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Friday, May 26, 2023

Student-Worker Strike Repercussions - Part 12 (Leg Assembly Statement)

According to an email circulated on May 25, the Legislative Assembly has endorsed the statement at the end of the letter from the UCLA Academic Senate Executive Board below 84 In Favor, 2 Against, 2 Abstained, and 19 were present but did not vote.

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April 27, 2023

Legislative Assembly

Los Angeles Division

Re: Post-UAW Strike Concerns and Finances

Dear Members of the Legislative Assembly,

UCLA and the University of California are at a crossroads: PhD training models are transforming in real time, and as we address the funding and policy consequences of UAW academic worker contract settlements our core values and academic mission are at stake. The divisional Academic Senate Executive Board (EB) hereby conveys related letters from several Senate committees and invites the Legislative Assembly to endorse a statement found at the conclusion of this memorandum.

A letter from the Council on Planning and Budget (CPB) proposes a path forward as UCLA considers how to fund costs associated with the contract settlements: “CPB members expressed to [Interim Vice Chancellor Baird-James] their view that the campus should be pursuing targeted cuts to non-academic units in order to help fund the increased costs of graduate education.” Such targeted cuts, the Senate recognizes, require analysis, staff time, political prowess, and difficult decision-making, but our times call for prioritizing this effort alongside seeking increased public funding. The Academic Senate stands ready to support such efforts and appreciates the openness of the Interim Chief Financial Officer and the Office of Academic Planning and Budget to restoring the Academic Senate’s involvement in campus budgeting. As CPB put it, “The view of CPB is that it is only through a deeper and consistent involvement of faculty in campus budget processes that we will be able to influence resource allocation decisions for graduate student funding.”

The Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (CODEI) “views the expected budgetary shortfalls as a threat to this university’s continuing support for the combination of excellence and inclusion that has been the hallmark of a UCLA education.” The committee “is concerned that passing the costs of these new contracts on to the already precarious finances of departments, research centers, and individual faculty stands to disproportionately impact URM graduate students and faculty. The Committee is also concerned about the threat posed to a central charge of the CODEI committee, which is to support the recruitment and retention of an increasingly diverse faculty.” CODEI described issues including undermining recent successes in diversifying UCLA’s PhD education, slowing the transition to Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) status, increasing burdens on faculty just as UCLA is making progress in diversifying our faculty, and harming undergraduate education as we aim to educate a diverse undergraduate student body.

The Council of Faculty Chairs summed up the concerns of many Senate faculty: “The financial responsibility for reinvesting in graduate education and postdoctoral training in the wake of the related contract settlements must not be borne disproportionately by academic units and faculty PIs.” Toward that end, “Every budget must be on the table, including administrative budgets, as our campus and UC system address cost increases.” Like CODEI, “members expressed concern that labor and graduate education are changing at a moment when UCLA has committed to graduate student and faculty diversity and becoming a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI).”

Faculty recognize that money does not grow on trees. However, it may be time to make hard decisions because, as these Academic Senate bodies have suggested, taking no major action leads to a default outcome of real cuts to academic units and research, cuts to our academic mission. Cutting non-academic programs may be painful, but there are real costs to choking the PhD pipeline, including to the lives of talented potential students. There are real costs to shrinking UCLA’s research profile, and there are real costs to losing faculty because of the ways that the faculty and the academic mission are being stretched and, it sometimes seems, sidelined. Faculty Rebuilding and Renewal is essential. For many colleagues, the experience of being a faculty member at UCLA has changed profoundly in recent times, as state funding per student has decreased, the student-to-faculty ratio increased, salaries lost ground, and, for many colleagues, demands grow and grow. As the Faculty Welfare Committee knows and a systemwide Academic Senate survey showed, burnout is real.

UCLA and the University of California face an existential challenge, one that requires a bold response that centers the academic mission and its core elements of research, teaching, and service. The Executive Board asks the Legislative Assembly to endorse the following statement:

The Legislative Assembly of UCLA’s divisional Academic Senate calls on our campus and the University of California to center the academic mission in our responses to the budgetary and policy challenges arising in the wake of contract settlements with UAW academic workers. Academic units, PhD training, and faculty research must not be undermined, either by design or by default. The faculty stand ready to support efforts to increase public funding in support of our academic mission, and we urge the Administration to take bold approaches to meeting funding needs by making targeted cuts to administrative budgets and non-academic programs rather than from academic budgets. Nothing less than the future of education at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels, and higher education more generally, is at stake. Should we make the wrong choices now, there will be dire consequences in the future for the state’s social, intellectual, and economic vibrancy.

Sincerely,

Jessica Cattelino

Chair

UCLA Academic Senate

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Source: UCLA Academic Senate, Data Management, Meeting of May 18, pp. 692-693. Files available to Senate members via Senate website. 

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