News: Possible Mid-May UC Strike

From the Sacramento Bee: A union representing University of California service and health care workers plans to launch an open-ended strike next month over allegations that the university had illegally increased members’ insurance costs and refused to bargain over housing benefits. The union said the open-ended strike, scheduled to begin May 14, would be the first of its kind at UC health systems and would impact all 10 university campuses and other facilities across the state. “Instead of the university really bargaining in good faith, they illegally have imposed these terms that amount to pay cuts,” Michael Avant, president of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299, said in an interview.

AFSCME Local 3299’s last contract with UC expired in July 2024. Negotiations have continued on and off in the two years since bargaining began. In November 2024, AFSCME Local 3299 went on a multi-day strike over low wages and health care costs. The union represents roughly 40,000 UC service and patient care technical workers who work at university facilities across the state... UC Health cares for 2.5 million patients each year and serves Californians in 99% of the state’s ZIP codes.

Heather Hansen, a spokesperson for UC’s Office of the President, said in a statement that the university was disappointed at the union’s strike announcement. “Given the progress at the table, an open-ended strike is unnecessary and risks disruption for patients, students, and campus operations,” Hansen said...

Full story at https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article315419872.html.

Note that the Regents will be meeting May 5-6 at UCLA, i.e., before the May 14th deadline. So, if there is no settlement by then, there will likely be much said about this matter during public comments.

Straws in the Wind - Part 320

From Inside Higher Ed: Susan McMahon, an educator, author and podcaster, will no longer be Utah Valley University’s commencement speaker, following backlash over her social media posts about Charlie Kirk’s death... After Kirk was fatally shot while speaking on UVU’s campus last year, McMahon made a post that has since been deleted listing quotes from Kirk, with the caption, “These aren’t sound bites taken out of context. Millions of people feel they were harmed, and the murder that was horrific and should never have happened does not magically erase what was said or done.”

When UVU announced last week that McMahon would be this year’s commencement speaker, university president Astrid Tuminez called her “a force of nature and a force for good...” But backlash came swiftly. The president of UVU’s Turning Point USA chapter criticized the decision to host McMahon as “tone-deaf and disrespectful to those still affected” by Kirk’s assassination... The university announced in a press release Thursday that McMahon would no longer speak at graduation due to safety concerns...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/04/17/commencement-speaker-who-criticized-charlie-kirk-out-uvu.

Already Ahead

April is the big income tax month and a lot of people pay up at the April 15 deadline. As the chart above shows, although the month is not complete, we are already ahead of the governor's projection - made at the time the January budget proposal was made - for April income tax receipts. We are also not far from the point when the governor will be submitting his May Revise budget. The continued above-projection figures for tax receipts will likely influence that submission and how the legislature looks at it.

The daily budget tracker for April is at https://sco.ca.gov/2026_personal_income_tax_tracker.html.

Want to subscribe to this blog?

You can't subscribe directly. But you can subscribe indirectly to this blog via a service called Blogtrottr. Go to blogtrottr.com and you will get a screen like the one shown above. Fill in the URL for the blog:

https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/ and put in your email address. 

You will then receive an email at the email address you provided asking you to confirm. After you confirm, you will receive an email notification of new postings whenever they appear. If there are, say, three postings on a particular day, you will receive three notifications (one for each one). 

Note and full disclosure: There are ads on these notifications.

Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 147

From the Harvard Crimson: A group of faculty members is pressing Harvard’s top brass to overhaul how it investigates professors, raising concerns that current procedures lack basic safeguards and could expose faculty to unfair or overly opaque disciplinary processes. The effort, led by a working group within the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, has gained momentum in recent months as faculty examine investigations that have unfolded across the University...

“We are concerned that some investigations have failed to adhere to reasonable standards of due process and that this threatens academic freedom,” University Professor Eric S. Maskin, a co-president of CAFH, wrote in a statement...

Last fall, the University launched a probe into former University President Lawrence H. Summers, just months before his dramatic resignation. And mathematics professor Martin Nowak was placed on paid administrative leave by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Faculty Conduct Committee pending a formal investigation. (The FCC is a two-year pilot committee that reviews professional conduct concerns that do not fall under Non-Discrimination and Anti-Bullying procedures). The University has also conducted several less public — but also scrutinized — internal investigations into Harvard faculty in recent years, including Anthropology professor John L. Comaroff, Economics professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr., Geology professor Daniel P. Schrag, and HKS Lecturer Marshall L. Ganz ’64...

Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/4/17/cafh-faculty-investigations/.

Harvard's Budget Leak

Since we have been blogging about UCLA budget matters on and off (including yesterday), it might be of interest to look at another university's budget. 

Harvard operates on a more decentralized basis than UCLA. And it doesn't have its own hospital (although it has a med school). Apparently, for years, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) has released aggregate budgets: Income statements (Revenues, Expenditures) and balance sheet (assets and liabilities). But after FY 2025 had passed, it didn't make a public release of its financial report. Nonetheless, it provided the FY 2025 report to selected individuals, one or more of which leaked it to the Harvard Crimson. The Harvard Crimson then published the report.* You can find the report at:

https://ia903207.us.archive.org/35/items/ucla-budget-book-v-final-feb-2026/Harvard%20Faculty%20of%20Arts%20and%20Sciences%20financial%20report%20FY2025.pdf

The income statement in the report shows a deficit for FY 2025 of $7.7 million. How bad is that? Expenditures were about $1.8 billion so the deficit was 0.4% of spending. How much did FAS have in the bank (liquid assets) to cover the deficit? The balance sheet in the report says there are "deposits with the university" of around $2 billion. So presumably, nobody is panicking. Why there was an attempt to keep the report semi-secret is an interesting question.

UCLA needs at a minimum to turn out reports such as Harvard's on a reasonably timely basis. Yes, it is more complicated at UCLA because of the health enterprise, as we noted yesterday. But it isn't impossible.

===

*https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/4/13/fas-unpublished-annual-report/.

Straws in the Wind - Part 319

From the Yale Daily News: The English department has nearly halved the number of sections of an introductory writing course, from 32 last fall to 17 this fall, as budget cuts constrain academic offerings at Yale. In addition to that decrease in the fall sections of English 1014, “Writing Seminars,” the number for English 1020, “Reading and Writing the Modern Essay,” has dropped from 17 to 14. The reductions are among the latest impacts on undergraduate academics of budget pressure in anticipation of an upcoming endowment tax hike. They come on top of decisions not to renew the contracts of several instructional faculty members, which the Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean described as being affected by budget “trade-offs.”

“These reductions were imposed upon us by the FAS Teaching Resource Advisory Committee, which has also imposed an increase in class size,” Feisal Mohamed, the English department’s director of undergraduate studies, wrote in an email to the News. “As a department, we are deeply concerned that the incoming class will not be able to find seats in introductory writing courses, and that those who do will receive less individualized attention.” ...

Full story at https://yaledailynews.com/articles/fewer-english-writing-sections-are-being-offered-due-to-budget-cuts.