Please join us and send a letter to fight layoffs and support teaching faculty in the UC system.

If you add your name on the sidebar, then you can click to send a letter to UC administrators.

Background:

After UCAFT (our union representing 6,000 lecturers who teach roughly 40% of the credit hours in the UC system) lobbied to reverse cuts to state funding, the California legislature increased the allocation for the UC by 10% in its 2026-2027 budget. The UC's endowment quadrupled in the last 12 years. Even so, across the UC system, more than 200 lecturers have been laid off, fully or partially, in the past months. Close to 25% of the teaching faculty at UC Merced received layoff notices since 2025!!

At the same time, tuition is increasing 4% this academic year. Yet UC’s students are getting less because lecturers are being laid off, reducing the class options that students and their families are paying for.

This makes no sense, so we are demanding transparency from the UC:

First, the UC must produce the line-item budget for UC Merced from 2022/2023 to 2026/2027 with a list of what cuts and layoffs have been made.

Second, show us the policy[ies] under which the lecturers at Merced have been laid off.

Finally, these debilitating cuts are justified through vague and unsubstantiated references to a “budget crisis” and are hitting lecturers at every UC campus. We demand to see the line-item budgets from 2022/2023-2026/2027 for each of the following departments, programs, or units:

• Berkeley FPF program

• UCLA — Department of Education, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology,

• UCR — Broken down by department within the following colleges: The College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS)

• UCI — Broken down by department within each of the following Schools: Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences

• UCSB — Languages

• UC Davis — Computer Science, Material Science, Earth & Planetary Sci, Education

• San Diego - Broken by department within Social Sciences, Arts and Humanitiesthe Jacobs School of Engineering, and the School of Global Policy and Strategy

• Santa Cruz — Languages

Enrollment is up. Tuition is up. Laying off lecturers and reducing instructional support makes no sense in this environment. The UC needs to be transparent about their motivations. In the interest of transparency, we demand that the UC produce these budgets by Nov. 17, 2026.

Click below to send a letter to the UC Executive Vice Chancellors demanding they share the actual budgets that are justifying these massive cuts to teaching faculty.