Santa Barbara Faculty Association Newsletter October 2026

Welcoming New SBFA Board Members

Three new members were added in the 2026 election: Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval (Chicano Studies), Kate McDonald (History), and Constance Penley (Film and Media Studies). The Board officers for 2026-27 are: Co-chairs Lisa Hajjar (Sociology) and Kate McDonald, Secretary Maxwell Millar-Blanchaer (Physics), and Treasurer Joseph Blankholm (Religious Studies).

Addressing Ballooning Faculty Workloads amidst the Hiring Freeze

The Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA) recently published a white paper, Broken Promises: How UC's Failure to Hire Faculty Is Undermining Higher Education. The summary of findings include:

• More students, fewer faculty. For the last decade, the UC has hired only an average of 130 ladder-rank faculty across the UC system while student enrollments grew by an average of 4,625 students per year. Between 2005 and 2025, the student-faculty ratio has increased from 25.5:1 to 29.6:1.

• The UC falls far behind its peers. At the Comparison 8, UCOP’s peer institutions, the average student-faculty ratio is 16.5:1. The student-faculty ratio of the four public universities within this group is 21.6:1.

• Greater reliance on Unit 18 teaching faculty. The ladder-rank faculty workforce grew by about 27% between 2004-25. Unit 18 grew by 65% in the same period, mirroring nationwide trends towards hiring underpaid, contingent faculty. Unit 18 precarity impacts us, and job security for them stabilizes our workloads.

• A ballooning senior administration. The ladder-rank faculty workforce increased by 20% between 2011 and 2025, while senior administrator FTEs increased by over 100% during the same period. The current number of senior administrators exceeds the number of Senate faculty by over 3,000 positions.

• Effects on faculty workloads are immense. Faculty report declining instructional quality, the erosion of graduate education, declining TA support, increased administrative and service workloads, compromised research time, burnout, and declining morale.

• UCOP’s misplaced budget priorities. The UC endowment has nearly doubled over the last five years. Its assets grew by nine cents per dollar. Yet UCOP only draws down three cents for every dollar it holds in endowment funds, compared to peer institutions, which draw down close to five cents on the dollar. Were the UC to follow the example of its peers, it could have spent another $235 million in 2025 on research and teaching that it instead treated as an investment pool.

• UCOP can afford it. To return the student-faculty ratio to 25.5 to 1, it would cost $219 million a year to hire our goal of 1,417 faculty across the system at the median non-clinical assistant professor salary. Given endowment growth, the current UC budget could meet CUCFA’s demands in a single year and return to its teaching and research mission.

SBFA encourages faculty to read the entire white paper, along with its accompanying data, and help disseminate it to departments, relevant campus service committees, and networks. If you want to share your own stories or examples of the impact of ballooning workloads (e.g., as related to instructional quality, graduate education, TA support, administrative and service workloads, available time for research, and morale), you can email Kate McDonald at klmcdonald@ucsb.edu.

The Hiring Incentive for the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellows Program Has Been Renewed

On September 25, 2026, UC President James Milliken announced the renewal of the hiring incentive for the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellows Program (PPFP), in partnership with the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellows (CFP), effective through 2028-29. In his letter to all Executive Vice Chancellors/Provosts, he affirmed that campuses that hire current or former PPFs or CPFs into their first UC ladder-rank faculty position, “regardless of rank or previous positions,” will receive $85k annually for five years.

President Milliken’s letter reiterates the strategic goal of the PPFP to “maintain academic excellence and leadership of the University of California and to effectively meet the needs of the population that the modern university serves.” “This pool of scholars,” he writes, “continues to represent the highest level of academic excellence and promise.” The hiring incentive advances “the research excellence and public service missions of the University.”

SBFA members have advocated strongly for continued UCOP support for the PPFP. If you have questions about the program, please contact UCSB Faculty Advisory Representatives Dolores Inés Casillas or Howard Chiang.

For general information about the PPFP program, please visit ppfp.ucop.edu/info/.

For answers to frequently asked questions about the hiring incentive, please visit ppfp.ucop.edu/info/recruitment-and-hiring/administrator-faqs.html.

Questions about the hiring incentive can be addressed to PPFP Director Mark Lawson ppfpdirector@ucsd.edu.

CUCFA Litigation against the University of California for Unfair Labor Practices

In the summer of 2024, several Faculty Associations filed Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) complaints against the UC asserting violations of faculty rights in a number of ways related to free speech, academic freedom, and union organizing during the 2024 student encampments. The CA Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) filed a case against UC asserting that, if the plaintiff FAs’ claims are correct, this would constitute labor violations. When hearings began in June 2026, attorneys representing the plaintiff FAs brought a number of witnesses to testify about their experiences.

SBFA has supported this ongoing litigation. If the plaintiffs win, possible outcomes can:

• Establish the UC’s unlawful interference in previous UAW strikes. PERB would confirm that faculty can communicate with graduate students about labor issues during a strike.

• Prevent the UC from using campus bans to intimidate faculty who attend protests. In 2024 several faculty at UCSC were not only banned from campus but arrested for violating a campus ban despite never being informed of any such ban.

• Establish that protests are protected activity. This would constrain UC administrators and police from arresting or disciplining faculty who participate in protests.

You can find information about all of CUCFA’s legal actions and victories here.

Stronger Together

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and CUCFA are partnered as independent but allied entities. AAUP members are also members of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)/AFL-CIO. You can add AAUP to your SBFA membership or sign up for both simultaneously. 

The Fight to Defend Higher Education Continues

On September 10, 2026, AAUP President Todd Wolfson and AFT President Randi Weingarten responded to Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s August 3, 2026, directive, “National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards”—the Trump administration’s “Compact 2.0” for higher education. AAUP’s analysis of Compact 2.0 found that the Department of Education “is asking presidents and governing boards to publicly commit themselves to a federally framed reform program that reaches faculty hiring, evaluation, curriculum, research priorities, student protest, academic standards, and the purposes scholarship should serve. That confuses public accountability with political supervision of higher education.” According to the specific findings in the AAUP’s analysis:

• The department is asking presidents and boards to make promises they do not have unilateral authority to make.

• Congress expressly prohibited the Department of Education from becoming a national academic supervisor.

• “Intellectual pluralism” cannot become a federally administered system of viewpoint balancing.

• A requested public statement is a nicer way of asking for a compelled political pledge.

• The letter presents a selective and politically narrow conception of free speech.

• The “loan repayment” standard reduces education to a debt-servicing instrument.

• “Prioritizing American interests” risks becoming a national-loyalty test for research.

The AAUP maintains that universities should not be made answerable to the political program of a particular administration. The Department of Education may enforce the law and administer programs authorized by Congress. It may not dictate faculty hiring policies, intervene in curricula, impose restrictions on research questions, try to officiate which scholarly perspectives count as “relevant,” or pressure institutions to publicly endorse the government’s preferred conception of their mission. To address Compact 2.0, AAUP created a toolkit with resources and additional information to defend higher education and push back against this federal effort to exert undue influence or force political compliance on universities. 

For a deeper dive, see the AAUP’s July 2026 report, Extorted Compliance: A Threat to Institutional Autonomy, Academic Freedom, and Shared Governance.

AAUP Fall Series of Webinars

The AAUP developed a toolkit for activism on AI and is hosting webinars throughout the fall.

AI Issues in Higher Education

• Strategy Playbook for Addressing AI at Work (October 7, 3 p.m. ET). Register here.

• Intervening in Local Policy and Bargaining Around Technology (October 12, 3 p.m. ET) Register here.

• Higher Education Investments and the AI Bubble (October 21, 3 p.m. ET). Register here.

• Protecting Research Integrity and Human Authorship in Academic Publishing (October 29, 1 p.m. ET). Register here.

AAUP Academic Freedom and Shared Governance Special Topics Workshops

• The Role of the Faculty in Financial Exigency (October 8, 3 p.m. ET). Register here.

• Using AAUP Policy to Defend Academic Freedom (October 15, 3 p.m. ET). Register here.

• The Role of the Faculty in Program Discontinuance (October 22, 3 p.m. ET). Register here.

See the calendar of AAUP events here.

Who Rules the Academy? An Update on CAHE’s “Know Your Governing Board” Campaign

SBFA Board member Constance Penley, who co-chairs the Governance Caucus of the Coalition for Action in Higher Education (CAHE) with Timothy Kaufman-Osborn (author of The Autocratic Academy: Reenvisioning Rule in America’s Universities), and SBFA Advisory Board member Claudio Fogu report on recent activities of the caucus:

Amid the ongoing authoritarian crackdown, many academic organizations have urged universities to respond by “enforcing,” “ensuring,” or “implementing” academic freedom and shared governance. Our caucus, by contrast, argues that the autocratic corporate structure of most university governing boards legally assigns final authority over faculty, staff, and students to unelected nonspecialists largely drawn from the financier class, even over matters historically, if informally, delegated to the faculty. Therefore, merely exhorting the UC Regents to respect academic freedom and shared governance is not enough. We need a fundamental restructuring of university governance that gives power to its real stakeholders. To that end, our caucus has created a “Know Your Governing Board” template to help faculty render these bodies visible, make their work transparent, disclose their links to other loci of power, and ask how we might reconstitute our institutions of higher education in the name of fulfilling their democratic promise.

For more information or if you would like to get involved in these efforts, including completing the template on the UC Regents, please contact Constance Penley at constance.penley@gmail.com or CAHE’s Governance Caucus at whorulestheacademy@proton.me.

A Year of Programming on Academic Freedom and Democracy

What is academic freedom and why does it matter? At US universities, academic freedom is inextricable from reimagining democracy at a time when its core principles are under duress. The intersection of academic freedom and democracy points to the university’s broader civic mission to provide a learning environment for students to become active citizens. Academic freedom is a key indicator—a canary in the coal mine—of the ever-shrinking critical space essential to flourishing democratic cultures. 

Just Futures: Academic Freedom and Democratic Cultures offers a year-long series of public programming, supported by a Mellon Sawyer Seminar grant awarded to the UCSB Area Global Initiative (AGI). The themes are “Academic Freedom after 9/11” in Fall 2026, “Locations of Difference” in Winter 2027, and “Campus Climate for Just Futures” in Spring 2027. Just Futures is organized by Bishnupriya Ghosh (English and Global Studies), Shiva Balaghi (AGI), Sherene Seikaly (History), Javiera Barandiarán (Global Studies), and Mellon postdoctoral fellow Hamzah Baig. The schedule of events and information about speakers is available here.