This year alone, CUCFA has initiated and joined several critical lawsuits to restore research funding, ensure faculty First Amendment rights, and assure that our universities’ resources are not held hostage to the Trump administration’s political agenda.
September 2025: Faculty Association and Union-led lawsuit prevents the Trump administration from unlawfully stifling free speech and academic freedom on our campuses. CUCFA organized Senate faculty and served as Plaintiff along with all 10 UC faculty associations and every single UC union in a wall-to-wall labor and union-led lawsuit. Our organizing efforts provided an essential basis for the “overwhelming evidence”-including 74 declarations–of threats to First Amendment protections cited in Judge Lin’s ruling that granted the Plaintiffs a preliminary injunction in November 2025.
Behind the Scenes: How UC Faculty Beat Back Trump’s Attacks Video (7:40)
CUCFA and UCLA Faculty Association Lawsuit makes public the Trump Administration’s Demand Letter to the University of California. Even though the UC Regents appealed all the way to the Supreme Court of California, a final ruling issued in October 2025 ordered the UC to disclose the federal government’s extortionary demands that would impose ideological controls on the university under the threat of a $1.127 billion fine and hundreds of millions in withheld federal funds.
CUCFA-Supported Class Action lawsuit that restored federal funds across the UC system. Faculty Association organizers across UC collected information about terminated federal grants and identified principal investigators who could serve as plaintiffs in Thakur v. Trump, which won a preliminary injunction in June 2025.
Court documents | News Coverage
April 2025: CUCFA organized an amicus brief in support of AAUP v. Rubio, challenging the federal government’s ideological deportation policies that resulted in the arrest and deportation of university community members. Many of our members contributed testimony on the harms that faculty have experienced as a result of these orders, including chilled speech, changes to teaching and research, and lost intellectual exchange with non-citizen students and researchers. The court’s landmark ruling in October 2025 affirmed that non-citizens have the same First Amendment rights as citizens.
September 15, 2025: CUCFA filed Unfair Labor Practice complaints against the UC for inappropriately disciplining faculty speech and unlawfully interfering with protected labor activities.