Reinvest in the Mission: A Systemwide Campaign Launched Under a New Name

After two years of organizing across every campus in this system, we are changing our name. The Council of UC Faculty Associations is now the University of California Faculty Association, UCFA.

When CUCFA was founded in 1974, it was a council: a coordinating body linking ten independent campus associations, each doing its own work. That structure served us for decades. But the last few years have made something else out of us. When the federal government began targeting the UC — our international students, our research funding, our colleagues’ ability to research, teach and write without political supervision — faculty did not respond campus by campus. We responded together, suing the Trump administration and achieving a historic legal victory that pushed back against federal interference. When shared governance was routed around and the disastrous Trellix mandate pushed through, all in brazen defiance of the Academic Senate, our opposition was not merely in Berkeley or Irvine. It was systemwide.

So: CUCFA is now UCFA – the UC Faculty Association. A united front across the ten campuses of the faculty, by the faculty, and for the faculty.

In recent years, we have witnessed our beloved University’s attention drift toward capital projects, hospital acquisitions, and ballooning administrative growth, i.e. toward everything except teaching, research and the people who do it. Faculty across this system are coming to the same conclusion — the old world is gone. It is time for something new.

This is why we are launching a systemwide campaign to reinvest in the UC’s mission — a campaign led by the issues felt across our ten campuses: that the University has the resources to invest in its academic mission, that shared governance must mean something more than being informed after the fact, and that the people who teach and research at the University of California should have a real say in how it is run.

These demands are based on UC’s own public commitments or models from our peer institutions. We have the supporting documents that show these changes to be not only possible, but fiscally responsible.

Now, we want to hear from you about how these widely felt issues are impacting you and your colleagues. Join us for a series of town halls in the coming months. 

Change at the UC begins with you. 

In solidarity,

University of California Faculty Association