Response to Frenk’s State of the Campus Address

On Tuesday, May 26, 2026, UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk’s idea of our university sharply diverged from the reality we feel on our campus. His description of a “connected, impactful, and exemplary” campus does not match the experience of faculty, students, and staff, who have borne the brunt of last year’s attacks on higher education.

We had hoped Frenk would acknowledge the serious problems on our campus, which stem in part from administrative failure to maintain our core mission. The illegal cancellation of federal grants, the threat of ICE on campus, the OneIT and Trellix debacles, as well as the administration’s refusal to meaningfully cooperate with the Academic Senate, offer just a few examples of the crisis we have all felt in the past year. The hundreds of UC faculty represented by the FA have a less rosy view of the state of our campus. Below, we offer our point-by-point response to Frenk.

Most strikingly, the Chancellor claimed that “[a]t UCLA, we stand behind our faculty.” This comes as a surprise to many of us, particularly in grant-based disciplines, as UCLA administrators did nothing when the Trump administration suspended $584 million in federal research grants and tried to impose a $1.2 billion fine. The UCLA Faculty Association, CUCFA, and other UC labor unions acting on our own won these legal battles, restoring grants to our university. During the injunction hearing, the Trump administration used the fact that the UCLA administration refused to join the faculty-led lawsuit to argue that the illegal suspension of the grants should be maintained. Fortunately, Judge Rita Lin saw through this tactic and issued her sweeping injunction. It is regrettable that the administration hampered faculty efforts to restore grants that fund critical research at UCLA. It is even more regrettable that Frenk failed to mention these events.

Frenk identified the threat of withdrawn federal funding as one of the sources of the campus budget crisis. Yet, he failed to mention that most of these grants have been restored by faculty action. Instead, his administration has used the federal attacks to justify its own restructuring of our university, including the OneIT debacle and staff centralization. Throughout the past year, faculty organized around the California Science and Health Research Bond Act, which would bring $12 billion of research funding to our scholars. While UCOP later joined the call for this bill, the UCLA administration has done very little in support of it and Frenk did not mention it at all. In fact, it was faculty organizing which gathered thousands of signatures, helping push the bill’s passing in the California state Senate. As CUCFA co-president Jessica Taft noted in Sacramento on May 4, “we can choose to be a place where truth, learning, and science are still valued.” Frenk did not seem to mention this choice at all, perhaps because fighting back against Trump would threaten the administrative restructuring he has championed.

During the apex of Trump’s attacks, the UCLA FA was forced to sue the UC administration for violating the California Public Records Act by not disclosing the “demand letter” from the Trump administration, as requested by a unanimous vote of the Academic Senate Legislative Assembly. Stubbornly, the administration fought its own faculty all the way to the California Supreme court and lost. This was a tremendous waste of university resources. Even after the grants were restored, UCLA administration did not ensure that all awardees could actually access their funds. During the past month, several South campus faculty members had to ask for help from the Faculty Association to get funds flowing. For all its verbal platitudes, Frenk’s claim that UCLA stands behind its faculty is demonstrably false.  

Most faculty know that the administration does not have our backs. Frenk said nothing about how he would better consult with faculty, despite a September 2025 Senate survey in which 36 percent of UCLA faculty strongly disagreed, and 26 percent somewhat disagreed, with the statement, “I trust UCLA’s administration to do what is right.” Feeling ignored by the administration is a longstanding problem for faculty. In September 2024, the Joint Rebuilding and Renewal Task Force of Senate faculty recommended eight ways in which faculty retention and morale could be improved, none of which have been implemented since. Frenk’s nebulous strategy made no mention of how we can reduce student to ladder faculty ratios, the main suggestion of the task force. In the last ten years, the number of administrators per student has doubled, while the number of faculty per student has decreased. There are now more managers and senior professionals on UC’s campuses than there are ladder-rank and clinical faculty.   

As Academic Senate Chair Megan McEvoy wrote in January 2026, Frenk and EVC Darnell Hunt made several false statements in response to faculty questions about the budget. In February 2026, the Academic Senate unanimously passed a resolution stating that “the administration has failed to meet its obligations under shared governance, as defined by University bylaws.” In the past year, the Senate passed multiple unanimous resolutions demanding basic budget sharing information and questioning administrative centralization initiatives. These resolutions were necessary because the administration was not fulfilling its basic responsibilities and faculty had to act. Because Senate faculty have no collective bargaining representative, we have no legal protection against the administration’s continued violations of shared governance. While Senate Chair McEvoy mentioned these resolutions in her introductory remarks, in Frenk’s address they were non-existent. 

Frenk said that “[c]ombating antisemitism and all other forms of hatred is a moral imperative,” which is certainly true. However, UCLA’s actions should not bolster the Trump administration’s illegal attacks on our university. As Distinguished Professor and Chair in Jewish Studies David N. Myers noted in an LA Times op-ed: “Trump’s claim of fighting antisemitism at UCLA is a dangerous charade.” A joint letter of 143 Jewish faculty at UCLA noted: “[t]he DOJ takes advantage of Jewish concerns about antisemitism to attack free speech and academic freedom.” When charges of antisemitism are cynically used to suppress free speech, abolish trans healthcare, climate science, gender studies, pediatric cancer treatment and diversity initiatives at UCLA, Frenk’s failure to put these events in context is a striking abdication of responsibility towards our community. Notably, Frenk has not even read the reports from the UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism. His failure to address Islamophobia on campus is a striking omission, coming just a week after a racist attack on a San Diego mosque left three people dead. 

On Tuesday, Frenk mentioned the need to protect free expression and safety, but outside his inauguration on Royce Quad, UCLA police violently threw to the ground students who were peacefully demonstrating. Frenk mentioned that they had recruited an associate vice chancellor for campus and community safety, Steve Lurie. He did not mention the $29 million spent on campus securitization, most of it paying for police overtime. On January 30, 2026 in a public forum, Lurie stated multiple times that if ICE were to come to campus, his office might take as long as two days to inform the community. Lurie said multiple times that people should not interfere with ICE actions on campus because “it could be dangerous for you,” and that UCPD would not stop ICE from taking illegal actions on campus. Instead of the administration defending our undocumented colleagues and students, it was faculty who organized Know Your Rights trainings and mobilized to protect commencement ceremonies last year. We plan to do the same this year, because our UCLA includes everyone, regardless of immigration status. 

During his address, Frenk said “connection brings us together” but an essential part of our community completely left out of Frenk’s statements and the entire event are our labor unions. UC-AFT representing lecturers and librarians, UAW 4811 representing graduate student academic workers, AFSCME 3299 representing service workers, and the Teamsters Local 2010 representing clerical and service employees were all left out. We are continuously told by the administration that contracts that offer fair wages somehow threaten the university’s existence. Yet, the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the Ascend program, the hundreds of new FTEs at OneIT, or Frenk’s newly-proposed grant of tens of millions of dollars to the athletics division would have easily paid for these increases. It is becoming clear that faculty need our own representation against an administration that refuses to absorb the costs of the contracts it signs, offloading them onto departments instead.

Frenk’s budgetary proposals remained nebulous and unclear. His proposal of merging the Chief Administrative Officer and Chief Financial Officer positions failed to outline whether the merger will actually reduce the number of administrative FTEs. We fear that this project, like several other recent examples of restructuring, will wind up being budget neutral in the end. Instead, we invite Frenk to truly consult faculty on the path forward for UCLA. He could start by responding to the dozens of reports by various committees and task forces of our Academic Senate and even attending a Faculty Association membership meeting.

On Tuesday, Frenk painted a picture of a man going it alone. He did not even acknowledge the existence of other people in UCLA administration, including Executive Vice Chancellor Darnell Hunt, the entire administrative staff, and department chairs and vice-chairs. Instead, Frenk was cast as the lone embodiment of the administration. All of the speakers thanked Frenk specifically and not UCLA leadership as a whole.

The State of the Campus livestream reflects a bunker mentality in Frenk’s office. His address was invitation-only and took place in an undisclosed location, with no questions taken. Before the livestream began, people in the audience were told that outbursts would not be tolerated and that police were nearby. 

During the past year, faculty have taken leadership in the face of unprecedented attacks on our university. We have defended UCLA against the Trump administration. We are fighting to secure billions in research funding with the passing of SB 895. We are pushing the regents to improve student-faculty ratios, and truly fund our educational mission. In the face of these momentous developments, Frenk offers curated town halls full of vague, corporate statements. Buzzwords are not solutions and do not convey leadership.