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.

UC Board of Regents, March 2017    

That is the question.

This is the answer: Never.  

Or not at least until the campuses fight and change current Office of the President (UCOP) budget ideology and practice. They have never done that.  Not yet.  

I’m going to compare UCOP’s January state budget show with their offstage borrowing.  State funding yields little, while the debt yields a lot.  

I’ll keep my eye on two major implications for the campuses. The first is a lock-in of structural deficits with continuing cuts to the educational core--to both teaching and research.  

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. 

Train Entering Station NYC on Oct 30, 2022   

I mean the question literally.  The New School (TNS, by which I’ll mean all its colleges) has advantages most private colleges would die for. Why is it now trying to push out 40% of its faculty and most experienced staff, mainly on the academic, non-arts side? How did it develop a $48 million deficit for the current year, or around 10% of operating expenditures? President Joel Towers has announced these things but does not explain them.  His administration has  published a closure list with no academic reasoning about the choices.

 

I’ve read all the documents I can access. My sense is that senior managers have made important financial errors over a number of years, and yet the underlying problem is poor academic planning. 2025’s Summer Working Groups notwithstanding, senior management have not yet constructed a multi-year collaborative academic planning process involving all faculty and frontline staff. 

 

Selling The Catalyst, UCSB on April 12, 2014   

2025 saw a shift in the hard right’s measure for the success of its decades-long attacks on universities: it moved from discrediting to subjugating the university system. It used decades-old methods in which culture wars and budget wars work together. These were now yoked under Trump II with federal coercion campaigns that extorted changes in core institutional policy through the unlawful withholding of federal funds.

 

University boards and presidents have not formulated common aims much less a joint strategy to fight the most powerful attack in higher education’s modern history, one already more destructive than McCarthyism. They have followed the mantra of corporate America: shut up, suck up, and try not to stand up.  I’ve noted that all the fighting has come from faculty groups and some professional associations.

 

UC Berkeley on May 29, 2024   

Every meeting tells a story as Rod Stewart once sang, more or less.  What stories have UC’s Office of the President and Board of Regents been singing when they met every two months?  Side A in November was “protecting student affordability.”  Side B was their perennial favorite, “budget rules everything.” The bonus track, unadmitted, was “stagnation conquers all.”

 

Fiscal stagnation means permanent austerity and the damage past and future appeared in the unscripted parts of the story in the public comment periods.  There some speakers opposed the termination of the campus hiring program associated with the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP). This seems to have been prematurely announced / decreed by the systemwide Provost Katherine Newman to a group of Executive Vice Chancellors, who brought the decision as an accomplished fact back to their campuses, which ignited a protest campaign from faculty, staff, PPFP alumni, academic consortia and, apparently, an unusually large number of chairs, deans and other administrators. The upshot was a letter from UC President James Milliken stating that reports of the death of PPFP’s faculty hiring incentives were greatly exaggerated. This was a real success for the protests, however unacknowledged by the president.

 

UCI May 25, 2018   

We saw in Part 1 that UCI Finance attributes losses to the Schools –the academic core—rather than to the non-core or medical center activities associated with research and various auxiliary services.  We also noted that in FY23 UCI needed to find $132.3 million in institutional funds to cover research costs. One result is unfortunate: dramatic cuts are coming to the core. 

 

Non-core and UCI Health may be conducting layoffs as well, but I haven’t seen any indication of this. The UC rule of thumb has been cuts to the educational core come only as a last resort.  It’s often honored in the breach, and I don’t see that UCI is following it now. 

 

UCI’s core funding is governed by a new Budget Model and multi-year planning process. It was tried out in 2024 -25 (FY25) and has been modified for the upcoming year (2025-26 or FY 26). 

 

Australian National University    

by Prof. Kylie Message-Jones, The Australian National University

The Australian National University (ANU) has said it needs to reclaim a budget shortfall of $250m. To do its bit, the College of Arts and Social Sciences last week published a roadmap to meet the University’s goal for its areas. Its change proposal boils down to a list of cuts that will damage staff, students, as well as local families, communities and economies. 

 

It might help to put the ANU’s situation in context. Although ANU is a small institution by Australian standards, with roughly 4500 staff and 22,000 students, it has historically been high performing. In the recently released QS 2026 World University Rankings, ANU, a member of the prestigious Group of Eight network, slipped slightly to come in fourth out of 36 Australian universities and 32^nd globally.

 

Dublin Bay on June 17, 2025   

Universities can’t fight an impeding fiscal disaster if they can’t face its size and destructive power.  Are they facing it?  Would they fight it? 

It's sometimes yes on the first question, but the public versions so far suggest not fight but capitulation.  

 

Today’s example is Minnesota--with condolences and heartfelt solidarity to everyone affected by the recent political assassinations in the Twin Cities.

The AAUP chapter at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities put together a presentation for faculty about their administration's budget announcement. They cite their administration saying, “a financial model that relies on maintaining academic programs and activities at current levels is not sustainable, nor is attempting to be great at everything.” This suggests both downsizing scale and diluting quality.

 

Santa Barbara on December 24, 2023   

In the May Revision of his January budget proposal for 2025-26, California Governor Gavin Newsom cut his cut to the two state university systems. 

 CSU Chancellor Mildred García wrote, “The May Revision reduces proposed cuts to the CSU to 3% or $143.8 million of ongoing funding – down from the 7.9% or $375 million cut initially set forth in the governor’s January proposal.”  UC got the same percentage reduction of the January cut—from nearly 8%, announced a week or so before Trump took office, to 3% now.

 

García went on to note that the Compact continues to exist at the convenience of the Governor and thus isn’t really a “Compact” in the normal sense.  “It’s like the father who announces, ‘I have a compact with my children not to spank them—except when I really need to spank them.” Sorry, I misquote. García’s only comment was, “However, the 2025-26 CSU ongoing multi-year compact funding ($252 million) remains deferred until fiscal year 2026-27 to help address the state’s budget shortfall.”

 

García added, “I commend and appreciate Governor Newsom for taking a thoughtful and measured approach to addressing the state’s fiscal challenges, while recognizing the unique and invaluable role that higher education institutions, and the CSU in particular, play in driving California’s workforce and economy.”

 

Not to be outdone, University of California President Michael V. Drake wrote, 

We are deeply grateful to Gov. Newsom for recognizing the value of the University of California’s contributions to our state in the May Revise. This is a challenging budget year for California, and our state leaders are facing very tough choices. Even in this difficult moment, the Governor has reduced the University’s cut from 8 percent to 3 percent, demonstrating his strong commitment to California’s students. His proposed budget minimizes cuts to vital student support services and preserves critical investments like affordable student housing construction.

 

The top managers at CSU and UC regularly teach their students and the public that Newsom is a sturdy hero of higher education funding.  If you criticize Newsom’s budgets for your campus, you in effect criticize your president, chancellor, and university officials, even though they've already done the maximum.

 

UC’s Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Nathan Brostrom presented the cut-of-the-cut budget to the Board of Regents on May 14th (Item F4; video is from Finance and Capital Strategies Committee starting at 14’30.”  Here’s the summary slide.

Figure 1

 

 

I recommend ignoring the rightward columns, in which we imagine that the state stops hurting UC and turns over a new leaf. This is still very bad news. The ongoing $129 million state cut is oblivious to the cuts tsunami coming from the federal government, in the ten dimensions I outlined in my last post (Liner Note 25).

 

In his Remaking post, “Manufactured Austerity,” Trevor Griffey laid out the history of the negotiations. He noted the injustice of the January plan: 

Budget cuts negotiated in 2024 seemed like a done deal. Then something unexpected happened: new, more optimistic revenue forecasts came in, and the state of California entered 2025 with a projected $363 million budget surplus.

 

The Governor could have proposed to use some of this money to give a reprieve to the UC and CSU systems, or try to sustain the compact another year. 

 

Instead, the Governor’s January budget proposal reduced planned cuts to state agencies, while leaving the 8 percent cut and compact deferral in place for UC and CSU. 

 

The May Revision is a partial correction of that extra cut meted out by the governor and legislature to UC and CSU. But it’s still a cut in the worst year in my lifetime for U.S. colleges and universities. 

 

Where did the Department of Finance and the California legislature get the idea that it would be OK to replace the Compact increase with a $129 million cut?  

 

At Cal Matters, Mikhail Zinshteyn has reported,

The chair of the Assembly’s budget subcommittee on education finance, David Alvarez, a Democrat from Chula Vista, asked UC senior officials how much the state could cut and still leave student academics largely unaffected, including graduation rates and other endeavors that “ensure that student access remains the same.”

 

For UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla, the answer was about $30 million, much less than the roughly $73 million in state cuts the campus would absorb under the current plan.  Systemwide, the UC’s 10 campuses could tolerate an ongoing cut of $125 million, said Seija Virtanen, a UC government relations official.

 

Mystery solved. The new cut idea came from UC officials themselves. Khosla told the Assembly Budget Committee that UCSD was cool with a $30 million cut three weeks after he told his campus community that they face cuts of $75-$500 million. Virtanen said a $125 million cut would be tolerable. UC’s cut was $129 million.  

 

The official UC discussions take place in a short-termist bubble in which only the most recent increments are in public view. The repressed pattern is a quarter-century of cumulative shortfalls.  

 

I’ve updated the blog’s ongoing calculations for the UC budget (CSU isn’t here) to reflect the May Revision.  If you’d like more background or a refresher, see “The Essential Charts.”  For Newsom’s funding pattern see “Shortfall.”

 

Figure 2

 

Here you see several lines.

 

The red line tracks the state's actual general fund allocation in nominal dollars.

 

The blue line is a benchmark, tracking growth in state per-capita income.  This measures the strength of the economy as it exists in people's pockets.  It goes up 4-5 percent a year most of the time.  

 

UC enrollment did not stay flat through this period, but increased by about 50 percent. The yellow line takes the per-capita income benchmark (blue line) and corrects it for actual UC student growth. 

The purple line is the California state budget (right-hand scale).  State government--health, corrections, transportation, K-12 education, etc--has grown at around the same rate as personal income.  California doesn't have an exceptional government, measured by growth rates.  It has an average-growth government--except for higher education, which state government has made sub-par.

 

Note that none of this data is corrected for inflation.

 

If a state wanted to fund an agency in an average way, it could use several metrics.  It could increase that agency’s budget at the overall government median.  The red line would track the purple line. 

 

Or it could increase that agency's revenues at the same rate as per-capita income. The red line would track the blue line. (In such a case, the legislature wouldn’t be treating that agency as more special, but just letting UC or CSU or public health or transportation grow with the state.)

 

Or the state could also acknowledge the growth in that agency’s service obligations, like enrollment growth.  In this case, the red line would track the yellow line. 

 

You can see that none of these average treatments take place.  UC’s state general fund revenues have fallen steadily behind the state in all three measures. And UC officials seem not only to be okay with this, but to co-create the substandard increases over years.

 

I’ve never understood why they do this, or why UC people don’t try in an organized way to make them stop. But here we are.

 

The traditional excuse was that UC will made up for state cuts with increases in student tuition. This has always been unpopular with the California public, so the line was that UC is compensating for state cuts by triple-charging international students, and this it’s a win for the state taxpayer.  When the taxpayers’ 4.0 or 4.3 GPA kids were getting rejected in large numbers from the flagship campuses with the highest shares of international students, parents complained, and the state negotiated campus-by-campus caps. Resident tuition got frozen by Jerry Brown (thanks to student protests) in the early 2010s, and the “cohort” tuition replacement makes little revenue difference. 

 

Long story short, if you calculate net tuition income, taking out some big expenses no longer covered by the state, you get this chart.  The green line adds UC general funds and net tuition income to state general funds.

 

Figure 3

 

Any way you slice it, the University of California has been underfunded by the state throughout this century. 

 

After these many years of substandard funding, UC (and CSU) are now woefully exposed to the ax-murdering of federal agency grants. At CUCFA, Eric Hays has calculated (conservatively) a UC-wide loss of $421 million in federal research funds from just one of the ten types of cuts—NIH reductions in indirect cost recovery rates to 15%.  

 

Damage is settling in everywhere. The system has frozen hiring on all campuses, amid various campus measures.

 

I noted above that UC San Diego, Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla warned of cuts on April 1^st.

We are unable to predict exactly what the losses will be, but our initial scenario planning models indicate possible reductions ranging from $75 million to more than $500 million annually. In preparation, I have asked budget offices to model a 2.5% to 12.5% budget reduction based on these initial scenarios. We will continue to evaluate the data and further refine the range of our estimates.

 

That was the last update on his page.

 

At UC Santa Barbara, the chancellor has asked units to prepare for across-the-board cuts of 10%.

 

UC Santa Cruz already had a $107-111 million structural deficit before Trump’s election, and faces cuts and layoffs.  Students are noticing educational effects.

 

UC Davis was already projecting a doubling of its core funds deficit to $90 million, and now expects further losses due to federal cuts of $118 to $408 million.  The chancellor's statement following the May Revision (h/t Mikhail Zinshteyn) declares a $53 million deficit on tuition and state funds, and a prospective $500 -$907 million deficit adding federal sources at the campus and medical center combined.

 

And so on. 

 

The financial information is woefully incomplete. It doesn’t tie specific levels of cuts to known policy variations.  There are no “bridge funding” policies of the kind I discussed in Liner Note 25. There are no elements of a coming plan. 

 

Researchers across the system engage in pure guesswork trying to figure out the near future of their research and of their students and staff. What kind support institutional support might they have? Nobody knows. 

 

This atmosphere may explain why the chair of the Santa Barbara division of the Academic Senate resorted to writing, “I like to think that the temporal rhythms of institutions—which can admittedly be frustratingly slow, particularly in relation to the frenzied pace of the news environment—are ultimately going to be our best defense.” Perhaps that’s the function of opacity too: the psychic defense of knowing little and thus having a reason never to be ready with a large and possibly successful counteraction.

 

Pressure seems to generate many bad ideas on high.  Faculty have had to spend time this year opposing ideas like converting the 7 quarter-based UC campuses to the semester system (look at the work already poured into this), or UCOP forcing universal adoption of root-level surveillance software on all UC computer hardware without consultation (this UC Irvine Senate resolution against the plan passed with a 94.9% yes vote). 

 

Unquantified, undebated budget calamity is also behind serious challenges to UC’s educational core. At the UCLA Faculty Association blog, Dan Mitchell summarized part of EVC Darnell Hunt’s commentary like this: 

 

After the student-worker strike a couple of years ago - which boosted labor costs - and given the current outlook of reduced federal and state support, the number of PhDs UCLA can train is being re-examined. The job outlook for PhD graduates has also been diminished by federal policy. Some departments in the past created sections staffed by PhD student TAs in order to support those students. Now only needed sections will be staffed. And UCLA is looking at whether even needed sections might be replaced by such tech alternatives as AI and remote/hybrid classes.

 

Hunt is suggesting a major shrinkage of UCLA’s doctoral programs, which will make undergraduate majors unteachable, which would require conversion of a large share  of instruction to online or “AI” instruction. Some unknown large proportion of graduate students would disappear, and undergrads would have college on their phones. 

It’s hard to imagine a better way to dismantle the UCLA product and brand--not to mention knowledge creation and public benefits.  And yet there seem to be private talks going on about this at senior levels. 

 

None of these budget disasters are acceptable. I hope more people will fight them furiously.

Mosteiro de Santa Clara-a-Nova,
Coimbria, Portugal on April 26, 2025   

by Trevor Griffey, UC Irvine

 Before 2025, California Governor Gavin Newsom developed a reputation for being a modest advocate for public higher education compared to his predecessors. This year, he proved that this reputation depended on flush state budgets, not on principle. 

 

When Newsom first came into office in 2019, the state had a projected $20 billion surplus, which allowed Governor Newsom to substantially boost spending for public higher education as part of what he called a “California for All” budget for 2019-20. 

 

And in 2022, with the state of California still receiving substantial CARES Act funding from the federal government, Newsom negotiated a 5-year “compacts” with the University of California and California State University systems that committed him to advocating for 5% annual increases to UC and CSU budgets. In exchange, the school systems committed to increase enrollment of California residents and increase student retention and graduation rates.

 

Though the compacts were legally nonbinding, they promised a sense of stability and modest recovery to UC and CSU after decades of inadequate and unpredictable funding. Unfortunately, they would soon be shredded because of a catastrophic accounting error.

 

Years of Austerty to Pay for Budget Mismanagement

 

According to CalMatters reporting, during the same legislative session that Governor Newsom negotiated the compacts, budget analysts working in his Department of Finance massively overestimated tax revenue for future years. They treated an anomalous spike in income taxes as normal, and over-estimated state revenue in future years by $200 billion per year. Legislators relying on these projections believed that they were balancing the state’s budget in 2022, and thereby set the state on a course to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more than it would collect in taxes. 

 

As the effort to undo the damage of faulty budget projections continued into 2024, Governor Newsom proposed “deferring” funding increases in the compact to future years. UC and CSU leaders successfully negotiated to receive a modest increase to their general funds in 2024-25, but in exchange for accepting an 8 percent cut in 2025-26. Since the Governor and the state legislature were also proposing an 8 percent cut to other state agencies, the shared sacrifice seemed fair. The compact was temporarily saved, but the Governor’s commitment to it was effectively over.

 

Governor Puts Majority of Budget Cuts Onto Public Universities

 

Budget cuts negotiated in 2024 seemed like a done deal. Then something unexpected happened: new, more optimistic revenue forecasts came in, and the state of California entered 2025 with a projected $363 million budget surplus.

 

The Governor could have proposed to use some of this money to give a reprieve to the UC and CSU systems, or try to sustain the compact another year. 

 

Instead, the Governor’s January budget proposal reduced planned cuts to state agencies, while leaving the 8 percent cut and compact deferral in place for UC and CSU. 

 

As the Legislative Analyst Office has highlighted, this move increased state government spending by $2.4 billion over the 2024 budget deal. The Governor also proposed increasing discretionary spending by $507 million, and proposed $150 million in new tax breaks for 2025-26.

 

To pay for this new spending, as well as cover billions of dollars of unexpected Medi-Cal expenses and rising costs for other programs, the Governor proposes to withdraw state reserves by about $7 billion in 2025, leaving $17 billion for next year. Remarkably, the Governor did not propose using any of those reserves to prevent or reduce cuts to public universities.

 

Indeed, whereas the State’s Special Fund for Economic Uncertainties is normally kept at $3.5-4 billion, the Governor proposed to increase that fund to $4.5 billion. If the Governor had simply thought to keep it at a normal $3.75 billion, he could have eliminated cuts to the UC and CSU system entirely for 2025-26. 

 

The rhetoric about the state budget in Sacramento is pessimistic. Concern that Trump’s reckless actions will weaken the economy further add to a sense of foreboding. Cuts to essential services seem inevitable, and this rhetoric of inevitability undermines politicians’ willingness to vote against the Governor’s proposed budget.  

 

Staff for the California Assembly’s subcommittee on education finance have instructed legislators that even though “CSU appears to be facing a fiscal crisis,” and “UC clearly faces significant financial challenges,” politicians should focus their hearings less on stopping the cuts and more on how the school systems “will weather increasing costs and potentially declining state and federal revenue.” 

 

This fatalism is baffling— more cowardice than analysis.  Decisions made by the Governor demonstrate that the need for cuts to higher education has been manufactured by treating UC and CSU differently than other state agencies. While state budget cuts may be necessary, they are being spread unevenly for political reasons, not financial ones.

 

As Jason Sisney, the budget advisor to the California Assembly Speaker, recently wrote, the July 2024 budget deal was that budget cuts would be equitably distributed across state agencies, and UC and CSU cuts would make up 22 percent of the state’s projected budget shortfall. Instead, Governor Newsom wants to increase spending, increase tax breaks, reduce cuts to state agencies, drawn down reserves, and still leave cuts to UC and CSU in place to cover 53 percent of the state’s resulting budget deficit. 

 

In other words, the Governor is proposing balancing the state’s budget on the backs of its four-year college students. This will take the form of increased class sizes, increased tuition, and increased debt, and possibly even one or more CSU campus closures and mergers. 

 

Can Democrats Stand Up to Their Governor?

 

On April 25, 2025, State Senator Catherine Blakespear, who describes UC San Diego as “in the heart of my district”, sent an email to constituents titled “Fighting for UC.” In it, she decried the Trump administration’s research cuts to UCSD, and pointed out that UCSD had already implemented a hiring freeze and was reducing graduate student enrollment. 

 

What Blakespear failed to mention is that she has declined to sign onto a letter from more than 60 of her colleagues in the state legislature opposing cuts to the University of California’s budget. In fact, she didn’t mention the Governor’s proposed budget cuts at all, or encourage her constituents to speak out against them. 

 

Blakespear made it seem as if UCSD hiring freezes and budget cuts were coming from the federal government controlled by Republicans, when much if not most of it is currently coming from the state government controlled by Democrats.

 

Like many Democrats, Blakespear is happy to oppose Donald Trump’s policies. But when it comes to standing up to a Democratic Governor, will she or others really “fight for UC”?

 

In my conversations with multiple state legislators this term, both Republican and Democrat, I have yet to find a single one who wants to cut the UC or CSU budget. I have yet to find a single one who wants the quality of instruction to go down while the cost of tuition goes up. 

 

Many California state legislators graduated from one or more public colleges or universities in the state. They know that California voters are mostly proud of their public higher education system, and see it as a core part of the services that the state provides.

 

And yet, when you ask a California state legislator if they’d vote against a budget that includes cuts to the UC and CSU, most Democrats— even those who sign letters opposing the cuts— will tell you that they have no choice but to vote for whatever budget the Governor, the Assembly Speaker and the Senate leader negotiate behind closed doors. Their ability to move legislation requires ceding their agency on the budget, or else be ostracized by their party leadership. 

 

When you meet with the staff of the Assembly or Senate leaders, you get the reverse message: the leadership needs to hear as much as possible from members before they head into negotiations about the need to protect higher education. 

 

Few will commit. Almost everyone is equivocal. One legislator I met with repeatedly asked if we could talk about how the state legislature could oppose Trump’s attacks on higher education, so we could avoid discussion of the state budget altogether.

 

And some share legislators whispers that because the Governor provided a 6 month delay to people impacted by wildfires to file their income taxes, and a 12 month delay to file their property taxes, his “revised” budget proposal, coming very soon, is likely to be even worse. 

 

Not treating delays in revenue collection as shortfalls is also somehow off the table. 

 

Taking their cues from elected leadership over the past couple years, UC has already increased non-resident student tuition 10 percent, and the CSU system is in the midst of raising tuition 34 percent over 5 years. Who knows what more may be coming?

 

Fighting for Higher Ed at the State and Federal Level

 

Shared sacrifice may be necessary during times of budget woes, even ones created by administrative error. Yet we as college teachers, students, staff and community members need to tell our politicians that balancing the budget on the backs of college students is totally unacceptable. 

 

For decades, politicians across the US, regardless of political party, have consistently raided the budgets of their public universities during recessions, or to cover the rising costs of health care, corrections, and other services they don’t want to tax people for. Politicians may publicly bemoan tuition increases. But they secretly depend on increasing student debt to balance state government budgets.

 

That game may be coming to an end. It ultimately relies upon federal grants and loans to students that Republicans are threatening to eviscerate in what the Debt Collective has called “the most dangerous higher education bill in history.” And it relies upon students believing that the inferior education provided to them in increasingly large and online classes is worth going into debt.

 

It's up to campus labor unions to invest their resources into organizing not just their own members but organizing students and community members to contact their legislators to oppose state government budget cuts.

 

It would be great if the defense of public higher education only required standing up to Donald Trump. But for now, we also have to stand up to Democrats whose support for public higher education is always hostage to their other priorities.

 

Contact your legislator to Stop the Cuts!

·      UC-AFT: For teachers and librarians represented by AFT

·      Teamsters: For UC and CSU clerical workers and building trades

·      University of California: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/get-involved/advocate/state-budget

·      California State University: https://www.calstate.edu/impact-of-the-csu/government/Advocacy-and-State-Relations/Pages/Budget-Advocacy.aspx

The Strike continues with no end in sight.  Although there have been tentative agreements concerning Post-Docs and Academic Researchers, in the Academic Student Employee and Student Researcher units, the parties appear to remain well apart on the fundamental economic issues.  This distance is most easily seen in the ASE category: although the UAW made significant adjustments in its proposal UC responded with little change.  You can see the latest UAW wage proposal here and the latest UC wage proposal here.  

It is impossible from the outside to tell where the negotiations are headed.  But what I want to try to do here is offer some suggestions for how we could think about the gap, how we got here, and what we might do in the future to alter the conditions that have created what is undoubtedly a crisis at the University, and a depressing foreshadowing of the end of UC as a serious research university.  If the latter does happen the responsibility will ultimately lie with UCOP and the Regents with some support from the campus Chancellors.

The first point is that it seems clear that there is a fundamental gap in the way that each side is defining these negotiations.  UC is approaching this as if it were a conventional labor negotiation with a class of workers whose position is fundamentally stable.  The UAW and its supporters on the other hand, start from the position that they have been placed in an untenable economic position.  Given the fact that TA wages have barely kept up with national inflation over the years combined with the extreme cost of housing in California, they cannot continue with relatively minor adjustments in the dollar amount of their monthly pay.  To make matters worse, UC's latest offer has a first year adjustment that is about equal to current inflation.  In this light, UCOP appears completely out of touch with the reality of life on campuses and indifferent to its lack of knowledge.

This image of autocratic disregard was only deepened by Provost Brown's appalling letter to the faculty last week.  Although much of it was standard UCOP pablum, he inspired widespread faculty hostility with his closing flourish threatening faculty members who refused to pick up the work of striking workers with discipline beyond the docking of pay.  For the last three years, faculty and lecturers  have performed an enormous amount of additional labor to keep the university afloat during the pandemic: transforming their courses, spending additional time with students, planning for campus transformations, and putting their research duties on the side to maintain "instructional continuity" as the administration likes to put it.  After all this effort, for the Provost to threaten disciplinary action for those who choose not to pick up the work of striking TAs or to act upon their own convictions about academic integrity, manifests a contempt for the faculty that is hard to ignore.

It's important to grasp UC's budgetary situation correctly.  Most importantly, the usual invocation of the university's 46 billion dollar budget needs to be put aside.  Most of that budget is tied up in the medical centers or in funding for designated purposes.  The real budget that is relevant is the core budget made up of tuition, state funding, and some UC funds.  It comes in closer to $10 billion (Display 1) and is largely tied up in salaries across the campuses.  As Chris and I have been pointing out for nearly 15 years, UC has been subject to core educational austerity surrounded by compartmentalized privatized wealth (although we should notice that the medical centers barely stay in the black).  This crisis will not be overcome by hidden caches of money floating around the university.  The problem is deeper than that:  its roots lie in the combination of state underfunding and the expansion of expensive non-instructional (often non-academic research) activities that have taken up too much of campus's payrolls.

But I want to stress that this reality does not mean that the graduate students are being unreasonable in seeking wages that enable them to perform their employment duties and pursue their studies.  Instead, it is a sign of how deep the failure of the University has been in (not) providing a sustainable funding model both for students and faculty supporting students.  The Academic Senate has been pointing to this problem for at least two decades.  In statements and reports from 2006, 2012, and 2020, the Senate has repeatedly insisted that graduate student support was insufficient and proposed steps to improve it.  Even the administration itself has sometimes recognized its depth.  To take only one example from 2019, UCOP's Academic Planning Council declared that:  

UC must do better at financially supporting its doctoral students, particularly as it seeks to diversify the graduate student body. The University cannot compete with its peers for talented candidates if it does not offer competitive support. In 2017 the gap in average net stipend between UC and its peers was nominally $680.3 In actuality the gap is much greater due to California’s high cost of living - with factored in, the average gap in doctoral support is closer to $3,400.4 This is a huge difference but not insurmountable. The Workgroup urges UC leadership to make every effort to close the gap so that the quality of UC’s doctoral programs is maintained and enhanced.

UC campuses, with planning and prioritization, could guarantee five-year multi-year funding to doctoral students upon admission. According to current data, about 77 percent of doctoral students across UC receive stable or increasing net stipends for five consecutive years.5 (Appendix 1.) With some exceptions, this multi-year funding is relatively consistent across campuses and disciplines. However, this funding is typically not presented as a full five-year multi-year guaranteed package upon admission. Offering five-year funding upon admission would enhance recruitment of high-potential students, offer financial security, and address one of the chief stressors for doctoral students - worry over continued funding while in the program.

In addition to offering guaranteed five-year funding, the University must address the issue of graduate student housing. Graduate students, many of whom have family responsibilities, face enormous challenges in finding affordable housing. Without a targeted effort to address graduate student housing, UC’s capacity to attract and retain qualified candidates is at serious risk.  (4-5)

And yet the problem persists.  The Academic Senate has stressed this issue repeatedly and with great force.  A recent letter from the UCLA Divisional Senate's Executive Board has pointed its finger at the problem--the need for renewed state funding.   It is time for the administration to do something to fix it--and something that doesn't simply damage other parts of the academic endeavor.

UCOP will continue--as they always do--to insist that we cannot get more money out of the state to pay for what needs to be done.  But let's press on that point a little more.  It is certainly possible that we are heading for a recession--the Federal Reserve seems determined to induce one to put labor in its place.  But does that mean that the state doesn't have the capacity to respond to an emergency at the University?  Despite all the talk about a budget shortfall, Dan Mitchell at the UCLA Faculty Association Blog has been pointing out that the situation is far less clear than the Legislative Analyst is insisting (and the University is repeating).  For one thing, revenues have been higher than expected and that even with the possibility of a downturn the state has around 90 billion dollars in usable reserves. If the state won't help it's not because of economic necessity but a matter of political choice.  After all, the Governor had no problem finding $500 million to pay for a private immunology research park at UCLA that provides little, if any, real benefit to the campus academic program.  The Governor and the state can do more for the educational core of the University than they are doing: and if UCOP and the Regents can't show the state how necessary that is, then one wonders again what their purpose is.  

I want to make one final point.  UC is the research university of the state and UC insists that graduate education is at the heart of its purpose.  But if UCOP actually agrees with that then the question must be: what do we need to do to have academic graduate education in a sustainable form?  What resources do we need to enable students to both contribute to the larger functioning of the university and to pursue their studies?  Are we willing to have only graduate programs where students have family money or have already flipped a startup?  Or where they are here to gain an additional credential to take back to their jobs?  Does UCOP remain committed to UC's contributions to disciplines across the spectrum of knowledge?  Or does it only care about graduate students (and others) as cheap and disposable labor?  

I don't expect that these negotiations or this strike can answer or settle these questions.  But UC is at a crossroads and the university--especially its leadership--must face up to that.  The long-term question raised by the strike is whether UC will continue as a research university; if we don’t make it possible for future scholars to attend, we will have forfeited our purpose.  There is an opportunity here to take the first steps towards creating a new sustainable vision of a twenty-first century research university.  Or we can continue as we have in decline.  The choice ultimately is UCOP's and the Regents'.

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(I've focused here on the ASE unit because the Student Researcher Unit is admittedly a more complicated problem.  The vast majority of GSRs are supported by external grants and those grants have both limits and their own rules.  To some extent UC has been negotiating with someone else's money.  That doesn't mean the situation is impossible but rather that it has to be implemented in such a fashion as to protect Principal Investigators from damaging unintended consequences.)