Our VP of Legislation, Trevor Griffey, has published a new piece about the devastating budget cuts being imposed on our campuses, which we have republished with his permission below.
For academic year appointments, reappointment letters should be received by June 1 (quarter campuses) or May 1 (semesters). If you have received a layoff notice or had your appointment reduced, let us know using this form so we can fight back together!
BETRAYED: UC IS ABOUT TO MAKE $267 MILLION IN UNNECESSARY BUDGET CUTS, HARMING INSTRUCTION AND UNDERMINING GOODWILL WITH THE STATE LEGISLATURE AND GOVERNOR
by Trevor Griffey
How does it feel to be laid off unnecessarily?
June 1 is the deadline for University of California (UC) campuses to reappoint lecturers, who teach one third of all undergraduate classes at UC, for the 2025-26 school year. Our union, UC-AFT, expects hundreds of UC instructors across the state to lose their jobs, their health insurance and possibly their careers.
UC campus administrators will blame its mass layoffs on a budget cut from the state legislature. But that budget cut may never come. And even if it does, many UC campuses likely have enough money in their reserves to offset the resulting cuts.
In January, the Governor proposed cutting the UC’s general fund allocation by 8 percent, or $397 million, for the 2025-26 school year. UC campuses incorporated these cuts into their budget plans for next year.
In response to months of lobbying from faculty, students, staff, regents and even administrators, the Governor reduced his proposed budget cut on May 14 from 8% to 3%, from $397 million to $130 million. That’s a difference of $267 million, enough to save hundreds— if not thousands— of jobs from the chopping block.
Publicly, the UC President praised the proposal, saying “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.”
But privately, the UC’s campuses are moving forward with 8% budget cuts in 2025-26 anyway, as if the Governor never made his announcement.
At UC Irvine (UCI), where I teach US History, the effects are devastating. If UCI were not moving forward with the assumption that the state will cut UC’s budget by 8%, UCI could save as much as $21 million next year. Instead, UCI is cutting over $10 million from its schools in 2025-26. The School of Law will receive a 30% cut next year. Pharmacy, Nursing, and Arts will all be cut by more than 10 percent. Business, 8%. The School of Humanities is managing a 4% cut by laying off over 20 lecturers and likely even more graduate student employees, making it likely that there won’t be enough composition classes next year for first year students to meet the prerequisites to take upper division courses.
And so the story goes, across the state, with dozens of potentially unnecessary cuts at each campus. UC Santa Cruz, which is planning on cutting $13.7 million from its budget this year to cover for state budget cuts that may never come, is decimating its language instruction— eliminating German and Farsi instruction altogether, cutting half the Italian curriculum, eliminating second year Arabic. UC Merced, which has already budgeted for a more than $11 million cut from the state next year, has already laid off eight senior composition instructors who each had over 6 years of teaching experience. Hundreds of others nervously await the June 1 deadline for UC to reappoint them for next year.
There is a particular cruelty to UC campuses laying off instructors that it may not need to, while sitting on a combined $6.5 billion they could draw from in the Blue and Gold Endowment Pool. The Pool, which is a short-term investment vehicle for UC campuses, has had double-digit annual growth until Trump was elected. According to UC, the fund “helps our campuses increase their revenues while reducing reliance on state funds.” Campuses zeroed it out entirely in 2020, withdrawing $1.8 billion to help manage budget uncertainties during the COVID pandemic. Yet it’s not clear if any campuses plan on drawing it down to mitigate or prevent the $397 million in cuts that they’re making next year.
UC budget cuts also set up a nightmare scenario for the state government. The Governor—responding to lobbying from UC students, faculty, staff, and the public— has risked political capital by proposing to reduce the cut to UC’s budget in a year when California is facing a significant deficit. At the same time, the Governor’s revised budget includes painful cuts to health care for undocumented immigrants, and wage freezes for state employees that may violate their collective bargaining agreements.
If the California state government cuts UC’s budget only $130 million, but UC campuses continue to cut $379 million from their budgets anyway, UC won’t just inflict needless suffering on its students and teachers. It will have completely violated the goodwill of the Governor and the legislature by padding its reserves with money that could have gone elsewhere.
That’s why, if the legislature is going to protect 4-year higher education from deep cuts this year, as it should, it may have to stipulate that in exchange, no recipient of UC or CSU general fund revenue should increase its reserves during the 2025-26 school year.
The problem of UC campuses moving forward with hundreds of millions of dollars of unnecessary budget cuts also highlights a need for greater transparency in public higher education spending.
The California Legislative Analyst Office recently identified that “While the composition of the [UC] workforce has not changed much from 2014-15 through 2023-24, the most pronounced change has been in the share of managers, which has grown from 7 percent to 10 percent of the total workforce.” In addition, while UC faculty hiring has been relatively flat since COVID, the number of managers employed at its nine campuses that teach undergraduates has growth 26 percent, from 3,266 to 4,122. During that same time, the number of senior professionals working at undergraduate serving campuses increased by 39 percent, from 5,823 to 8,106.
Partly as an effect of this top-heavy growth, more than half of UC campuses are suffering from “structural deficits”, and they’re making painful cuts to instruction that should focus more on upper management and administration instead.
One fix for this lack of transparency would be for the California state legislature to require that all public four-year higher education institutions and their medical centers share their budget models for the 2025-26 school year, and each year thereafter. That way, the state legislature will be able to evaluate in future years whether the money that it allocates to UC and CSU for instruction isn’t diverted and spent in ways that don’t directly serve our schools’ students.
