2025: The Year That UC Faculty Fought Back (And Won!)

•  Faculty found their voices in the face of the Trump attacks on higher education.
•  CUCFA and the FAs won multiple lawsuits, obstructing the Trump agenda in California
•  Faculty Association membership grew by 50%
• CUCFA’s new leadership takes office and works with local organizers to move the council from an advocacy model to an organizing one

Faculty Association Victories in 2025

Image credit: San Francisco Chronicle

As the new administration shut down research funding and limited faculty freedom of speech, UC faculty fought back on many fronts.

Guided by a new leadership team committed to building a broader, more representative, more powerful organization, CUCFA initiated and joined multiple successful lawsuits:            

• Sued the Trump administration to prevent the University from capitulating under financial coercion–and won!
• Sued to compel the release of the Trump demand letter–and won!
• Filed an amicus brief in AAUP’s lawsuit that banned the federal government’s ideological deportation policies–and won!
• Supported class action suits to restore hundreds of millions of grants across the UC system –and won!

To learn more about CUCFA’s work towards these successful lawsuits, check out a short video here. 

Faculty members spoke out against UCOP’s plan to cut the hiring incentive component of the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP). On Tuesday, November 18th, UCOP agreed to continue the hiring incentive.In November, over 200 faculty attended a town hall on the Future of Higher Education, emphasizing the need to ensure research funding and academic freedom, and sent hundreds of letters to UCOP and the Regents urging them not to capitulate to the Trump administration.

CUCFA and the FAs continue to campaign against the implementation of Trellix surveillance software. We also continue to partner with UC organizers to advocate for a California-funded research program.

Hundreds of Faculty Joined Their Campus FA 

Image credit: KQED

As the Trump agenda unfurled, FA organizing committees sprang up on many campuses. In September, local organizing committees held a state-wide meeting and set a goal to add at least 1,000 faculty members by the end of the academic year. As of today, we have made progress toward that goal, but there is more work to be done. If you’re interested in joining your campus organizing committee, reach out to organizing@cucfa.org. 

We need powerful organizations that can launch legal challenges, organize faculty opposition, and speak to the public through media outreach. Ask your colleagues to join us today!

Join AAUP and Help Defend Higher Ed

CUCFA is allied with the national American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the national union at the forefront of responding to the Trump administration’s attack on higher education around the country. We encourage faculty to add AAUP membership to your existing FA membership by visiting your FA join page.

New CUCFA Leadership and Staff

CUCFA Officers

Many of these accomplishments have been spearheaded by CUCFA’s new leadership team and expanded staff. Our vision is to shift from a primarily advocacy-driven model to an organizing approach in order to build durable, systemwide faculty power. This summer we elected new officers: Co-Presidents Annie McClanahan (UCI) and Jessica Taft (UCSC); Jess Ghanam (UCSF) as Vice President for Health Sciences; and Miloš Jovanović (UCLA) as Secretary/Treasurer. We also appointed Charmaine Chua (UCB) to lead campus organizing and Zoé Hamstead (UCB) to direct external relations and legal affairs. Based on our conversations with campus FA boards and organizing committees, the new officers have set a clear collective charge before them: to deepen engagement across campuses, strengthen our statewide coordination, and bring more faculty into active leadership.

To support this shift, we created two new staff roles. Jen Jenkins, our new Director of Operations, brings extensive experience in learned society and member organization administration (formerly the operations director of the German Studies Association, Jen has also done consulting work for the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Society for 18th-Century Studies, and the American Association of Teachers of German) and a background as a former tenured faculty member in German and Scandinavian Studies at Pacific Lutheran University. She understands both the administrative demands of a growing statewide organization and the daily realities of faculty work.

Jen Jenkins

Sam Smucker, our new Director of Organizing, brings over twenty years of labor organizing across higher education, healthcare, manufacturing, warehouses and school districts. Sam has led more than two dozen organizing drives, including at Indiana University, where he attained his PhD. He will be working with systemwide and local leadership to build campus structures that can turn broad faculty frustration into collective action for meaningful change.

Sam Smucker

Finally, Eric Hays, who has held CUCFA together for years as a contractor covering everything from tech to policy research—will continue in his current position through 2025 before transitioning into a new role of Policy Analyst. Eric’s new role will focus on legislative analysis, tracking UC Regents actions, and monitoring budgetary developments on the UC and state levels.

Eric Hayes

This new leadership and staff team positions CUCFA to take on long-term work of building real faculty power across the UC system. This power begins with you. If you would like to comment or offer suggestions on what CUCFA has done well in the past half year, and what it could do in the future, please reach out to president@cucfa.org.