Who is in? Who is out?

The systemwide Academic Senate is circulating a letter from UC President Milliken to the chancellors regarding shared governance for clinical faculty who are not members of the Senate. Only ladder faculty, in residence faculty, and clinical X faculty are members. There is concern about lack of shared governance for clinical faculty who aren't. Apparently, a proposal to add them to the Senate was earlier rejected.

...As the University of California’s health enterprise has grown, the growth in some faculty series, notably the Health Sciences Clinical Professor series has raised questions about how to best integrate clinical faculty into University governance. Faculty in the Clinical X, In-Residence, and Ladder-rank series are members of the Academic Senate. However, the majority of clinical faculty are in the Health Sciences Clinical Professor series, which is not a faculty series in the Academic Senate.

Non-Academic Senate clinical faculty requests for a role in shared governance were noted in a 2020 task force report. To begin to address these concerns, a Special Committee on Health Sciences and Clinical Affairs was then formed. From 2024 through 2025, under then-President Michael Drake’s tenure, non-Academic Senate clinical faculty, Academic Senate leadership, and UC’s health science schools proposed various approaches to expand access to University governance for clinical faculty. However, the issue remains largely unresolved to this day...

Full letter and other documents at:

https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/systemwide-senate-review-tf-on-clinical-faculty-representation-9-30-26.pdf.

Comments concerning establishing some alternative method of representation are due in mid-November. There has also been a suggestion of raising the limit on the number of clinical X faculty, presumably to allow some conversion of clinical faculty to the clinical X series - which would put them in the Senate.

Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 201

From the NY Times: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission asked a federal judge to compel Harvard to hand over records in the agency’s investigation into what it described as “systemic discrimination” in the university’s employment practices, particularly against white men. In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Massachusetts, the E.E.O.C. accused the university of noncompliance, escalating a legal battle that has been brewing for more than a year, court filings show.

Lawyers for Harvard have called the E.E.O.C.’s investigation part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to bring the university to heel. “The government has not concealed that its all-out campaign targets Harvard for the assertion of its constitutional rights,” the lawyers wrote in a June motion, which the agency included in the lawsuit filed on Tuesday. Harvard’s lawyers noted that Andrea Lucas, the Republican chair of the E.E.O.C., filed her civil rights charge against Harvard in April 2025, four days after the university sued the federal government for freezing $2.2 billion in funding.

...Ms. Lucas has been keen to use what are known as commissioner’s charges — allegations based not in a complaint from an employee, but on an E.E.O.C. commissioner’s belief that a violation of the law may have occurred...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/30/business/economy/harvard-eeoc-diversity-hiring.html. 

Straws in the Wind - Part 487

News release from Yale Faculty Senate: The Yale FAS-SEAS Faculty Senate’s Instructional Faculty Committee completed a report calling for stronger job security, greater compensation and a stronger voice in university governance for instructional faculty. Submitted to the Senate on September 10, 2026, in closed session and published over the weekend, the report brings together recommendations from four prior Yale reports on instructional faculty issued between 2017 and 2026 and urges university leaders to establish an implementation schedule and track progress annually.

The report comes in response to cuts to lecturer ranks last year and the negative climate for instructional faculty present in the 2025 University-wide Faculty Climate Report. Instructional faculty comprise roughly 40% of FAS-SEAS faculty and are widely held to teach a greater percentage of undergraduate students annually than ladder faculty. The report also comes in response to the Report on Trust in Higher Education, which called for a renewed centering of teaching, and the university’s new mission statement, which elevates the place and practice of teaching at Yale...

Full release at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fzwRyc4bYfZP0qJKuRvfhqh9CoxnClxD/view.

Newsom in the 3rd Quarter

As blog readers may know, we keep track of Gov. Newsom's activities, particularly his not-a-campaign for president, on a regular basis, combined with other related political events. He doesn't pay much attention  to UC, except mentioning it in extolling the California economy. Unless there is some highly unlikely event, Xavier Becerra will be the next governor. However, he will be coming in to office in January facing a constitutional requirement to present a budget. Much of the legwork will, of necessity, have been done in the next few months by Newsom's Dept. of Finance group. In any case, our Newsom & related files on the Internet Archive for July-September can be seen at:

https://archive.org/details/newsom-7-1-2026-savings-accounts-for-kids.

We're still looking for numbers and definitions

As we have pointed out, UCLA administration keeps citing numbers - with regard to childcare closings and anything else in the budget while not providing the basic accounts. Where is an income statement for 2025-26? Revenue? Spending? By unit? Where is a balance sheet? When "deficits" are cited, what definition is being used? Yours truly looked at the UCLA website and the latest year available is 2024-25:

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https://www.finance.ucla.edu/corporate-accounting/ucla-annual-financial-reports

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Yet, when it comes to justifying the childcare closure, the powers-that-be cite bits and pieces of data from fiscal year 2025-26. And apparently, the UCLA student newspaper has access to some kind of documentation for 2025-26. And there is reference to projections for the current 2026-27 fiscal year. From the Daily Bruin:

UCLA’s childcare centers are projected to incur a year-end budget deficit of $9.1 million ahead of their June 2027 closure, according to financial statements reviewed by the Daily Bruin. UCLA’s Early Care and Education centers, which primarily serve the children of UCLA faculty and students, will close in June 2027 because of budget issues, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Darnell Hunt announced in an August email to parents. The university initially projected that ECE’s accumulated deficit would be $8.6 million by June 2027, but the figure was adjusted to include food service costs, a UCLA spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

...ECE’s projected operating expenses for the 2026-27 academic year are about $10.2 million, according to the documents. Parent tuition accounts for more than $6.2 million in revenue, and remaining costs are paid by the university, state funding and student fees, the documents said.

The childcare centers’ financial difficulties come as UCLA experiences broader budgetary woes. UCLA had a year-end budget deficit of $58 million for the 2025-26 academic year, down from its initial projections of $220 million, Chancellor Julio Frenk said in a September campuswide email...

Full story at https://dailybruin.com/2026/10/04/ucla-childcare-centers-face-projected-9-1-million-deficit-ahead-of-closure.

State and local governments (cities, counties) all produce budget estimates and projections. This is a university. We are not idiots. Not even imbeciles. Not even morons.

So let's get the latest numbers out there. Not bits and pieces in "statements." Not in unnamed documents available to some, but not others. After all, "We are ONE UCLA." Just get them out there. How about it?

Something added

We have previously blogged about the missing January Regents meeting. But today and tomorrow, the Regents have added a meeting: a retreat. No, you're not invited. No, you're not invited unless you want to travel to Lake Arrowhead.

Source: https://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/meetings/. 

Request for Dismissal

From the LA Times: In the University of California’s strongest rebuke yet of the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against it, the university is asking a federal judge to throw out a Justice Department lawsuit accusing UCLA of enabling antisemitism, describing the case in court filings as “political coercion.” ...UC’s lawyers asked U.S. District Judge Christina A. Snyder in Los Angeles to dismiss the case filed four months ago, alleging the government is “weaponizing” civil rights laws and has no legal basis for the suit...

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-10-01/uc-asks-judge-dismiss-doj-ucla-antisemitism-lawsuit.

Request for dismissal at https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/28713336/ucla.pdf. Alternative: https://ia600402.us.archive.org/9/items/2-final-hjaa-report.-the-soil-beneath-the-encampments/UCLA%20asks%20for%20dismissal%20of%20DOJ%20case%209-30-2026.pdf.

Statement by UC President Milliken supporting the request: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/uc-president-millikens-statement-universitys-motion-dismiss-department-justices-title-vi.