Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign hi folks, this is Dick Flack, your host on Talking Strategy Making History, a very particular and special episode of our podcast.
By the way, Daraka won't be joining us or maybe joining us later, he happened to be on the road. But my two guests, Jessica Taft and Charmaine Chua, these are the our two officers of the System Wide Faculty association, the Council of University of California Faculty Associations.
Kukva is the word we'll be using as a kind of shorthand for them.
And I'm delighted to have both Jessica and Charmaine as partners in this con, in this podcast because I've known them in some way for a number of years because they both have a connection originally to UC or originally in my life at UC Santa Barbara. Jessica was a got her PhD here in the Sociology department and I worked with her a bit in that process and she's one of our stellar alumni of our PhD program. Charmaine I got to know a bit in her several years as a faculty member, junior faculty member here at ucsb and I might say quite a force intellectually and in terms of community leadership on this campus. And just started, didn't you, Charmaine, at UC Berkeley, which was a tragic loss for Santa Barbara, but I'm sure you will invigorate Berkeley, which always needs it, even though its reputation is so dynamic.
I always figure they can use some help up there and you're going to give it to them, right? Anyway, so what motivates this particular episode and having these folks here is the, in a broad sense, the assault on higher education that is part of the Trump administration agenda for transforming America into a, you could call it fascist dictatorship or monarchy, or there are a variety of models they seem to be operating on, none of which have to do with preserving the Constitution, democracy or or even the way of life we're accustomed to. And higher education has been a target of attack on the part of the American right wing for maybe much more than a century.
In fact, I would say that the aaup, the organization of university professors back in the early teens of the 20th century, was rooted in similar kinds of attacks on academic freedom and professorial freedom of research, freedom to teach, freedom to speak and act as citizens. That was that's part of the history of American higher education.
So my old self, which has historical connection, keeps feeling this is not new, but there is something some new elements to it and some particularly dangerous and brutal elements to the current attack. One element is the effort to link the power of the federal government to the allegations of softness on antisemitism on the part of American institution higher education and using, ironically, the Civil Rights act and provisions of civil rights law to claim the right of the federal government to deny funds that, research funds and other funds that are routinely part of the higher education funding mechanisms in this country on the claim that antisemitism has to be constrained.
And that's a kind of unholy partnership between the, the Trump administration and some of the powerful organizations in the Jewish community who have been alleging the same thing.
And we just recently had the information that a billionaire, Mark Rowan, wrote an op ed in the, in the New York Times just the other day, claiming credit for being one of the architects of the Trump, the Trump design.
And he, he claims that this is rooted a lot in his concerns about antisemitism, but also more broadly, he wants to reform higher education to make it much more a institution amenable to and welcoming of right wing ideology. So this is really a multi pronged attack and it came home to us in the University of California. And if listeners don't know that I'm a Emeritus professor from UC at UC Santa Barbara, so I claim membership and 50 years membership in this faculty.
The Trump administration leveled a billion dollar plus extortionary fine on UCLA and tried to withhold a large portion of research funds on the grounds that UCLA was one of the colleges in the country that had been accepting of antisemitism or not doing enough to deal with it.
And that led Governor Newsom to immediately talk about blackmail and extortion and say, if I heard him right, that the people of California would not allow the university to be blackmailed in that way.
But that isn't necessarily the full story of what the university itself, the regents and the administration are doing.
One version of what they could have done, I suppose, is they could have themselves sued and said that what the government was trying to do, what Trump was trying to do, was illegal and they were going to court to contest it.
But that hasn't been their primary move. Their primary move has been to see if they could achieve some kind of negotiated settlement and I guess to thereby protect the large budgetary hit, not only at ucla, but what is likely to happen throughout the system in terms of withholding of funds. It's funds for research in the sciences and healthcare and all fields and also funds for supporting student aid and also an attack on the ability of the university to be welcoming to international students.
And I would say also, and this has gotten less publicity singling out of individual faculty, individual staff for their political behavior and punishing them. Well, all of that is what we may be able to cover with Jessica Taft and Charmaine Chua. Jessica is the recently elected statewide president, co president of the Faculty association statewide kukfa. And Charmaine Shua has been appointed by the president, I guess, of the organization to be what, Coordinator of campus organizing, which sounds like a broad definition of an activist role that they're hoping, and we all hope, that you'll be playing in that. You want to clarify a bit more what your role is, particularly with the faculty association. Charmaine, welcome.
[00:08:19] Speaker B: Hi, Dick. It's such a pleasure to be here. Sure. So I am the chair of Campus Organizing, which means that I oversee the 10 campus faculty associations process of shifting the Council of UC Faculty Associations into an organizing model in which we are hoping to be able to grow faculty power by using our role as the only faculty organization empowered to bargain over and fight for faculty working conditions in order for us to be able to exercise that collective power within our roles as UC faculty.
[00:08:54] Speaker A: So it's a somewhat long, several decades old organization that actually was, in my memory, because I was here during those years, created as an alternative to unionization and as a kind of, and actually was fairly conservative faculty who were the original founders of the Faculty association.
With that in mind, they didn't want unionization, my understanding. And Jessica, you can clarify this. The one campus that where the faculty association has the equivalent of collective bargaining power is at UC Santa Cruz, where you are a now distinguished professor in Latin American Studies, I guess, in sociology as well.
And I should have mentioned about Charmaine that you are now at Berkeley in the geography department.
You both have outstanding records as researchers and as intellectuals, and it's exciting that you are taking on this activist role to add to the work that you are doing. So what is the faculty association role at Santa Cruz that may make it distinctive? Just for.
[00:10:15] Speaker C: Yeah, so I'm also really glad to be here. It's nice to reconnect after all this time. And I think I appreciate you situating the conversation a bit in also the history of student movements, of movements in universities, attacks on universities that have happened before this one. I think it's always really helpful to think about how this moment has both continuity and difference from other moments. But yeah, at UC Santa Cruz, the faculty association is the only one of the faculty. So there are faculty associations on all 10 campuses of the UC system. Every campus has a separate faculty association. They come together in Kukva, the Council of UC Faculty Associations, which is the umbrella organization that coordinates and engages in sort of system wide struggle around faculty well being and rights and sort of advocating around and representing the faculty on matters relating to our employment. And our working conditions are, as you know, all of the teachers at from every level always say educators. Working conditions are students learning conditions. Our working conditions are also the conditions of research in the state of California. Our working conditions are the conditions of public service in the state of California because of the significance of the uc. So CUFA understands our role as advocating for faculty faculty rights and well being as workers to also mean that we advocate for a particular vision of public higher education.
[00:11:36] Speaker B: Right?
[00:11:37] Speaker C: That that's not just about faculty interest, although faculty interest is part of it. But when we're really defending faculty's capacity to act as teachers, as researchers and as public servants, we're also defending the well being of, of the university itself and of the state. So at most of the campuses, the faculty associations are independent employee organizations that do that work separately from, but often in relationship to the academic senate. But at UC Santa Cruz, we're the only faculty association that is officially a union. And so we have the right to collectively bargain with our administration over terms and conditions of employment that are set at the local level. So we can't negotiate with them over decisions that happen at the system wide level. And that constrains some of what we can do, but we can negotiate over local decisions or local implementations.
So the Santa Cruz Faculty association has become in that sense sort of more robust because it has this additional role that the other faculty associations do not have. And at the moment when that, when SCFA decided to become a union to unionize, this was in the early 1980s. The, there were votes taken at UCLA and Berkeley as well, and they were all very close. But Santa Cruz was the only one that unionized in that moment.
[00:13:00] Speaker A: So the faculty association is affiliated with the American association of Unity University Professors, aaup, which I mentioned earlier.
And AUP is also nationally evolving in the direction of becoming more union like.
And hopefully we'll have a little time to talk about that dimension of what the situation is, that is the development of. And Charmaine, you alluded to this, the empowerment of faculty, as you might say, workers, in addition to the kind of shared governance empowerment that us older generation of UC faculty believed we had power that way, and I put it that way because I think we had some.
It's not often as used as much as it could be, I think, but we're now at a time when we see that Senate power is not maybe the best way to exercise the voice of the faculty in this kind of crisis that we're in. And that leads me to the main thing I want people to hear about, because I think this, what we're about to describe deserves a lot of publicity and attention for a lot of reasons. And that is a lawsuit that I think was about a month ago announced that not only the faculty association, but the AAUP nationally and all of the unions, which are now several, I don't know how many unions are represented on campus. Eight or 10, something like 100,000 workers working for the UC system represented by these unions. All of them combined together to sponsor a lawsuit against the Trump administration's attack on the UC system.
And one would have hoped, I would have hoped that the UC administration would have done such a lawsuit. But this is the lawsuit that we have.
And the significance of having this kind of coalition bringing it, I think is itself something worth talking about.
So I guess both of you might have been involved much in the, in the process of building that lawsuit, the coalition. Is that the case? You know, something about anything you want to tell us about that process? Was it, what were the hurdles or difficulties and what does it represent for you?
[00:15:37] Speaker B: Sure, I can get started. So one of the things about this lawsuit that we're very fortunate to have is that it was filed by the aaup, the American association of University Professors, for which one of our faculty, a UCI law professor, Veena Dubal, serves as the legal counsel. Veena is a movement lawyer, a lawyer of employment, labor and a force. And she came into that role with the perspective that lawsuits are not just places that we can pull all of our hopes into, but are actually containers and vehicles for faculty organizing. And so the AAUP lawsuit was a kind of brainchild of Veena's, which we filed with a total of 19 plaintiffs that included the AAUP, the American Federation of Teachers, at the international level, the local AFT 3299, sorry, local AFT, UC AFT, the AFSCME, local 3299, the California Nurses Association, Teamsters Local 2010, which represents the trades, the UAW International UAW 4811, which represents graduate students, postdocs and researchers, UPTI Communication Workers of America, and the Council of UC Faculty Associations, as well as all 10 campus specific faculty associations. So it's a historic coalition car committee of interns and residents. SEIU is the only union on the UC campus that was not a named plaintiff, but they might plan to come on later. And so effectively, this is a wall to wall coalition, historic coalition of all of the unions represented representing UC employees that constitute together nearly a quarter of a million jobs that are key to the engine of California's economy, that are a key to the engine of making the UC work as a whole.
And we filed this lawsuit to bring a complaint against the President of the United States and multiple federal agencies and their officers basically to seek relief from continuing, from the Trump administration's continued use of the unlawful threat of federal funding cuts to illegally coerce the UC into suppressing free speech and academic freedom rights to implement harmful federal policies on the Trump administration's behalf and otherwise violating the constitutional and state law rights of UC faculty, students, academic employees and staff employees.
I'll let Jessica maybe keep going in terms of sort of what this lawsuit is seeking.
[00:18:10] Speaker C: I think before we get into like the, the what it's seeking and some of the harms that it outlines, I do think it's worth sort of really emphasizing how incredible it is that it was all of these unions, right. This kind of wall to wall effort is, is really remarkable. And I think it's the result of many years of the UC unions increasing collaboration across different units together, right. That this was not just a sort of one off, like immediate new relationship. Right. That the UC unions have over time built a stronger and stronger sense of their connection to one another. So I think that that's first like worth highlighting, right, that this is like the result of many years of working together, not a brand new relationship. And I think that there's, it's important and exciting to think about what we can do moving forward together in this way that sort of really does try to demonstrate solidarity across the different unions. But in terms of what it the lawsuit is doing is that it really is identifying the many harms that are already being felt by workers across all of these different units because of this demand letter to ucla. And it's important to note here, right. This is, it's harming people across the system, right. That these demands, this sort of attempt at extortion has impacts beyond UCLA, right. That we are a 10 campus system, that what happens on one campus isn't just impacting one campus, it actually impacts all of us.
That people across the system are feeling increasing fear and nervousness about teaching. They're feeling increasing nervousness about their research and whether or not they should continue their research trajectories on topics that have been deemed to be unacceptable or problems by the Trump administration.
So there's already impacts on free speech and academic freedom that are being felt. There are already Harms being felt around people actually losing their jobs because of these terminations of the, the funding. While some of that funding is coming back, even when people get some of those funds back from some of these class action lawsuits that have been happening, it's also still the case that people are anxious about hiring and making those longer term commitments because of this kind of climate of uncertainty. So the research engine of the University of California and people's livelihoods are being threatened by these demands.
I think also important to note in terms of some of these harms is that they harm beyond. Right? The lawsuit really identifies the harms to, to the members of these unions of these associations. And there are more and I'm happy to talk about more of them. But it also, I think is important to note that there's harm to the state of California by this as well, right? That the California, the University of California system is a public system. The UC is a public good. So a billion dollar ransom from the UC is a billion dollar ransom from the people of California from our public institution.
And so these demands are about, about us at this institution, but they're also about an institution that actually matters to the State of California as well. And so in that, and that this people of California benefit from in various ways. And so I think whether that's in terms of healthcare, right? Some of the demands are demands that would violate the rights of transgender individuals, right? Ending gender affirming care in UC hospitals for, for minors, violating rights around sort of access to different kinds of spaces, particular kind of definition of gender.
So these, the harms are extensive and they are in the lawsuit identified in terms of the harms to, to the university and to the workers of the university.
But they are also harms to, to the state, right?
[00:22:02] Speaker A: I mean, people may forget, but they now need to be reminded that the healthcare system of California is very much the university health institutions within the UC are fundamental to the state health system as a whole.
The research done at the university is so integrated and has been designed that way to, for the, for the overall economic and social well being of the state, that the taking away of large scale or any kind of grants undermines that research fundamentally. You can't just stop research and then restart it in many, many cases without a lot of damage permanently to the project.
And so those very concrete harms which the university itself officially is certainly willing eager to highlight, but beyond the material harms, you might say, and the economic harms which are fundamental and important to the state are the particular character of higher education and of academic freedom. You've alluded to the state serious chilling effects that have already presumably been happening for individual faculties in terms of their teaching, in terms of what they think they can say, and even their very identities.
Are any particular harms you want to highlight that you might want to develop that the lawsuit is inspired by any further harms?
[00:23:46] Speaker C: I mean, I think one of the other ones that feels important to me in the department that I teach in, I teach in a Latin American and Latino studies department, that part of our conceptual and intellectual framework is to think about the Americas in an interconnected hemispheric way. And we benefit profoundly from the presence of international students in that project.
And international students are particular one of the sort of. Again, we don't actually know all of the details of what the demands are in the Trump administration's demand to the uc, some of it has been disclosed via the press. And it seems that one piece of this would be a demand to share disciplinary records of international students with the federal government and to avoid recruitment of so called, quote, anti Western or anti American international students. And those terms are left entirely undefined. And so this not only means that it will be it. It's not only harm to international students, right. Who then can't express a full diversity of their opinions, perspectives and ideas, so it inhibits their free speech and academic freedom, but this also harms the broader community that learns from these students and their perspectives. Right. That part of being an academic community together is learning from and with a variety of people from a variety of locations and perspectives. And this particular piece, for someone who teaches in a department that really benefits from that kind of thinking across experiences, feels deeply concerning to the construction of an actually functioning, vibrant intellectual community.
[00:25:23] Speaker A: And then there is the danger, and maybe, Charmaine, you can speak to this, the attack on people because of their political behavior. For example, people who've been advocates for Palestinian justice, whether they're students or international students, domestic students, faculty and so forth.
Are any actual events like that have happened already in terms of threats to or other damage to people who've been active in that sense?
[00:25:57] Speaker B: Sure. So there are maybe two things worth saying here. The first is that the lawsuit is making an unconstitutional coercion argument. So it's making the argument that the UC as an administrative body is being coerced to act in ways that it would not otherwise act. The University of California, as we know, is the birthplace of the free speech movement. It has always been one of the forefronts of progressive faculty being able to use evidence based academic research to foreground claims around questions of justice and equity. And what's happening right now is that what J.D. vance Trump himself have often sort of directly cited is that they see the foreclosure and termination of federal funding as a cudgel through which they intend to hold back or discipline faculty for their attempts to indoctrinate people. And so Vance has been on record, record saying essentially that if faculty are indoctrinating our children, we should be able to use federal funding, our control of federal funding, to bend them to our will. And what's happening right now is that two things are happening. On the one hand, the termination of $584 million in research grants has been on the basis of not just sort of failure to align with these official agencies, let's say funding priorities, but they are about charges of antisemitic harassment, even as UCLA and other campuses has made have made many attempts to address alleged anti Semitism and to prevent racial discrimination in admissions in the ways that they've dealt with various kinds of student activism across the faculty associations.
We have seen and have talked to many faculty members who have said that the fear of being reported to the Office of Civil Rights, which is the office that oversees claims of discrimination. Right. And so technically, claims of discrimination could run the gamut for everything from discrimination against Palestinian people, people of Arab and Muslim ancestry, to shared Jewish, Israeli ancestry, so on and so forth, all under the sort of title of shared ancestry entitled six Law.
But what we have seen, and Asla Bala, who's the president of Middle East Studies association, has just completed a report on this, it has basically shown that almost all of the files that are filed under Title 6 investigations with the OCR at the UC have been on the shared ancestry claim, but primarily around antisemitism. So where there has been certainly anti Semitic speech in some that perhaps students have engaged in, there is also certainly an escalation of Islamophobic discrimination against Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students, faculty, so on and so forth. I think it's also important to say that sort of how we think about free speech and academic freedom is really important to Mark. So Isaac Kamala, who's one of the AAUP's forefront advocates and a specialist in sort of questions of free speech, reminds us that academic freedom and free speech are actually two different things. Right? Free speech is the right to say is the right to speak. But academic freedom relies on the supposition or the foundational logic that what we do in the academy is that we are experts of various kinds of fields and those fields of thought allow us to actually make evidence based, historically based claims that, that draw from our research and draw from our knowledge in order to be able to speak to questions of what's happening right now in the genocide in Palestine, for example. And what's happening, I think, is that when you attack not just free speech, but academic freedom, right, the right to actually use your research and use your knowledge to testify to long patterns of settler colonialism, extirpation and genocide in a, in a region that has long been the subject of US Empire, the fact that what the Trump administration is doing is seeing its role as an active way of holding, holding back people's ability to use their academic expertise to teach with knowledge about this is part of what's at stake. And faculty members across the board have said that they fear just teaching about Palestine in their syllabi. And that's a significant cost, not just, not just to academic freedom in general and the principle that we hold dear, but, but also to our students who are seeking a way to try to make sense of some of the worst violence that many of us have experienced in many generations or lifetimes, and who are not able to receive the kinds of historical knowledge or evidence based research that can help them understand and comprehend what's going on.
[00:30:55] Speaker A: And so it is actually the case that in the discourse about Israel, Palestine, there are voices that say that any accusations of the kind that you're alluding to about genocide, apartheid and settler colonialism are anti Semitic in nature. And so they would be included in any assault or any efforts to crack down on antisemitism is forbidding those kind of things to be said.
And this.
I was in College during the McCarthy Red Scare period of the 50s, and there's a tremendous amount of parallel between the use of the Palestinian issue now and the use of the great demonized communist threat that was fundamental in the assault on academic freedom in the 1950s. So I particularly shiver in a way at how this is playing out these days.
One of the ironies I'll comment on this, you don't have to, is that the regents nowadays is much more liberal politically than the regents of old would have been. But on this issue of Palestine and antisemitism, those lines of left and right don't work out the way they used to. And so we have, I'm sure, members of the regions who want to punish and get rid of the very kinds of challenging and so called controversial perspectives that you're alluding to. And that's part of what is happening Now, I think, and makes it particularly fearsome.
There's one other area that, and there are quite a few others besides what I'm about to mention, where I think harm is intended by the administration, and that has to do with the admissions policies of the university.
Affirmative action was abolished in California 30 years ago.
I was one of the faculty who worked hard after that to see whether we could achieve levels of diversity, of achieving the goal of a student body that resembled the demographics of the state of California, which is under, under the California Constitution, supposed to be the case, without affirmative action. And what we realized then and what has been implemented is a transformation of admissions policy that has worked enormously well given the abolition of affirmative action to bring about a diverse student body with respect to representation of underrepresented minorities of people of color.
And that is under attack very deliberately by the administration.
They are wanting to bring back, for example, the requirement of the SAT as an admissions criterion that the university deliberately and for very good reason did away with a few years ago.
Did away with because it was shown empirically that the SAT really correlated with family income more than it correlated with actual success in college.
And so that something I'm particularly concerned about and is sort of buried in a lot of what else the Trump Trumpers are trying to do is this reversal of any gains that have been made in making for a more inclusive higher student body in higher education and the UC system.
Among the more elite colleges in the country, I think we are the most advanced, even without affirmative action, in creating a more diverse and representative student body. I've been. It's one thing I've been sort of proud of is the fact that I was able to help bring that into being.
So and so. So the lawsuit is aimed at what, what, what would be the. What do you think the process will be legally in going forward with the lawsuit?
Jessica?
[00:35:18] Speaker C: So right at this point, what the lawsuit is doing, it's. It was filed in Northern California district of the federal court, and it is calling for an immediate injunction on these coercive threats. Right. So this is the.
The sort of immediate ask is for a cease to these threats from the federal government. So it's an injunction against the federal government's continued threats to the uc.
I.
Charmaine, do you know the date when we expect to.
[00:35:51] Speaker B: Oh, it's slipping my mind. I'm sorry.
[00:35:53] Speaker A: I don't you expect a fairly soon decision on that at that court level?
You don't know.
[00:36:01] Speaker B: We don't. We don't know the timeline for the decision, but One of the positive outcomes is that this case has been placed under the docket of a judge who has also ruled in favor of other preceding decisions that look very similar to this one. And so one of the chances is that because it is attached to other pre existing cases in which she's ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, that, that there might be an sort of accelerated timeline on it, but we don't have.
[00:36:31] Speaker C: It for certain because one piece of it, I think, has already been in some ways connected because so this is Judge Rita Lynn who's been filing the, the judge who's been hearing the cases that are the Thacker v.
Trump, Thacker v. Trump case, which is a class action lawsuit that Claudia Polsky at UC Berkeley Law took on the lead on supporting. And that lawsuit basically says that people's grants were terminated for in using an unlawful process and, you know, without justification. Right. That these were done in a sort of sweeping manner that is in violation of federal law. And so she has been continually adding more agencies to that finding. Right. So first it was one set of agencies, the NEH and the nsf, and then it was the nih. And additional kind of pieces keep getting added to that, to her rulings, and those are the things that are actually returning money to, to PIs, to researchers to be able to continue their work. And because this, one of the sort of pieces of this case is to say that the funds need to be restored.
[00:37:43] Speaker B: Right.
[00:37:43] Speaker C: Because there were some funds that were initially cut as part of the initial UCLA action that those funds need to be restored. So this therefore is in her docket. And some pieces, I think, of that funding has been restored. But this broader kind of enjoining against the kind of continued threat of conditioning federal funding upon these various actions is the piece that is still yet to be heard.
[00:38:08] Speaker A: Right.
And so that would. And then of course. So that's. Is that federal court?
[00:38:14] Speaker C: Yes. Yeah, that's federal court.
[00:38:16] Speaker A: And then there'd be layers of appeal beyond that that the Trumpers might be going through. But so this may take time to eventually ever be resolved.
So one question I have actually about the process has to do with.
So the faculty association has an active layer of, of faculty who work on their campuses and system wide.
But how far has have you been able to get real engagement and conversation in the wider faculty and staff levels to make sure that there's sort of grassroots university employee involvement in these issues? Or is there a way to do that? Do you know what I'm asking?
[00:39:08] Speaker C: So one thing that I would say is That a weird echo here. A lot of the data and information that filtered into the suit, that was part of the like examples of harm, the things that people are articulating as the harms that they have experienced so far. That process emerged from a lot of conversations on a lot of campuses. Right. That faculty from the faculty associations were reaching out to colleagues who had lost grants. We're reaching out to colleagues who might be impacted in other ways and gathering these testimonies. And that sort of across the system, faculty from multiple kinds of departments, divisions, professional layers. Right. Varying conditions of work, have shared testimony that makes up the kind of evidentiary grounds for the case.
So that's sort of one layer of participation that people have been sharing stories that sort of build into the case itself. And then beyond that, obviously. Right. We've been talking about it with faculty in all kinds of different formations and meetings at Santa Cruz. We have plans to talk to faculty about the case and what's happening with it at the department level. And I know that that conversation about having department being available for department meetings, talking about it at department meetings, is happening elsewhere as well. So there's definitely conversation happening at a variety, in a variety of different forms. And then Kukva is as frequently as we can, trying to communicate out to all Senate faculty across the whole system with legal updates about the case as things unfold.
[00:40:51] Speaker B: One of the things that, Dick, you might be able to speak to better because you've been in the UC system for decades, is the extent to which, for the most part, faculty are pretty siloed in their departments. They don't know what's going on. And so a big task of lawsuits and what we plan to do in terms of organizing, using them as an organizing base is to just be able to start collecting these stories so that faculty can really understand what we're confronting together. Right. To kind of defeat some of that siloing behavior. So just to give you some examples, because I feel like your listeners might want some sort of specific details that about what faculty have experienced. One of the ways that we began to collect testimonies was around how faculty members research has been affected by the termination of these grants. So, for example, a UC Merced faculty member who was conducting federally funded public health research on lgbtq, intersex and asexual populations was directed by the federal funding agency to change all language in the project materials referencing transgender individuals. The federal agency then cut funding entirely, requiring the member to terminate their entire research project. A member in San Diego, as another example, conducted a federal Grant funded training in addressing partner violence for early career physicians.
Seems pretty like a good thing across the political spectrum to want to. The Trump administration canceled the grant on the stated reason that the grant included the word equity in the project title. So what we're finding is that, you know, faculty are not just getting grants terminated wholesale, it is also forcing faculty to change the very content of what it is that we're finding, studying and researching. And so one of the things that we really need to do in order to put our heads together about what building faculty power will mean and look like in the next phase of faculty organizing has to do with just having a real clear eyed understanding of what is happening to faculty research on some of the most important and crucial topics of questions of social justice and equity that are being done in the UC system today.
[00:43:00] Speaker A: I wonder if you have any strategy relating to the Faculty Senate itself. The Faculty Senate is the official organ of faculty participation in the governance of the university.
And there are particular, and we've already alluded to them, targets of current faculty power that may be in danger. One I mentioned is the admissions policy.
That's always been the province of senate committees on each campus and system wide.
And there is a, I think grave danger that that will be diluted and undercut by some of the demands being made.
And of course, all decisions about faculty hiring and promotion are governed by Faculty Senate.
Those have been fought for over the years.
The control of that is a constant battle, I would say in some ways so. But that would be another area that, that I would be worried about. And then something that may be that's already happened, which is discipline of students with respect to political expression.
The thing I noticed that really got me upset was something that happened before the direct attack by the Trump administration.
The then President Drake in August of, of whatever, of the 19 of 2023, said that encampments which had been happening all that spring were up, were now to be banned on all the campuses. In other words, the previous previously it was the individual chancellors who were in charge of the disciplinary process and rulemaking on their campus. Suddenly Drake is saying no, this is a system wide policy.
And there's something very ironic about that. You alluded Charmaine to the free speech movement. One of the key moments of that movement was what really amounted to an encampment by about a thousand students inside Sproul hall inside the administration building.
They were all arrested. But the steps of Sproul hall, which many of these students going limp when they were arrested, were dragged down those steps of Sproul hall. And their blood was on those steps.
That was in 1964. Those steps are named by the university the Mario Savio steps. They are actually named for the leader of the free speech movement. So there's a kind of recognition now at Berkeley in the history of student protest.
And forms of occupation and encampment are in that history. They're part of what that history is all about. And then for the president to just say you can't do it seemed to me very shortsighted, not only for these reasons I'm giving, but because encampments are actually a form of protest that I think is part of students education. Encampments are a framework of education, oddly enough. I wonder if you have any comment on that. So anyway, the general point I'm asking is my worry that things that faculty empowerment that does exist is going to be is being whittled away by the exigencies of accommodating to the Trump administration in one way or another. So got any thoughts about that?
[00:46:37] Speaker C: Yeah, I think there are a lot of thoughts there. I think my sense is that some of the dynamics around shared governance and faculty power that we are facing in this moment far precede this moment. Right. That shared governance has been decreasing in the UC system for quite some time and that even some of the recent Senate chairs have marked this problem of the sort of declining voice of the Senate within decision making processes. And so, you know, on the one hand, I think there's a kind of fundamental question here about, you know, how, how the university sees faculty as, as partners or not in the sort of project of creating a university. And that as the university has become increasingly administrator heavy. Right. We have all kinds of evidence of much larger growth at the administrative level than at the faculty level for quite some time as well. That this administrative framework for thinking about the university has significantly diminished the, the power of faculty. Right. And that, you know, we hear stories about UCOP saying basically the Senate is just a thing you have to work around or wait your way through and eventually the Senate leadership will change and then you can do what you wanted to do anyway. Right. That these kinds of declines in faculty power have been, they have a longer history and trajectory.
[00:48:11] Speaker B: Right.
[00:48:11] Speaker C: And that this is why we need faculty to organize in different ways and to sort of be moving toward other forms of holding power in the institution. And really thinking about what does that mean? How do we recenter a kind of legitimate democratic faculty voice in shaping our workplace and institutions of higher education? Because faculty have all kinds of expertise that really should be at the forefront of many of these decisions. So that's on the sort of shared governance side on the sort of question of student protest and the sort of relationships to student movements. You know, as you know, this is also a subject of research and interest for me, right. Thinking about young people's activism and movements over time. And I think that here we also see, again, kind of longer standing shifts toward increasingly seeing students as.
And student protests not as an educational or like, moment of transformative learning, which is, you know, what those of us who study student movements know that it is right, that like participation in student movements is actually profoundly educational for students.
They learn many, many, many things through that participation, but instead an orientation towards seeing students as threatening, as dangerous, as troublesome, criminalizing student protest in various ways. And I think that trajectory has also been longer standing as well.
[00:49:47] Speaker B: Right.
It's so funny that you mentioned the Mario Savio haul and the fact that the UC reacted very violently to. To an event that they now claim as the province of the UC itself. Because this is what universities do, right? Universities use the forefront of student liberation movements, students who see and want to fight for a better world, forcibly repress them through the power of police in all sorts of multiple ways, and then promptly proceed to take the credit for it. And we knew that this was what was going to happen with the encampments. And probably in five or 10 years, the UC will proudly say that the UC was one of the hearts of the Palestinian liberation movement. But certainly for today, what we do see is that, in fact, there's a really rich irony to all of this, right? Because when the UC in 2024, in response to California lawmakers withholding $25 million from the UC, until former President Jake submitted a report to the legislature detailing his plans to discipline the uc, you know what, what the UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Leon said, for example, was that, oh, Berkeley already has rules prohibiting setting up tents and sleeping overnight outside campus buildings, blocking walkways, or using masks to conceal one's identity. So, you know, policies that were previously set up to criminalize unhoused and homelessness, for example. Right. That's one of the reasons why prohibiting tents is sort of in UC policy, then becomes sort of like, used as a cudgel to then prevent students from expressing protests through the encampments. So there is a kind of strange way that the UC and universities in general, or institutions in general are just so good at affirming commitments to free speech even as they secretly sic the police on students, while while refusing to Let students express the very free speech that they claim as the heart of what we do. Right.
[00:51:46] Speaker C: I think that's right. Right. Like that the, this was also true in the free speech movement. Right. That in that moment they were not celebrating it. It's like they celebrate it now. Right. Similarly, we saw the same thing with like the, the UC webpage on divestment from South Africa.
[00:51:59] Speaker B: Right.
[00:52:00] Speaker C: Has a similar kind of narrative.
[00:52:02] Speaker A: You can talk in a cynical way about that, but I'm suggesting flipping that and saying, look, this is, these are, this is using those as grounds for really challenging the current policy by saying, by pointing out the very contradiction that we're getting at in this conversation. Well, there's one other, you know, this leads to one other thing that maybe we can cover before we conclude, which is the student voice in all of this.
What's your sense of student activism in. In defense of our values of higher education and academic freedom and freedom of speech. What's going on with respect to student organization? Do you have any sense of that?
[00:52:50] Speaker C: Yeah, I can speak a little bit to the Santa Cruz context. I don't know that I have a good sense at the statewide level. And so maybe we'll get a little bit of comparison from Charmaine from the, like, two places she's been in recently.
I think what I see at Santa Cruz is that our students have a profound sense that they know what they want their education to be. And there are so many threats to that kind of vision of a quality education. Right. It's these Trump administration threats, but it's also the threats of AI, constant notifications on their phone about canvas assignments, everything being digitized, having a high cost of living, being unable to afford to live in Santa Cruz, commuting from a long distance. And there's a strong student sense on my campus, at least that they deserve better. Right. And that their education really should be otherwise. And I think that for students, it's a little bit tricky right now to kind of parse what's what in those many, many, many threats to an actually transformative, high quality educational experience.
And so I think that things haven't quite crystallized in terms of a student movement around this here at ucsc, although there's a lot of student organizing around our campus, budget cuts, for example, which feel a little bit more proximate, and I think a variety of other kind of specific issues. I think the federal attacks feel a little bit harder to still wrap their heads around. But I think that there's important room for conversation with our students about how These different threats to what they deserve actually intersect with one another.
[00:54:34] Speaker B: I think I maybe want to add some, some concrete examples and then, and end by saying something really quick about I think, the role that faculty have to play in this. So one is that just to give an example of what's happening at Santa Barbara, since maybe many of your listeners will be in Santa Barbara. Hi, old neighbors. Santa Barbara has actually been at the forefront of a lot of important organizing on the student front. So one is that students in the Student Senate in 2024 organized for a long time because for a 10 year period, previous student senators had attempted to pass divestment at the student senate and were not successful. And what the students learned is that they need to run slates, they need to have a long view of taking over leadership. And they did that. They had students show up time after time at general assembly after general assembly and were finally able to pass UC divestment of the student senate after a long process of organizing. So students, I think, are showing us the way because one of the kind of stereotypes that are often said about student movements is that they are fleeting, they are temporary, they are prone to sort of like urgent moments that sort of rise up and then disappear. But one of the things that SJP at UCSB really showed was what it meant to sort of take that long term horizon and sink. And I think that one of the reasons that they did that particularly well is that faculty who are at UCSB who have had a long experience of organizing in Palestine solidarity movements, were also advisors to those students and helped them to understand what had won in other places and what had been successful on other campuses. The other movement that I want to lift up is a movement called Researchers Against War, which was started by grad students at UC Santa Cruz, but that a team of amazing grad student organizers at Santa Barbara picked up. And that project has been to try to understand the ways in which science funding is wedged to Department of Defense funding that, you know, helps to facilitate the military industrial complex. And UCSB is one of the top campuses that receives the most private military funds, mostly because Santa Barbara is the seat of some of the major military industrial complexes that found their way to the Infrared valley in the 1960s and 70s because Santa Barbara was a quiet enclave that would allow them to surf in the morning and then invent bombs at night. So one of the, one of the ways that UCSB has developed then has been this tight relationship to the military industrial complex that Researchers Against War has really tried to help organize around by encouraging students and faculty who are haunted by the university's complicit role in war, state violence, and the genocide in Gaza to refuse funding from the dod. And what's happened with that project is that they organized so successfully that now in the UAW 4811 contract negotiations that are ongoing, a central demand is transitional funding. And that demand would allow basically graduate students to build into their contract the ability to be essentially a conscientious. Conscientious objector who might leave, you know, who might choose to leave a lab and have a transitional funding pocket of money so that they can find another place to go. That demand's not just useful for people who want to leave a project that's funded by the military. It's also useful for grad students who might be wanting to leave toxic places, abusive conditions, and so forth. So, you know, when my friend and comrade Shireen Sekali often says that Palestine is a paradigm that Palestine frees all of us, that's what she means, right? That Palestine illuminates some of the conditions that students are helping us think about as something that then sort of opens the door to other things. I'll finally close by saying that one of the things that we are experiencing is that students feel very fearful in the face of rising fascism. And one of the things that faculty can really do in this moment is to refuse to cower to that fear. So even though we are fearful, even though faculty have been making adaptations to our syllabi, so on and so forth, it is not just for us, that it is incredibly important for us to be able to flex the stability and power that we have as tenure track and tenured faculty. But it's also important for what we're indicating to our students that we refuse to cower in the face of fascism. And that's what I think Kagva is really trying to empower in the kinds of ways in which we're refusing to just sit down and are using our role to. To wage a frontal attack against the Trump administration's attacks on higher ed.
[00:58:55] Speaker A: Yes. Thank you. So, in closing, either of you want to say anything that you would hope people would be doing as next steps, either, on the one hand, supporting the suit itself that we've been talking about, or other organizing efforts that would be. That you're hoping to see happen?
Any final words you have about that?
[00:59:21] Speaker C: I mean, I would just say that for faculty, specifically. Join your faculty association. Right. The faculty associations are just made up of faculty doing this on our free time as volunteers we can only do as much as the faculty organizers who are involved do. And so for folks that are already members, get more involved, reach out, see how you can get plugged into different working groups, campaigns and projects for folks that, for faculty that are not yet members, join, it's a good way to get connected. And then I think beyond faculty, right, for the sort of wider set of audiences, I think one of the things that this suit hopefully reminds us is that higher education is a public good, right? That we, that what we do in higher education should be at its best, right? Serving the interests of the public. And so we all benefit from having a public that is engaged with that, that is aware of what we're doing on our campuses, that is connected to what's happening on our campuses. And so I think that for folks across the state, just sort of engaging with and thinking about and looking for the places where higher ed touches their lives. Because I think there are so many myths out there right now about higher education, so many narratives about who we are and what we do that are coming from the Trump administration that are just profoundly false. And that I think that even just taking a moment and reflecting on how higher education has impacted you, your family, your community, it's. It becomes obvious, I think, where at its best, higher education is really doing, doing the work that we all need for a more democratic and engaged society.
[01:01:08] Speaker A: Well put.
So I'm really grateful for you, Jessica Taft, who I'll remind listeners, is a. Is teach, teaches Latin American Studies, UC Santa Cruz, and is the co president of the kukfa, the Council of UC Faculty Associations, and Charmaine Shua, now, sadly, at Berkeley in the Geography department. I say sadly because you were a marvelous member of our faculty for the time that you were here at ucsb, but hopefully you will be a source of light and inspiration wherever you go. I'm pretty sure that's going to happen. Thank you both for telling us all about these actions, which I think are really important not only for the university, but for the whole direction of things. And we need to know about these actions and about the labor movement that is growing in the University of California that I think has potential of affecting how labor movement operates in the United States going forward. And I thank you both for being part of that. This has been the Talking Strategy, Making History podcast, and we're going to end with a song by Phil Oaks that he wrote after the Free Speech Movement got going in 1964.
And it's a song that sadly resonates down to now because it talks about how the administration of the university is not necessarily in sync with the aspirations of its members.
And we're hoping that song doesn't come true. These days, this has been Dick Flax. Thanks for being a listener here on the podcast. Talking Strategy, Making History.
[01:03:04] Speaker D: Oh, I'm just a student, sir and only want to learn but it's hard to read through the rise and smoke from the books that you like to burn so I like to to make a promise and I'd like to make a vow that when I've got something to say, sir, I'm gonna say it.
[01:03:22] Speaker A: Now.
[01:03:24] Speaker D: Oh, you've given me a number and you've taken off my name to get around this campus why you almost need a plane and you're supporting Chiang Kai Shek While I'm supporting Mouse and I've got something to say, sir, I gonna say it now I wish that you'd make up your mind I wish that you decide that I should live as freely as those who live outside Cause we also are entitled to the rights to be endowed and when I've got something to say, sir I'm gonna say it now who you'd like to be my father? You'd like to be my dad and give me kisses when I'm good and spank me when I'm bad But since I left my parents I'd forgotten how to bow so I've got something to say, sir, I'm gonna say it now.
And things they might be different about here alone But I've got a friend or two who no longer live at home and we'll respect our elders Just as long as they allow that when I've got something to say, sir, I'm gonna say it now I've read of other countries where the students take a stand They've even helped to overthrow the leaders of the last.
Now I wouldn't go so far to say we're also learning how but when I've got something to say, sir, I'm gonna say it now.
