To Assemblymember Tasha Boerner and Senator Catherine Blakespear,
On behalf of the below signees, the UCSD Faculty association urges you to oppose the Governor’s proposed 7.95% reduction to the budgets of the UC and CSU. These proposed cuts will result in a $396.6 million ongoing reduction to the UC, and compromise our ability as faculty to maintain the standards of excellence for which the UC is globally known.
Cutting funding, at a time when higher education funding is under attack at the federal level, will drastically affect the ability of the UC to support students. It will inevitably lead to larger class sizes, less hands-on laboratory experience, decreased hours for libraries, and the decreased availability of range of crucial services including mental health support, tutoring, and program support. The proposed cuts to the UC are more severe than the 3% cuts to other large state agencies, which were additionally allowed to exclude direct services and local assistance from their cuts, unlike the UC.
We ask that you join your colleagues in opposing these proposed state cuts, which come at a time when the UC, and the work that we do as researchers and educators, is under attack from an ideologically motivated federal government. By opposing these cuts, you would not only help maintain the UC’s standards of excellence, but you would also signal to federal government that California supports free academic inquiry, free speech, and protects the rights of the marginalized within our community.
Signed by 187 UCSD affiliates.
Testimonies from signatories:
Shorter library hours mean less safe spaces for students who need places to study and do research. My students will also have to do with less instructor attention as we have worse instructor and TA to student ratios; the students will feel more like a number and miss the chance to engage with someone who can coach them to grow to their fullest potential.
Funding cuts will dramatically increase class sizes, cut teaching assistants, and place enormous burdens on researchers across the university system. It’s the last thing we need in these times of dread and uncertainty.
Budget cuts will have minimal effect on my own research but will increase class sizes and decrease the number of graduate teaching assistants we can support. They will likely increase tuition and undercut our ability to resist the Trump Administration’s demands for ideological conformity and suppressing academic freedom.
We have lost almost 40 percent of TA support. Our students will feel the pain this year, and next year will be a lot worse. Our research is suffering as well.
Budget cuts will jeopardize our life-saving research projects and is causing us to have to refuse highly talented students who depend on us for research experience and training – I fear many of these students will be lost from the pipeline forever.
They will result in less robust educational offerings and decreased time for and quality of instruction.
These cuts will have devastating impacts to student Curriculum, faculty research, staff and overall quality of education!
It would destroy my entire career
These cuts are disastrous, particularly in light of federal attacks on higher education and increasing economic precarity. What we desperately need right now is reinvestment on the part of the state — while at the same time fighting for the restoration of federal funding at ordinary levels. The UC is a major economic hub in addition to one of the best university systems in the world. Research findings consistently show that the return on investment in higher education (at both the state and federal levels) is substantial. Cuts to higher education not only result in deteriorating working conditions, but also hurt the state of California’s bottom line. By cutting higher education, the state is essentially kneecapping itself. Please fight these cuts. Thank you.
Staff resources are already strained, funding for TAs to help with instruction is declining, and deferred maintenance has already led to marginal research facilities. This is not the path forward for California.
Without research grants UCSD faculty don’t have the resources required to do what we were hired to do. The result will be an expensive and unusable, unworkable teaching college that is incapable of teaching anything but pedagogy. Don’t you want young Americans to contribute to our society as professionals skilled in analytic thinking and knowledgeable about research?
Every dollar taken from the work I and colleagues do on pre-college K12 outreach and support will result in less prepared applicants to our UC system — requiring MORE expenditures down the road. Keep the UC budget in a moment of great threat!
This is incredibly damaging to the university.
I’m really concerned about the need to increase class size and reduce the time students have both with faculty and Instructional Assistants – reducing opportunities to learn, and form community and a sense of belonging.
It will have a general effect of diminishing the quantity and quality of every aspect of work
It is absolutely absurd that I have to pay my employer to do my work. That is what is happening! I have to pay out of pocket to attend professional conferences to present my research. I have to buy my teaching assistants books to teach discussion sections because the university expects six of them to share one copy. These conditions are unsustainable. How far will the state go to bankrupt the UC system? Students already recognize how their education has been cheapened while they’re charged more and more for tuition.
The funding cuts will create even a more toxic and unhealthy work environment, which will in turn negatively affect all students and educational outcomes.
We are already operating in a political context where the President of the United States wants to gut every institution of higher education in the country. We already had to rescind two faculty offers. To face an 8% cut on top of that will be catastrophic.
In my Department, budget cuts will adversely affect the quality of our undergraduate offerings, restricting how many small seminars (courses with around 15-20 students) we are able to offer. It is in these courses that students who are majoring and minoring in History really come to know their professors and develop skills that simply cannot be taught in large lecture classes. If students majoring in History can only enroll in lecture courses, that will dramatically diminish their experience. At the same time, budget cuts will greatly affect our graduate program, resulting in shrinking cohorts. Because we rely on our graduate students to work as teaching assistants to help professors manage large lecture courses, a serious reduction of our graduate program would threaten the Department’s ability to function on the most fundamental level.
I work in the humanities teaching and researching philosophy and political economy, and I have no extramural funding. I am the main earner in my family and have just begun to receive Social Security benefits, which may disappear any day thanks to the gameplaying of Donald Trump and the non-existent DOGE. Additional state cuts would be catastrophic for myself and my family. It would render it even more difficult for me to do research and writing and introduce innovations in my teaching for the good of my students.
They will impact our capabilities to develop new cancer drugs and better treatments
As a faculty who cares greatly about providing positive and effective teaching, I have seen the effects of past cuts on student access, mental health, and learning outcomes.
Our budget is already stretched to the limit and we are understaffed. Each of our staff is doing the jobs of 2 or 3 people. Further cuts would decimate or mfa and PhD programs, leaving undergrads without TA support and hindering their education. Freezing research funds will not only damage the intellectual and creative output of our colleagues, but make advancement within the institution extremely difficult. We cannot accommodate further cuts.
Cuts to the UC will reduce the quality of education provided to California’s future leaders, and to the speed of innovation which supports California’s private sector.
Opportunities to give students special research positions in my lab will be reduced. Staff are currently over worked in our dept because we have grown so fast and our staff size has not kept us. Reductions in staff or opportunities to hire part time staff will cause major delays when we need admin help. Which is surprisingly often. We won’t receive the same income from indirect costs and this will impact students in my lab. Resources will be scarcer, less money to buy subscriptions to AI software.
The cuts will make working conditions untenable, making an extremely stressful campus climate even worse. The quality of education will plummet, along with the ability to do research. If this is what financialization requires, then it is obviously a failed approach to higher education (as it has been for health care and every other area of social need).
I am working in the humanities. One of the impacts that these cuts will have is on my teaching and the educational experience that I will be able to deliver to students. One of the things I have been proudest of, particularly in the post-COVID period, has been to redesign my courses to maximize interactivity and interpersonal engagement around the literary texts that I teach in this class. I have made it a point to know every student’s name (in classes of up to 40) and keep them accountable to the coursework as well as to one another. Creating a vital classroom community is one of the things that is valuable about a university experience and one of the few intensively interactive person-to-person spaces that younger people actually have left. Being able to talk and discuss complex issues with peers from a range of backgrounds who may not actually see things in the same way, in an amicable and generous way, is a critical skill that has too long been seen as unimportant. As I said, this can work in classes up to 40. However, with increasing demands on enrollments to sustain departments, we are going to have to balloon all of our classes to sizes (70-100) where sustaining that level of interpersonal engagement and sense of mutual responsibility/accountability is not possible, or go back to online teaching, which is honestly a terrible pedagogical model for the humanities.
In general, my feeling is that the cuts will only speed up the work of eliminating the field of humanities altogether, increasingly unfortunate in a society where people are feeling increasingly disconnected and hostile to one another.
The budget cuts will significantly hurt the quality of higher education and affect the future work force in California.
Keeping in mind that there have been so many grants terminated for faculty who are close to 100% soft money, this will continue to devastate our academic environment more than what seems an innocuous 8% at the state level. Honestly, we need support from our state since the federal government has targeted science.
As the director of the UCSD Center for Machine-Intelligence, Computing, and Security, I can testify that this cut will significantly impact our state of the art research in AI and security. Not only harming our technological advancement, but also exposing vulnerabilities in the critical and increasingly AI-based platforms that we are building.
The state cuts will gravely exacerbate the dire federal situation. Please maintain current funding levels.
We continue to accommodate an increasing number of Undergraduate Students with the same Staff and Faculty at a time of funding shortcuts due to increasing costs for graduate student support while at the same time Federal grant support is being cut (10% in my case for Direct Cost).
Every cut to higher education vastly inhibits our ability to prepare and support the next generation of scholars, educators and leaders, who will lead California and the nation into the future, Higher education is not just an investment in today, but the shape and condition in which we will find ourselves tomorrow.
I teach freshman chemistry at UCSD. I have around 800 students (2 groups of 400) in the fall. For the 800 students I’m allocated 4 (FOUR) teaching assistants. The students are getting a subpar education because class sizes are inflated and the teaching support is entirely insufficient. These students are our future and deserve much much better.
Loss of critical equipment funding, inability to host community enrichment events, enhance public experiences of our department, cripple outreach and development efforts to put us on the map with other distinguished art institutions
The University is our most precious bastion of freedom of expression; at a time when that very principle is being attacked by the federal government, the survival of our democracy depends on continued funding from the state of California.
It affects my opportunity to get into research, it affects my opportunity to get into higher education as a woman of color and more.
These cuts will be disastrous for training young scientists, medical students, postdoctoral fellows, and PhD students. We will lose a generation of researchers to these cuts.
I will likely need to retire early from medicine.
At UCSD we are already strapped for money. I worry that our students, who sometimes have to choose between eating and buying books, will not be able to learn. I worry that financial pressure will affect academic freedom by influencing choices of topic and approach. I worry that the library will not be able to afford the basic databases and books and journals we need to carry out our research.
The University of California is already withdrawing most of the infrastructure supports needed to effectively do research. If you wanted to collaborate with Trump to destroy American science, California would make further cuts.
I get paid per class, I have already had three courses cut this year and have taken a 30% pay reduction as result
These cuts to higher education will not only affect student welfare and education, but will also hinder our research substantially, making us less competitive not only with other universities in other states, but also with researchers in other countries, running this risk of increasing the intellectual gap.
Further cuts will decimate our stellar graduate program. All of our graduate students who choose to pursue tenure track faculty positions achieve that goal, and research shows that undergraduate students do much better overall when they take Ethnic Studies. The return on investing in Ethnic Studies is high!
This exhibition was co-curated by undergraduate and graduate students in a course at UCSD that will not be taught in the future if the proposed state budget cuts to UC take place: https://mingei.org/exhibitions/historic-footprints
State budget cuts at a time of federal grant withholdings and withdrawals will negatively impact my teaching and research, by reducing our ability to recruit and admit talented graduate students (many being residents of California), drastically increasing the student:instructor ratio and thereby reducing educational efficacy, and reducing our ability to conduct ground-breaking science that makes California a beacon of technological advancement. A specific example that is now unfolding is that the threats of these cuts have imposed a hiring freeze which has made it impossible to recruit and hire a staff coordinator for our community college to CSU/UC bridge program, STARTastro despite having external funds to do so, which will reduce our ability to support our transfer student population and facilitate one of the most effective ways to improving the economic situation of our most vulnerable California populations. It also violates the requirements of our private funding, which may further limit future investment from private partners. The state is mandated by the California constitution to support our institutions of higher learning, and this support is needed most when these institutions are under assault by the federal government.
I think it will affect the students the most with increased costs to them
The cuts will diminish the competitiveness of the state of California and its taxpayers to produce technologies that create jobs and keep the best jobs in the state. Additionally, UC will begin relinquishing, to other US and non-US universities, its prestige, built over more than a century, and its ability to draw the country’s and the world’s best minds to California.
It will drastically weaken the leading position of UC in education and research.
Large reductions at this time are complicit in the federal dismantling of higher education
This is such a challenging time for education and we are facing such a challenge from policies in Washington that are changing every day. It is more important than ever that the hard working faculty of the University of California be appropriately compensated. We are already dealing with many more undergraduates without an increase in the number of faculty. To sacrifice the quality of education would be tragic.
That would be really counterproductive, given how much UC contributes to the California economy. And devastating to the UG and G education system.
This isn’t about the workplace. This is about defending free thinking, truth, and democracy!
Cuts to higher education funding will jeopardize the safety net that has enabled basic scientists like me to pursue cutting-edge high-risk, high-reward research programs, which would not be possible without the occasional support by the University. Funds for this type of highly creative research are hard to come by, especially now with the recent federal funding cuts that are negatively impacting my lab. The University is already not able to help offset the lost funding, and cuts to the UC funding provided by the state of California will exacerbate this situation. If cuts to state funding were to further impact my work, I would consider reaching out to my industry contacts and shutting down my laboratory.
In UCSD Mathematics, we’ve already experienced a complete hiring freeze, and we had to rescind offers to Ph.D. students because of limited budget and lots of acceptances. I’m honestly worried about the future. I teach probability to classes of 150 undergraduates which is hard enough with a team of two TAs and a 10-hr-per-week grader. But if our budget gets cut by 8%, I know we’ll have even less support with teaching and grading. I’m worried it’ll become unworkable and our undergraduates will suffer :/ In addition to teaching, I’m research-active and the recent federal funding cuts mean that less grant funding will be coming in. I’ll survive but my research productivity will probably fall by 50% of my normal paper count per year. Slapping a 8% budget cut on top of all the other recent changes feels like hitting us hard when we’re already down and need support more than ever.
Thank you for taking seriously the impact these cuts will have on our entire educational system. Personally, we are now teaching much greater numbers of students with fewer and fewer resources. We are losing support for our graduate students and doubling the work they must do to remain in the graduate program, which fundamentally impacts their time to completion of their degree. My colleagues across campus are losing essential funding to support that important research in all areas. Please fight these cuts with all you have at your disposal. Thank you.
Our department already does not have the funds to pay enough teaching assistants.
The virtual collapse of funding in relation to the arts on the part of private Foundations (Rockefeller, Ford, Mellon, etc.) along with the appallingly tiny budget of the NEA and NEH has already crippled efforts of faculty to explore resources and strategies to deepen and broaden the experience of American audiences. Now further cuts to the university budgets for the State institutions of learning will be devastating. Faculty are hired both to teach and to explore ways to improve the quality and reach of their subject matter.
Cuts will harm graduate students doing advanced work.
I am already teaching large lecture courses, where it is often challenging to provide students with sufficient support during office hours and other forms of academic assistance. Further increasing class sizes would significantly exacerbate these difficulties.
The federal attack on higher education is already severe and we need help from our state to counter it.
It has a significant adverse impact on our teaching, research, and would make the workplace conditions very bad, forcing those who can find a job to leave higher education to make ends meet.
As a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, I have already begun to feel the harmful effects of cuts to higher education. These cuts severely limit our ability to conduct world-class research, recruit and retain talented students and faculty, and maintain a supportive and intellectually vibrant workplace. Our teaching loads increase while resources for student support, TAships, and equipment shrink. This not only jeopardizes the quality of education we can offer but also threatens the long-term innovation and competitiveness that higher education drives in California and beyond. These cuts are deeply concerning and unsustainable.
As a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, I have already begun to feel the harmful effects of cuts to higher education. These cuts severely limit our ability to conduct world-class research, recruit and retain talented students and faculty, and maintain a supportive and intellectually vibrant workplace. Our teaching loads increase while resources for student support, TAships, and equipment shrink. This not only jeopardizes the quality of education we can offer but also threatens the long-term innovation and competitiveness that higher education drives in California and beyond. These cuts are deeply concerning and unsustainable.
We already do not have enough teaching and research resources for all faculty to support our mission. This will further imperil our ability to do so.
The state cuts put graduate education at risk — the innovative engine that produces a creative, motivated high-tech workforce in California.
Proposed cuts will increase our workload while paying us the same, assuming that budget cuts don’t lead to pay cuts.
I already have over 300 students in my upper-division undergraduate Biochemistry class and only 1 teaching assistant. More cuts will make it impossible for me to deliver the education these highly qualified students deserve. We cannot survive more cuts!
Budget cuts will limit already scarce resources that support biomedical research
These cuts will critically harm our capacity to educate students.
It will significantly affect/reduce the quality of our teaching and research. No/less TA support, poor facility maintenance, graduate support, etc.
Cuts to higher education will impair educational experiences of our students. Lab courses, for example, have already been affected by budget cuts and hiring freezes, and are understaffed. If the state values fostering growth of a competent, thoughtful workforce, then laboratory courses that teach critical thinking, communication, and hands-on techniques need to be prioritized.
I will be completely overwhelmed with work that staff used to do – this is what happened in 2010. I was working 70+ hours a week to run the department in the absence of regular staff admin assistance and a faculty hiring freeze. Eventually I had to take medical leave from the stress.
Everyone, every department, and every school is already in some form of crisis mode with mass cutting, freezing, downsizing because of the policy from the federal government. Big states like CA do need to step up in keeping higher education running and overcoming the difficult time now. More than ever. And not cutting further.
We have already been asked by our dean to refrain from spending research funds. With the retraction of grants by the NEH to their awardees, I feel like the whole purpose of being a professor in my field is about to change, If the university wants to pay me to be a glorified full-time instructor, it can no longer expect or evaluate my research. But what a sad day this is for higher education.
It overall hurts our infrastructure to be able to provide the best educational resources for our students to thrive and for us to be leaders in important biomedical research.
Our research and educational programs are already under financial strain from previous cuts and new union contracts. The result is that we’ve had fewer resources to teach our students and we have greater labor demands on us as faculty, which takes us away from both our ground-breaking research and our grant writing (which itself has had to accelerate to make up for additional cuts). The bottom line is that cuts are already degrading the pace and quality of both the research we do and the education we provide to the next generation of Californians. We cannot afford to cut off our legs in the name of losing weight.
The 8% budget cut will significantly hinder my ability to maintain the quality and scope of my research, teaching, and overall workplace conditions. Reduced funding will limit access to research support, conference travel, and essential teaching resources, ultimately affecting student engagement and learning outcomes. Additionally, cuts may lead to larger class sizes and fewer professional development opportunities, which can diminish instructional quality and faculty morale.
These budget cuts will reduce the number of TA allocations, which will negatively impact all undergraduate classes.
Lecturers are already stretched thin with grading duties of our current class loads, and the humanities already has almost no budget for projects and experiential courses. These cuts would likely increase class sizes and therefore workloads, leading to even less personalized feedback on student writing, which is the best (and perhaps only) way that students learn this skill. It would also mean even less of the humanities projects that are so vital to students’ access to art and writing at a STEM-heavy school.
They will compromise our world-leading microbiome research program and curtail opportunities for students and postdocs who would otherwise contribute more to California’s workforce after their top-tier training here.
Running our course based labs without the proper staffing will be detrimental to how we train the next generation of scientists.