, as I did for one mini-grant, why professors read books, does not help me clarify my ideas. At the outside, it might help explain what I am doing to an uninformed auditor. But that kind of explanation to such a person makes a negative contribution to my scholarly life.

The formulae for the mini-grants typically imitate those of major grants in the sciences, as does the idea that everything done should be grant funded. But in these fields, people spend as much as half of their work time applying for the funds they need to do their jobs. Rather than address that impractical situation, universities now replicate it at every level. The exercise seems particularly absurd when we are asked by our university to defend our job positions, or to explain that conducting research is part of our contract with them, and we are complying. 

But what is happening here? Every time there is a new, allegedly competitive, centralized internal funding opportunity, it is presented as new funding intended to help us, yet simultaneously, money disappears from regular departmental budgets and the regular library budget. A central committee reviews all the proposals, and individual units across campus lose autonomy. The university says this reduces “siloing.” In some cases it can be fairer since there are always people involved who do not know the applicants. But overall, it seems to be about a reduction in shared governance.

That is to say that every mini-grant application is a symptom of a department without a budget and, in the case of many of mine, a library without materials. When departments do not have budgets for research and libraries do not have them for materials, and faculty instead apply for funding to a mysterious committee in Academic Affairs, that committee has taken over functions that multiple department chairs, librarians, and others would have shared in the past. This is a concentration of power in a rather faceless group. Even if there were a Senate committee administering such things, the atmosphere would be less corporate. 

I note further that Human Resources nowadays is not a department of my university, but a service we have outsourced to a corporate “partner.” People who have increasing power over us are not colleagues or university employees. I wonder when the same will happen to the committee that judges the mini-grants.

What should be happening instead? Universities should restore department budgets for routine scholarly activities that are central to university education, central for undergraduate students as much as for everyone else. This would increase the use of decentralized academic expertise, lodged in departments, which would in turn increase the efficiency of the overall system. And it would reduce the excessive administrative labor of the many, many scholars in my position.

University of Louisiana, Lafayette on October 25, 2018

November 20, 2015, Lincoln Cathedral  

 

Is AI Plateauing? 

“If this were just a few hedged anonymous reports about “less improvement,” I honestly wouldn’t give it too much credence. But traditional funders and boosters like Marc Andreessen are also saying the models are reaching a “ceiling,” and now one of the great proponents of the scaling hypothesis (the idea that AI capabilities scale with how big they are and the amount of data they’re fed) is agreeing. Ilya Sutskever was always the quiet scientific brains behind OpenAI, not Sam Altman, so what he recently told Reuters should be given significant weight:

‘Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of AI labs Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and OpenAI, told Reuters recently that results from scaling up pre-training—the phase of training an AI model that uses a vast amount of unlabeled data to understand language patterns and structures—have plateaued.’

“[Though it’s bad that AI cost increases exponentially], I think people focusing on price or the domain-specificity of improvements are missing the even bigger picture about this new supposed scaling law. For what I’m noticing is that the field of AI research appears to be reverting to what the mostly-stuck AI of the 70s, 80s, and 90s relied on: search.

 

“I don’t mean searching the web, rather, I mean examples like when this summer Google DeepMind released their state-of-the-art math AI able to handle mathematical Olympiad problems. It's a hybrid, very different than a leading generalist LLM. How does it work? It just considers a huge number of possibilities.

‘When presented with a problem, AlphaProof generates solution candidates and then proves or disproves them by searching over possible proof steps…. The training loop was also applied during the contest, reinforcing proofs of self-generated variations of the contest problems until a full solution could be found.’

“This sort of move makes sense, because search was the main advantage for AIs against humans for a very long time . . .”

 

“Continued improvements are going to happen, but if the post-GPT-4 gains in AI came mainly from adding first better prompts (chain-of-thought prompting) and now more recently the addition of search to the process (either over many potential outputs or over the model’s parameters itself) this is different than actually constructing baseline-smarter artificial neural networks. It indicates to me a return to the 70s, 80s, and 90s in AI.”

 

SOURCE: Eric Hoel, The Intrinsic Perspective

 

EPISTEMIC COLLAPSE

 

"I do think there is an information story to be told here, but I also think, and I promise I'll address it, but I also think that people who vote for Trump, many of them often understand themselves to be voting for his spirit and not for specifics, right? And they are voting for the spirit of resentment, they are voting for the spirit of sort of anti-establishment thinking, they are voting for the spirit of having somebody punish their enemies, right? And that spirit, that vibe of Trumpist dominance, gratification and like fun resentment, right?

 

“That is an emotional register that can contain a ton of contradictions, right? So you can be pro-abortion rights, at least in your state, and be pro-Trump at the same time, because it is perfectly possible to favor abortion access for you and also fucking hate a lot of other people and want to see them punished, right? And that is, I think, a continuous theme you see in Trump supporters.

 

“If you ask them about Trump policies, often they will say, well, I don't support that, but they do support the animating feature behind those policies, the sort of spirit of sadistic, jeering, fuck you. That's what they really like, they enjoy the anger. But I do also think, to your point, that there's an information ecosystem problem, right?

 

“Like this information ecosystem is dog shit. It is impossible to get reliable information. The media has lost its credibility, but it's also just lost its monopoly on the audiences.

 

“People don't trust the most credible sources to be telling them the truth, but they're also not really listening to those sources anymore. So they're listening to a lot of fucking --d“

 

“Podcasts.”

 

“A lot of goddamn podcasters”

 

“Fuck them. I hate those guys.”

 

“They're listening to podcasters. They're watching influencers who do front-facing videos on TikTok and Instagram reels. They're getting a lot of information sort of ambiently from what they see posted by their connections or what their friends who saw something posted online say to them over burgers.

 

There's this ambient disinformation and a corrosion of the information environment and the reliability of information that has led to, I think, a really profound epistemic collapse that is completely impervious to the style of politics that involves facts and policy mattering.”

 

SOURCE: Moira In Bed With The Right Podcast: Episode 42 Nov 19, 2024

 

 SOURCE: KAL, The Economist, November 14, 2024

UNIVERSITIES DOING TRUMP’S WORK FOR HIM

 

“The contradiction between liberalism’s substantive ends and its formal means is not a new problem. One could argue—I would—that virtually every historical moment of substantive liberal triumph has been made possible by social movements that imposed themselves from below, often over the protest of liberal policymakers and thinkers, registering their objection to the means despite their abstract support for the ends. Universal adult suffrage, the welfare state, equal protection under law—such is the story of each of these.

 

“In our time, there are entrenched institutional liberal forces, not only in formal politics but in the universities, the press, the legal system, the nonprofit sector, and even the corporate world, that intone the threat Trumpism poses to democracy and the rule of law, yet work every day to defeat their own internal left-wing challengers: student protests, labor struggles, “woke excesses.” When they raid encampments (student or unhoused) or bust unions, they do Trump’s work for him, remaking Americans in authoritarian ways. The phenomenon that Trump represents can only be defeated when liberal institutionalists cease trying to quash the insurgent left in the name of protecting democracy, and instead look to it as an ally and a source of strength. This is not because the ideas of the left already represent a suppressed silent majority—a fantastical, self-flattering delusion—but because it is only the left that has a coherent vision to offer against the ideas of the right.”

 

SOURCE: Gabriel Winant, Dissent (November 7, 2024)

 

 

IT’S THE RACE AND CLASS COMBINATION, STUPID

 

"There are countless polls that show Americans want things that are anathema to the Republican Party and especially to Trump’s agenda. At least 65 percent of Americans believe that the federal government has a “responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care.” More than 50 percent insist that “government aid to the poor does more good than harm.” Nearly 80 percent believe that Social Security benefits should not be reduced in any way. Polling by Pew also shows that most Americans believe that the government should do more to help “the needy even if it means going deeper into debt.” Nearly 70 percent of Americans are concerned about the costs of child care, and thus nearly 80 percent support some kind of government-subsidized, affordable-child-care initiative. And overwhelming majorities agree that the U.S. is enveloped in an ongoing housing crisis. More than 60 percent of voters agreed with the statement “Housing is a basic necessity, and the private market is unable to address many Americans’ affordability concerns.” In hurricane-wrecked and Republican-controlled Florida, a recent survey found that a whopping 90 percent of residents believe that climate change is real and 58 percent believe that it’s human-caused. Nearly 70 percent of them want the state and federal governments to do more to address it.

 

"Despite the widespread desires of ordinary Americans for the government to play more of a role in improving their quality of life, Trump and the Republican Party reject these calls for greater public spending and services to help those in need of it. But the Democratic Party has also been reluctant to cast itself as the party for greater government intervention to help with health care, housing, and child care. For more than a generation, the Democratic Party has envisioned itself as jettisoning its reputation as the party of social welfare, most dramatically exemplified by the War on Poverty and the Great Society initiatives, the signature legislation of the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Harris has made some modest proposals like expanding the child tax credit and providing grants for potential first-time homeowners, but none is nearly enough to offset the economic malaise that ordinary people are experiencing right now. It is almost as if the Democrats believed that the sharp personal contrast between the candidates — a white supremacist Trump against a Black South Asian daughter of immigrants — was significant enough to outweigh substantive mention of any other details of why their party should prevail.

 

"In her unprecedented run for office, Harris has almost completely retreated from the more progressive positions she took during the heated primary in 2020 and the bolder proposals that the Biden-Harris campaign eventually adopted. These promises, designed to convince the millions of young people protesting in the streets to cast their votes for the Democratic ticket, included increasing the minimum wage, paid family leave, subsidized child care, canceling student debt, and other big government expenditures, some of which were realized in the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act signed by Biden in 2021. The Democrats won in 2020 with 81 million votes, the most in American history.

 

"But in this election, even though ambitious government proposals are still popular with wide swaths of the electorate, Harris has returned to a political message that emphasizes the supremacy of capital, marginalizes the role of the state and public expenditure, and has legitimized Trump’s law-and-order rhetoric on the border and wherever Black and brown bodies need to be surveilled and policed. She has deftly avoided any mention of the 2020 protests that are the reason she was selected as Biden’s running mate in the first place. The simultaneous eruption of protest in response to the murder of George Floyd and the unfolding human tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic raised the demands not only for police reform but also for the state to play a greater role in helping suffering people. Since her ascension to the top of the ticket, Harris and the Democratic National Committee have excised the influence of the Black Lives Matter social movement that suffused the party’s 2020 political platform and its emphasis on countering racism, police brutality, and inequality. It has been airbrushed from history. Indeed, in the Harris and Walz 80-page platform, the words “racism,” “inequality,” “diversity,” and “police brutality” are nowhere to be found.

 

"[I]n this race, Trump is setting the terms, and this time he has shed the patina of economic populism that once defined him and is leaning even more heavily into conspiracy ramblings and outrageous bigotry. Harris, lacking sufficient pressure from the left, has largely abandoned gestures or appeals to the working class and instead touts endorsements from current and former Republicans, including war criminal Dick Cheney. Focused on appealing to middle-of-the-road and undecided voters, Harris has now been left to scramble to bolster support among core Democratic bases, including Black men. Weeks away from the election, Harris promised up to $20,000 in forgivable loans for Black entrepreneurs, an initiative to tackle sickle cell disease, more regulatory protections for cryptocurrency investors, and the creation of new opportunities for Black men to participate in the emerging cannabis industry. It reeks more of desperation than as part of a coherent plan to mobilize voters."

 

SOURCE, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Hammer and Hope (Fall 2024).

 

THEFT OF ENJOYMENT

 

“Nationalism thus presents a privileged domain of the eruption of enjoyment into the social field. The national Cause is ultimately nothing but the way subjects of a given ethnic community organize their enjoyment through national myths. What is therefore at stake in ethnic tensions is always the possession of the national Thing. We always impute to the ‘other’ an excessive enjoyment; s/he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. In short, what really bothers us about the ‘other’ is the peculiar way it organizes its enjoyment: precisely the surplus, the ‘excess’ that pertains to it—the smell of their food, their ‘noisy’ songs and dances, their strange manners, their attitude to work (in the racist perspective, the ‘other’ is either a workaholic stealing our jobs or an idler living on our labour; and it is quite amusing to note the ease with which one passes from reproaching the other with a refusal to work, to reproaching him for the theft of work). The basic paradox is that our Thing is conceived as something inaccessible to the other, and at the same time threatened by it; this is also the case with castration, which, according to Freud, is experienced as something that ‘really cannot happen’, but we are nonetheless horrified by its prospect. The ground of incompatibility between different ethnic subject positions is thus not exclusively the different structure of their symbolic identifications. What categorically resists universalization is rather the particular structure of their relationship towards enjoyment:

 

‘Why does the Other remain Other? What is the cause for our hatred of him, for our hatred of him in his very being? It is hatred of the enjoyment in the Other. This would be the most general formula of the modern racism we are witnessing today: a hatred of the particular way the Other enjoys. . .The question of tolerance or intolerance is not at all concerned with the subject of science and its human rights. It is located on the level of tolerance or intolerance toward the enjoyment of the Other, the Other as he who essentially steals my own enjoyment. We know, of course, that the fundamental status of the object is to be always already snatched away by the Other. It is precisely this theft of enjoyment that we write down in shorthand as minus-Phi, the matheme of castration. The problem is apparently unsolvable as the Other is the Other in my interior. The root of racism is thus hatred of my own enjoyment. There is no other enjoyment but my own. If the Other is in me, occupying the place of extimacy, then the hatred is also my own.’ (Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Extimité)

 

“What we conceal by imputing to the Other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us: the lack (‘castration’) is original; enjoyment constitutes itself as ‘stolen’, or, to quote Hegel’s precise formulation from his Science of Logic, it ‘only comes to be through being left behind. Yugoslavia today is a case-study of such a paradox, in which we are witness to a detailed network of ‘decantations’ and ‘thefts’ of enjoyment.’”

 

SOURCE: Slavoj Žižek, New Left Review (Sept/Oct 1990)

 

By Richard Wittman

Associate Professor,

Department of the History of Art and Architecture, UCSB

for today's Academic Senate Town Hall meeting, 

in collaboration with the UCSB Architectural Historians Group

Thank you very much for the invitation to speak here today. Time is short, so I will dive right in.

Munger Hall is a highly experimental design based on completely untested theories. It crams over 4500 young undergraduates into tiny windowless bedrooms at a density comparable to some of the densest urban concentrations in the world. And yet it claims that it will have beneficial effects on student well-being, and poses them no danger. What is the evidence for this claim? There is none! 

Munger Hall is justified uniquely by the unsupported, fact-free assertions of the billionaire architectural hobbyist who conceived it. It cannot be said often enough: no serious supporting data has been brought forth to support the claims made in favor of this outlandish design. And yet UCSB is proposing not a small experimental building, but a pharaonic investment of $1.5 billion in what would be the largest dormitory building in the world. It is difficult to exaggerate how completely irresponsible this would be: to gamble on that scale on a project whose entire rationale is untested and which is regarded skeptically by an almost universal consensus of knowledgeable professionals. And to make that gamble with the wellbeing of our UCSB students.

This project is also a slap in the face to recent global efforts in the architecture industry to mitigate environmental degradation and climate change. A key tenet of those efforts is sustainability. Sustainability refers to passive strategies to reduce energy consumption, like considering sun orientation when sitting, or being thoughtful about window placement; it refers to using renewable energy sources like solar and wind power, and low environmental-impact building materials. The current design of Munger Hall essentially ignores these strategies, for instance by shutting out the sunlight that is one of Santa Barbara’s most abundant natural resources. 

Do not be deceived by the building’s LEED Gold certification. The LEED system is widely recognized as a problematic guideline that very often has more of a public relations value than a real connection to environmental outcomes. Munger Hall exemplifies this, as it is based on an outdated, unsustainable approach to building, in which the building fundamentally depends on mechanical systems to defeat and exclude nature, and to create an entirely artificial environment.

The design of Munger Hall is profoundly problematic in terms of our students’ mental and physical health. There is clear scientific evidence that a lack of natural light and ventilation has adverse impacts on human beings. (As the LA Times recently reported, even prison design in the US is required to provide windows, as well as lower density.) 

But also consider the COVID pandemic. Imagine living in a windowless cell, somewhere near the core of the most densely packed building you’ve ever lived in (or ever will live in), during a pandemic, when every knowledgeable party is telling you that the safest place is outdoors and at a distance from other people. Imagine having to quarantine for two weeks in such a windowless cell. Graduate students at Mr Munger’s Michigan dorm building have had to do just this, and have spoken wrenchingly about the effect it had on their mental health. Being ill is never fun, but being ill in Munger Hall would be hell.

We know that there is a severe housing crisis in the Santa Barbara area. We all have students who have been unable to find lodgings, or who are even living in cars. We are not utopians who oppose Munger Hall out of obliviousness to the problem it is meant to solve. (And we certainly don’t oppose it because we are “idiots” or because we “hate billionaires,” as Charlie Munger has so charmingly alleged in his public remarks.) 

No, we oppose this building project because it is a disgrace. Because it will damage the wellbeing of our students. Because no serious evidence has been provided to support the claims its boosters have made about its benefits. Because it will damage the reputation of our university. Because it betrays UCSB’s commitment to safeguarding our natural environment.

Indeed, Munger Hall has already turned UCSB into the target of critical articles in all the major US papers and in many foreign ones too. My colleagues and I launched a petition about Munger Hall and received nearly 3000 signatures in a week! A petition by an undergraduate who targeted undergraduate social networks received over 12,000 signatures! Meanwhile, barely a single credible voice supports this design. 

Our petition has had dozens and dozens of comments from past, present, and potential future UCSB parents saying that they would not allow their child to live in Munger Hall, or in some cases even to go to UCSB if Munger Hall were built. The message is pretty clear: the stakes are high; the leadership at UCSB needs to step away from this monstrous project, the sooner the better, before lasting damage is done.

August 17th was new UC President Michael V. Drake's first day of work (red gown at left, at CSU Dominguez Hills).  He picked a hard time to start the job. But the Board of Regents has made it harder by pushing the president and the faculty out of the search for the campus chancellors.  The Board did this to the University's first Black president in the name of diversity.

Lack of diversity was the lead reason the Board of Regents (BoR) gave for rushing through changes in the selection process.  Both staff and faculty (especially tenure-track faculty) do need to be more diverse at UC.  But the Regent-commissioned report didn't  analyze applicant pools and hires to show racial disparity or anything else.  They would have had to offer evidence of systemic bias, since, in terms of outcomes, President Janet Napolitano (2013-2020) has a reasonably good diversity record with her 6 chancellor hires.  She brought on board two white men, Sam Hawgood (San Francisco, 2014) and Howard Gillman (Irvine, 2014), both promoted from within the campus, an African American man, Gary S. May (Davis, 2017), two white women, Carol Christ (Berkeley, 2017, from the campus) and Cynthia K. Larive (Santa Cruz, 2019), and a Latino man, Juan Sánchez Muñoz (Merced, 2020).  The 3 external hires were a Black man, a white woman, and a Latino.  First glance suggests that the easiest way to cut the white majority is not to hire from within.  

The Regents proposed a much more dramatic solution: a set of new search rules that overshadowed all other issues at their July meeting, including Covid infections and costs and the possible 12-16% revenue losses in 2020-21 that I discussed last time.  A review of the case suggests that a lack of chancellor diversity was not the main motivation.

In November 2019, Board Chair John Pérez convened a Regents Working Group on Chancellor Search and Selection. It produced the report, which does note the opportunity to "underscore how UC can better integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion practices into its chancellor search and selection process." But first came this:

While over the years, the Regents have delegated authority for many of the operations of the University to the President, appointing chancellors remains one of the most important responsibilities, which the Board has reserved unto itself.1 This reservation of authority requires particular attention and dedication by Regents with respect to the appointment of chancellors— the specific process which is set forth in Regents Policy 7102. (1)

Footnote 1 cites Bylaws 22.2 and 31.  Bylaw 22.2 sets out specific reservations of regental authority, and is a series of unilateral approval rights.  Bylaw 31 states that chancellors "are appointed by and serve at the pleasure of the Board," with the president advising and consulting on appointments without appointment power.  It also defines the chancellor as a direct subordinate of the Board as well as the president--as someone who can be line-managed by the Board. 

The Board's main motivation for the review appears to have been to increase its direct power over appointing chancellors.  The two discussions of the items were fraught, with both the Senate and the current UC President objecting to the changes and asking for further discussion. In the end the changes sailed through. 

First, the changes. The Board's Governance Committee Agenda for July 29th had three items on this matter, in which the acceptance of the Working Group Report would lead to immediate changes in the search policy, Regents' Policy 7102.  You can see the modifications here.   The new and approved clean copy is here.   The key changes are: 

1. Though the Board of Regents always appointed chancellors, candidates were identified and a finalist proposed to the Board by a "Committee." Now, this body is a "search advisory committee," with its powers identified as advisory only.
2. The president was the lead on running the search.  Now, "the Board and the President each has a role"--they are co-managers of the search process.
3. The five faculty members of the Committee were appointed by the Academic Senate.  Other groups selected and sent their representatives. Now, the chair(s) of the search advisory committee will select members from a slate of three for each position.
4. The Committee membership was constituted by the process of submitting names, not subject to further adjudication (I assume).  Now, the president meets only with the regental members prior to retaining a search firm or any committee meeting to insure a "strong balance" on the committee.
5. The five faculty members of the Committee were responsible for reviewing candidates and submitting names to the full committee, "working with the president."  Now, this reviewing is done by an outside search firm.
6. The Committee deliberated the virtues of the long and short lists submitted by the faculty reviewers.  Now, the lists prepared by the outside search firm are discussed by the president and the regental members of the committee.
7. The Committee came to a conclusion about the final candidate(s) together, through some (unspecified )process; the president would then communicate the nomination to the Board of Regents for approval. Now, only the regental members of the search advisory committee will vote amongst themselves on the name to be forwarded to the full Board of Regents.

In short, the chancellor search will be run by an outside search firm hired by the Regents and the Regent members of the search advisory committee. Only Regents will vote on the committee, and the result will be handed from the Regent members to the full Board. The president has been removed as lead authority in the search, and the faculty have been removed from the review process.  Faculty can submit nominations to the committee, just like anyone else.

Ironically, the actual search issue this year was not faculty having too much influence over administrative hires but having no influence at all.  During the search for the new president that led to Michael Drake-- the Regents completely excluded the faculty advisory body from contact with the applications or any of the candidates. The Senate Chair has in the past functioned as a member of the Special Committee; after an initial meeting, she was never allowed back. The Academic Assembly formally protested in a February Resolution, when the problem could have been fixed.  The Academic Council also protested in a July letter dated the day before the discussion of the chancellor search items. It objected to the refusal of the Regents even to acknowledge receipt of formal requests to be consulted. The new chancellor's search process will make them more like presidential searches, which in the current case meant the near-total bypassing of the faculty. 

The Senate response to the Working Group's search changes was strongly negative.  Before the letter I just mentioned, on July 23rd, the Academic Council wrote to the president to say that the "lack of inclusion" of faculty from the Report's interviews had skewed the results, and that it offered no justification for marginalizing faculty expertise about and personal commitment to their campus. It also stated that research university faculty members have special knowledge of what it takes to run a research university and asked that the new rules be delayed for further consultation, including consultation with President Drake.

The next Senate response was the bombshell, a letter signed by 20 former chairs of the Academic Senate, including virtually every head of the Senate for the past quarter century.  Though I've often wished for it, especially for demanding the Regents improve their generally poor job of maintaining UC revenues, I've never seen this kind of united Senate front before. The chairs' letter rejected the implication that "the UC faculty have been an impediment to the diversification of the University," pointedly contrasting the Senate's longstanding defense of affirmative action with the BoR's overturning of it in 1995, from which Underrepresented Minority (URM) student representation has never fully recovered. The letter defined the process of the recommendations as "not in keeping with the best practices of our University" in having excluded faculty from the Working Group and the Senate from meaningful prior review.  In addition, the former Senate chairs criticized the demotion of the president in the chancellor's search.

[T]he proposed Section 6 of the policy . . . would require the President to meet privately with only the regental members of the search committee, and then seek their approval of the President's choice prior to submission for approval by the full board.  The effect of this change is to fundamentally undercut the authority of the President in selecting Chancellors.

This critique of the Regents on both process and substance was the basis of a Los Angeles Times article by Teresa Watanabe. Many Regents, including the Board chair, first read about the 20 Chairs' retort in the newspaper, and they were riled before the discussion began.

There were two discussions of the search process changes during the meetings , first on July 29th (here) and then July 30th (starting at 2'09" here). The Working Group report was defended by Regent Lark Park, the WG chair, and by several of its other members.  I watched both discussions on line, and didn't hear anyone identify a clear operational problem to which the changes were a solution.  Park said the point was to be "more efficient, accountable, and inclusive" (2'04").  No one objected to this goal,  but there were questions about how these changes accomplish that? A few Regents expressed frustration with getting only one finalist  at the end of the search on which they were asked to do an up-or-down vote. But there were other, simpler ways to address this understandable concern. For example, the Committee could meet with the BoR while the process is ongoing, or the President could write reports to the Board chair every 2 weeks, or the Committee could submit a short list of 3 final candidates to the full Board instead of just one (as will now be done for Committee selection). None of these would require pushing the faculty or the President out of the process, as these changes do.  

The outgoing President didn't support the changes. Janet Napolitano noted there's "the question of what the problem is that we're trying to fix here" (2'41").  She said the Working Group could try to reduce their differences with the faculty and also said that "it would be useful to consult with President Drake." She noted that while most of the changes are "not necessarily objectionable," that one is a change to the president's power and the other is change to the faculty power. She said to the Board that her preference was that they "receive the report" at that meeting and engage in "greater consultation" with the faculty. They should "then consult with President Drake. I think that would be very respectful of him "(2'43"). 

Here the President offered the Regents accurate definitions of both respect -- consultation and discussion prior to a decision--and of shared governance, in which the process treats the views of all parties subject to equal treatment.  The sharing of governance requires what we can call epistemic parity, in which one set of views cannot simply negate the other, but must seek some kind of mutual understanding if not reconciliation.  In the previous process for selecting a UC campus chancellor, the sharing took place during the review and consultation process, after which the BoR hd full decision rights.

The expression of regental views went on for quite a while. A handful of Regents, including immediate past chair George Kieffer, acknowledged the deep dissastisfaction of the faculty and the clear non-support of the president, and said these were reasons enough to delay the vote until further consultation had amended views (3'08").  They were in effect speaking for shared governance's underlying principle of treating the epistemic positions of each party as valid, requiring further efforts at accommodation.

A bit later Board Chair Pérez asked Regent Park a narrower question-- whether she had in fact not shown the document to the Senate leadership in time for the Senate to deliberate and opine. She said there had been a meeting with the chair and vice-chair, and they had noted they needed to consult with the Council, which then produced the negative letter linked above.  Park then responded to the general concerns (starting 3'23").

I will just go back to this Chancellor appointment being the purview, responsibility, and duty of the Board members and the Board members alone in ultimate approval, and that is why Regent search committee members are treated differently in the proposed amendments to Policy 7102.  With regard to . . . the letter signed by many academic chairs. I was at some level astonished to receive that letter. I felt that the letter was not respectful, or did not acknowledge the purview of the Board, and the many Bylaws and Standing Orders that currently exist that show exactly who reports to whom, what has been delegated to whom, and what responsibility lies where.  22.1, 22.2, 30, 31 of the Bylaws all speak to this. Standing Orders 100.1, 100.4 clearly lay out the responsibility. . .  This idea that the Board does not have this prerogative is frankly surprising in terms of coming from past members of academic leadership in that acknowledgement, and seemed to suggest that the Chancellors function more as political appointees of the President, and again that if they're not picked by a president they cannot be loyal.  I find that not credible, and contrary to all the policies and bylaws that I have seen. Not to mention that upon that logic, none of these chancellors today could be loyal or follow the direction of our new President because he did not have a hand in picking them. So that to me is a fear that can be quickly dispelled by taking a more vigorous look at the existing Bylaws and Standing Orders. 

I really welcome the wisdom of our new president in a great many things. But I will take today as a case in point for not delaying further action. 

Park said that we've had a lot of discussions already and that to say "we should spend a great deal more time on these recommendations " would suggest that the Board cannot do  time and process management, and "then as a Board we cannot govern if we literally tie ourselves up in endless discussion." She was totally opposed to further consultation. She added, 

This is not an attack on shared governance. Truly it is not.  Faculty are the lifeblood of the university. That will not change with these recommendations. . . . And I would really love to see 24 [sic] academic senate leaders come together to opine on things that are deeply concerning and weighty to the institution--rather than whether shared governance has been quite respected enough in these modest recommendations.

There are several issues here. First, Regent Park missed the point of the Past Chairs letter.  It did not challenge the Board of Regents' appointment authority, but disputed the plan to end the shared procedures that had traditionally led up to the exercise of that authority.  

Second, Park read disagreement as an attack on regental authority. 

Third, her response to that perceived attack was to reassert that regental authority-- as unilateral. 

Fourth, she told President Drake that approving her recommendations was more important than getting his "wisdom."

Fifth, she denied Academic Senate's clam that this was an attack on shared governance by asserting that it wasn't. 

The full Board did indeed respond to Park's call to power.  Few explicitly echoed Park's claim that the point of the changes was to give the Regents full unilateral control.  Many instead told the faculty that they didn't want what they said they wanted, or that not having it didn't matter like they thought.  Regent Leib specialized in this Orwellian discourse, telling faculty that the Report was a "gift" to them because it meant they wouldn't have to do so much work. The discussion was often patronizing and dismissive, and oblivious to common sense basics of sharing and collaboration.  Regents like Lansing and Leib didn't want the faculty to feel bad, or think they were part of doing a bad thing to them. But they and nearly all of the rest of the BoR voted not to wait to give either the faculty or President Drake reason not to feel bad.  

Obviously nobody is going to die from all this, but the Regents' report, discussion, and vote were a textbook case of epistemic injustice, resting on the five features above.  This happens when the more powerful side tells the other that their concerns are wrong, that they need not be considered further, and that they comprise an attack on legitimate authority. 

Let me finish by widening the picture a bit.  Faculty, staff, and most campus administrators have no power over major University decisions of top management appointments, budget policy, layoffs and furloughs, system health and safety regulations, and the like.  But they do have clear jobs to do on their campuses. The function of governing boards is not so clear. What, today, is their value-added to the overall institution?  

University governing boards were justified in earlier centuries as a kind of natural aristocracy: the better people had a monopoly on wisdom, and board membership were drawn exclusively from them.  Few now espouse this kind of social Darwinist view of concentrated intelligence.  In addition, today's universities are enormously complex. The needed intelligence is widely distributed.  Experiences and needs are quite diverse. Front-line contact is more valuable than ever. The intelligence that solves problems must be integrated from a range of quarters. In this context, boards of trustees or regents are archaic forms.  The unilateral authority affirmed by Regent Park is this form at its most archaic point. 

Board members almost always lack university expertise, so that members of the campus community cannot be heard to say to each other, "How can we keep UCPath from ruining our lives? Regent N might be able to help us."  Or, "How do we reduce houselessness among formerly incarcerated students? Let's call Regent Q: she knows a ton about this, and would be glad to listen."  I have never heard a comment like this. Campuses and their many units feel entirely on their own;  the BoR is treated as a ruler, distant and adversarial, to be managed and dodged but not consulted for special insight.  The stereotype is that they are most concerned with (1) implementing the views of external powers in business and politics; and (2) exercising their own rights and powers.  

Unfortunately, Regent Park fulfilled this stereotype.  The Board, faced with a choice between power and consultation, sided with power.  Personally, I would love to bring to bear the achievements and capabilities of Regents in their own domains. I would love to see them exercise their sophistication and influence to protect the university from political interference and financial damage. Such Regents would be outward facing. Their internal gaze would focus mostly on managerial competence--on helping the senior managers serve the increasingly beset employees of the institution.  In the three domains of politics, management, and finance, such Regents would be especially focused on the third. They would insure financial vitality--they would protect and increase core revenues as necessary. 

Good trustees--like good professors, physicians, presidents, landscapers, cooks, civil engineers, parents-- don't push their authority beyond the limits of their competence. Power beyond knowledge is the great American temptation: U.S. organizations are top-down and prone to chains of command. University governing boards are generally granted quasi-monarchial sovereignty, as is UC's. The structure is inherently and deliberately anti-democratic. It is not justifiable on grounds of standard political theory. Elizabeth Anderson's book Private Government is a good analysis of the anomaly of governing authorities that have "arbitrary and unaccountable power over workers" in a putatively democratic society. Still, though lacking in political justification, unilateral power might have operational claims: Power can be earned by operational effectiveness.  But, as we have been forced to note repeatedly on this blog, the operational achievements of the UC Regents are rather modest.  Instead of addressing this problem by, for example, spending all of one day on the buried budget crisis, the Regents made themselves less accountable to faculty and to the president--the clear purpose of Regent Park's Working Group.  

As the Regents succeed at greater power and distance, epistemological bubbles will form around them, and consultants--who report to them and are unlikely to challenge them--will replace people in touch with real conditions on the ground. UC's split between Oakland's Office of the President and the campuses will continue to make this worse with a structural gulf that can be crossed only with consistent and accurate communication, and that has been undermined here by the regents own action. To be accurate, this communication must be between parties with relatively equal standing.  Exchange between superior and inferior is distorted by the inferior's need for self-protection, and the superior's entitlement and self-overestimation. I can't go into this here.  To summarize in a formula, epistemic inequality insures error.  When the Board turned a collaborative committee into a two-tier set up with superdelegate privileges for its Regents, they insured the intellectual distortions that no one actually wants.

One final note: governing boards all over the country, like UCs, have gradually come to regard the faculty as a problem for university success.  There are many sources and causes for this, but the result is default prejudice against faculty as people who just defend their privileges rather than the interests of education or university.  I must call this managerial bigotry against professionals. It is categorical, uninformed, and wrong.  UC will never move forward until its Board, including its Jerry Brown Bloc, and its allies can work through their anti-faculty prejudice and make use of their deep expertise, always freely given.  For example, each of UC's 10 campuses has some of the world's most respected scholars of race and ethnicity, who would bend over backwards to help increase educational justice and diversity.  

The saddest moments in the regental discussion on July 30th were when outgoing president Napolitano asked the Board, at least twice, not to decide the new president's role in chancellor searches before President Drake arrived. It would have meant waiting 3 weeks.  The Regents couldn't wait, and so the outcome of her last meeting as president was the triumphant affirmation of Bylaws 22.1, 22.2, 30, 31, and Standing Orders 100.1 and 100.4.

I wish President Drake the very best in his new role. I'm very sorry the Regents cut his power over  chancellor's searches.

Photo Credit: Los Angeles Sentinel (Michael Drake at the investiture of  CSU Dominguez Hills President Thomas A Parham)

February 13, 2020

Dear Chancellor Larive and Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Kletzer,

We, the California Scholars for Academic Freedom,* a group of over two hundred scholars throughout California, write with grave concern about the Google form “Notification of Class and Section Disruption” sent on February 7, 2020 to UCSC undergraduates in relation to the graduate student strike demanding a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA).  This form asks students to surveil and report on conversations occurring in the course of instruction.  It sets a dangerous precedent of surveillance that undermines the core principles of academic freedom.

The university produces knowledge and practice critical to the operations of a democracy. The ideal of academic freedom is at the core of the university in a democratic society. 

Academic freedom is a cornerstone of education in a free society. Its definition includes such items as what are called ‘the four essential freedoms’ of a university, to determine, on academic grounds, who will teach, what they may teach, how they teach and who may study.

Academic freedom requires that faculty and students can participate in intellectual debate free of any censorship or retaliation. Central to academic freedom is that the political, religious, or philosophical beliefs of others, including politicians, administrators and members of the public shall not be imposed on students or faculty. 

California Scholars for Academic Freedom call on you rescind the link to the Google form and refuse to use any data collected through that mechanism as the grounds for disciplinary measures against faculty and students.

On behalf of California Scholars for Academic Freedom,

Susan Slyomovics

Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

ssly@anthro.ucla.edu

Walid Afifi

University of California - Santa Barbara

Professor, Dept of Communication

Director, Center for Middle East Studies

Craig Reinarman

Professor Emeritus of Sociology & Legal Studies

Rachel Carson College 338

University of California

Santa Cruz, CA 95064

831-459-2617

Sondra Hale, Professor Emerita

Anthropology and Gender Studies, UCLA. sonhale@ucla.edu