Higher education is facing mounting pressures, from political intervention and financial challenges to attacks on academic freedom. These tensions are visible in the University of California system, where debates over funding, governance, labor, and public mission are increasingly shaping the future of public universities.
Recorded on February 9, 2026, this panel brought together leading scholars to examine the forces challenging public higher education today. Drawing on areas spanning finance, policy, and labor, the discussion explored how these dynamics are shaping the UC System, and what is at stake for students, employees, the public, and the future of higher education.
The panel featured Charlie Eaton, Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Merced; Katherine Newman, Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at UC Berkeley and Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of California; and Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, Professor of Sociology at UC San Diego. The panel was moderated by Christopher Kutz, C. William Maxeiner Distinguished Professor of Law.
The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Education, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), and the Departments of Anthropology, Geography, and Sociology.
Watch the panel above or on YouTube. Or listen to the audio recording via the Matrix Podcast below (or on Apple Podcasts).
Podcast and Transcript
(upbeat electronic music)
[WOMAN’S VOICE] The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
[MARION FOURCADE]
Welcome, and thank you for joining us today. My name is Marion Fourcade. I’m the director of Social Science Matrix.
Across the country, and here in California, universities are facing intensifying political, legal, and economic pressures. From challenges to academic freedom, to debates over funding, diversity, and the public mission of higher education, the UC system has been a central site for these conflicts to play out. So I’m thrilled to welcome today’s panel, Higher Education Under Attack, with a particular focus on the UC system.
As you will see, we’ve been able to assemble not only scholars who bring extensive research expertise on higher education, inequality, and politics, but also who bring firsthand, really practical understanding of the current challenges facing the UC system and, you know, who can help us think about its possible future. And I’m especially pleased that this panel brings together colleagues from across the UC campuses making it a small celebration of the bonds that unite us. Today’s event is part of our California Spotlight series and is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley School of Education, the Center for Studies in Higher Education, and the UC Berkeley Departments of Anthropology and Sociology.
Now, before I turn it over to the panel, and introduce the moderator, let me briefly mention a few upcoming events. Next week, we have our first Matrix Teach-In, where we invite distinguished teachers from the Social Science Division to give one of their favorite lectures. And so if you want to, you know, if you’ve ever dreamt of going back to college and take a take a lecture from a fabulous teacher, please come and listen to Ula Taylor on February 19th.
And then you know, we have a whole series of events, plenty of book panels coming up for the rest of the semester. Let me now introduce our moderator, Chris Kutz. Christopher Kutz joined the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Berkeley Law in 1998.
He specializes in moral, political, and legal philosophy, focusing on criminal, international, and constitutional law. He’s the author of three books, “Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age,” from 2000 which focuses on individual responsibility for collective harms. On War and Democracy in 2016 explores tensions between democratic values and the ethics of war, including humanitarian intervention, torture, and drone strikes, and “Publics in Action: The Self-Making of Civic Life,” in which came out last year and examines the philosophical meaning of the word public and explains how people should and do come together to create their shared institutions.
Chris’s research also addresses criminal responsibility, social welfare obligations, climate change mitigation, humanitarian ethics, and political legitimacy. Needless to say, the perfect person to talk about to, to be the moderator for this panel, and one thing that also makes it unique, makes him uniquely qualified is that he’s a past chair of the Berkeley Academic Senate, and he received the university’s Distinguished Service Award last year. So thank you for your service, both large and small, starting with today’s event.
Thank you, Chris.
[CHRISTOPHER KUTZ]
Okay. Thank you so much for that very, very kind introduction. It’s my pleasure to host a discussion with three remarkable scholars and practitioners of higher education, and would like to express my gratitude to Matrix for making this possible.
I think these events are just incredibly important. I’m gonna introduce them, all of the panelists now, and then we will hear remarks from each in the order that I’m introducing them, followed by a brief discussion among the panelists and a bit of time for questions if we’re lucky and mind our time well. So immediately to my left is Charlie Eaden, who is an associate professor of sociology at UC Merced, where he co-founded the very cleverly acronymed Higher Education, Race, and the Economy, or HERE Lab.
He’s also a PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley. Charlie investigates the power of elites in politics and the economy, as well as policy and organizational strategies to promote more equitable distributions of power and wealth. His book Bankers in the Ivory Tower, University of Chicago Press, which got quite a lot of national notice is about the relationship between financialization, inequalities in higher education, and the rise of private equity and hedge fund investors among US billionaires.
His ongoing research examines how billionaires from these corners of finance and from Big Tech adopted more oligarchical roles in US politics, and I’ll just add, while commuting on Jeffrey Epstein’s private island.
(audience laughing)
To the left, Katherine Newman joined the University of California in January 2023 as Systemwide Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs and Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Berkeley. She received her PhD in anthropology at UC Berkeley and a BA from UC San Diego. Provost Newman has held leadership and academic appointments at kind of everywhere, Princeton, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, UMass Amherst, UMass Amherst, Columbia University, and the Law School at UC Berkeley.
She’s the author of 16 books, the most recent of which is, ‘Moving the Needle: What Tight Labor Markets Do to the Poor.’ Professor Newman is working on a, Provost Newman is working on a new project in collaboration with Evelyn Belieu, Belieu in the Sociology Department, I’m sorry for the, on the campaigns to unionize foreign car manufacturing in Alabama. And then to the left furthest most left, Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra is professor of sociology at UC San Diego, where he also directs the Latin American Program and the International Institute.
His PhD in science and technology is from the University of Edinburgh. Work includes research on the infrastructures of finance and the effects of research evaluation on how knowledge is produced. His most recent book, “The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences,” examines how market, market-oriented quality assessments introduced in the 1980s reshaped the practices, career structures, and intellectual orientations of British social science.
He’s currently working on two books, one on the weakening of science in the public sphere, and a second one on how budgeting techniques shape the organization of higher education. With that, I give you Charlie Eaton.
[CHARLIE EATON]
Thank you. Thanks. Great to be here with this group and this, this audience.
And I’m gonna read my, my initial remarks. I promise to be more extemporaneous in our, our discussion. I think I am on this panel in part because about a year ago, I wrote this essay in the New York Times, and the title was, “15 Billion Is Enough to, $15 Billion Is Enough to Fight the President.”
The $15 billion referred to the size of Columbia’s endowment and my essay detailed some of the math for how wealthy university endowments could afford to buy time for the fight. Time to litigate, time for elite and public opposition to grow against President Trump and his agenda, time for the midterms to potentially break Trump’s control of Congress, but perhaps most importantly, time to develop a strategy. A year later, I think my original argument still looks pretty good.
$15 billion was enough, despite Colombia’s capitulation in many ways. More importantly, $53 billion at Harvard, $36 billion at Princeton, and $40 billion at the University of California, were enough in our case, especially after you consider state funding and other revenue streams for UC. Not enough to survive forever without federal support, but enough to buy time for the fight.
But as far as I can tell, universities as organizations have not developed much of a strategy to influence the coming inflection points that will determine their futures. And while this is unfortunate, I also think it’s not surprising. The attack on universities is part of a larger rupture in the American and global social order, to borrow the phrase used by Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, in his recent speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Carney and others have argued that there’s no going back to the old order because there’s no way to trust that it will hold up after its rupture this time, and this inability to go back to the old order, I think, is immobilizing, but just as Carney said, in the case of the international world order, I think we have to adopt a sort of values-based realism that says you can’t go back to the old order. So, we have to think of something, perhaps, that’s better and new. Universities as we know them can’t just exist as islands amid a ruptured larger order or as islands in an authoritarian America with powerful backers.
And I think this means that any effective university strategy requires the promise of a broader new order to follow the rupture. The construction of any such new order would almost certainly require marshaling of state and economic power by forces outside of universities. But without such a restoration that includes some preservation of constitutional democracy on some new terms, the threats to universities will remain even when Trump goes away.
For example, America will still have a set of powerful Wall Street and Big Tech billionaires who have not received, I think, sufficient attention for conceiving and advocating for Trump’s attacks on universities. They did so in collaboration with far-right activists like Christopher Rufo but these leaders from Wall Street and tech played a leading role, not a supporting one. They include people like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, private equity billionaire Mark Rowan, along with Elon Musk, who you probably know.
In their own words, they set their sights on universities because they view some of the policy and social ideas coming out of universities as threats to their wealth and status. Under the old order, billionaires like these had no reason to feel threatened by the ideas of academics who Pierre Bourdieu counted as part of the dominated faction of the dominant class. In a shift, these new billionaires have adopted an oligarchic posture towards universities and other sources of criticism because of these perceived threats.
I think making peace with these billionaire adversaries is difficult because they are not completely irrational in their perceptions of threats from academia, academic law, at least not in our ruptured world. Academic law and people like Elizabeth Warren played central roles in developing financial regulations and consumer protections that are despised by these new oligarchs. The same is true of antitrust reforms advanced by people like Lina Khan.
Here at UC Berkeley, you have the proposed billionaire wealth tax from Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, and academic critiques of masculinity and whiteness have also offended the status honor of many oligarchs. And after graduating from universities, to top it all off, where these ideas circulate, the college-educated have become the most reliable voters for politicians who support these ideas. How the new billionaires got from perceived threats to oligarchic practices is something I am still puzzling over.
But Zucman has suggested that something has changed with their accumulation of unprecedented relative wealth that makes them far richer than even the oligarchs of the US Gilded Age. And this unprecedented wealth may both motivate and enable them to act outside the bounds of a constitutional democracy. As hubs for debate over this kind of concentrated wealth and power, universities are likely to remain under threat so long as the new billionaires and their allies feel free to act outside the bounds of the law.
And as I said earlier, constructing a new order that restores the rule of law will depend most on the actions of political and economic groupings outside of, outside of the university. But I still think universities have an important role to play. Academics and free societies played key parts in constructing the liberal, social democratic, and neo-liberal regimes of the last century, for better or for worse.
Social scientists, legal academics, and historians, including some I’ve mentioned, have already helped many to make sense of our current rupture. Mark Carney and his speech writers are clearly reading some of these academics. But the contributions of universities to establishing new hegemonic ideas do not just come from the methods of social science and academic debate.
They also come from how universities connect to different powerful sectors and groups across the polity and the economy. We do so through alumni networks, industry relationships, conferences, and as my research shows, through university boards. It’s in this connective role that universities have fallen down the most over the last year, in my view.
Instead of convening leaders from across business, philanthropy, and politics to debate how to move beyond the rupture, we’ve institutionally joined those leaders in keeping our heads down and pretending everything is okay. In his speech, Carney likened this to cornerstone owners putting Workers of the World Unite signs in their windows to signal support for the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. Individually, universities and civic organizations can’t take the sign down without risking retribution from a Trump presidency.
That’s what makes the convening power of universities so important. It provides a means of coordination for enough powerful groups to take down their signs together so that none can be singled out for retaliation. It’s ironic that it was the BlackRock asset management giant and its CEO, Larry Fink, who provided the World Economic Forum as a platform for Carney and others to challenge Trump and the rupture before global elites.
Even Gavin Newsom flew to Davos to deliver his own broadside against Trump to these elites. We’ve seen no comparable attempt that I’m aware of to convene business or bipartisan defenders of democracy by American universities. I think a space has opened for universities to step back into this role.
We bought enough time for Carney, for other thinkers, for ordinary people in Minneapolis to open up space for us to offer our convening role again. And I’ll be very curious to hear today if Kathy, who I think has a very different vantage point given her position and past positions, I’m curious to hear if she thinks that other university leaders think that offering this convening role again might be something that universities could take up. And if so, I’d like to know how we all might help.
(applause)
[KATHERINE NEWMAN]
Thanks very much. I wish it were possible for me to speak frankly about everything that I know about this. It will not surprise you that that’s not really possible.
But within the confines of what I can talk about, I will be as straightforward as I can be. But I’d like to start by giving all of you a sense of what has been at stake in this last year, because I think it can be difficult to know from the vantage point of any one campus or department, just how incredibly threatening this situation is. The University of California currently receives more than $17 billion a year that’s with a B, from the federal government.
That includes nearly $10 billion in Medicare and Medicaid funding, 5.7 billion for research and program support, and 1.7 billion in student financial aid. When resources like that are threatened, that is a very serious existential crisis for the university, and I wanna dwell for a moment especially on what it means with respect to Medicaid, because this is often somewhat far removed from those of you who are on campuses without a medical center. But the University of California serves a very high proportion of low-income Medicaid recipients.
We are the only source of their healthcare, and that has been threatened, and it’s a very serious matter when you think about what it would mean if we had to close our hospitals as a consequence of taking actions that perhaps would be regarded as unpleasant by the Trump Administration. So if you’re wondering why we are sometimes quieter than you might want, I want you to pause for a moment and think about what is at stake, because it’s much harder when you’re not responsible for that than when you are. More than, but now coming closer to the things faculty are concerned about, more than 1,600 federal research grants across UC were suspended, canceled, or delayed over the course of this past year, which is a very serious matter for our colleagues who are holding those grants and trying to advance their research through them.
Of them, of course, have been reinstated, and to Charlie’s point, they were reinstated through legal actions that some of our colleagues here at Berkeley and the law school were responsible for, as well as actions that were taken by concerted organized groups, the AAU, the APLU. So, we should not think that every university is just spinning out on its own. There have been organized efforts to push back, some of which have been successful in the sense that the lower courts have been accommodating.
It’s a little bit harder to tell whether they will be sustained through, through the legal system that Chris knows much more about it than I do. But these grants represent a potential loss exceeding a billion dollars in research funding, and that’s not even getting to what the Trump administration began by demanding of UCLA. And although we haven’t heard a lot about that lately, I would not hold my breath because we have not been forgotten in Washington.
Through action in the courts, over 1,200 of those awards representing more than 800 million have been restored, but most of those decisions are under appeal, and it’s hard to know where it all comes out. And the uncertainty alone has been very difficult for our colleagues who have payrolls to meet and students to support, and no resources to do that with. Now, with respect to trying to bide time, I think it’s fair to say that every single UC campus has stepped up and deployed parts of their reserves to create bridge funding.
Again, exactly trying to do what Charlie has suggested, wait this out and hope that the political system changes, which I think it is. I actually think there is evidence to that effect, though how consequential it will be is another matter. But you know, another 5.7 billion in annual research and program support faces growing risks from new potential federal policies, including for example, what was called the F&A rate or the indirect cost rate.
This is another piece of esoteric information for those of us who are not working on scientific grants, but the sciences and the universities in general depend a lot on what the federal government provides to support the building of laboratories, the maintenance of laboratories. That F&A rate which in our medical schools tends to be around 60, 65%, has been proposed to drop to 15%. And again, while some of the political opposition has grown, Congress has pushed back on this, but it’s not easy to know where it’s going to land in the end, and that it has been very concerning to our colleagues.
It’s also a very direct harm to California’s economy because we are the second-largest employer in the state of California. A lot of jobs depend on this funding coming in. So certainly, one thing we have all learned is that single dependence on a single source is not a good idea.
You can be very, very vulnerable, and we are very vulnerable under these conditions. But those jobs are supported by purchasing that we do through our vendors, contracts, patents, startup business, product development, and on and on and on. So it’s not just the university that’s at stake.
It’s many people who depend on the kind of work that we do. You know, our students, students in all fields, but especially in the STEM fields, and if you’ve been paying attention, as we do, to the number of doctoral students in the university, you can see it declining. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out why.
The revenue to support it is declining sharply, and that is putting the future of our fields at risk because we depend on the next generation to continue on with the research traditions and new ideas that we all look to them for. Another area of vulnerability, the Department of Education, which barely exists anymore, so there isn’t even really anybody to call when you want to get answers to questions. They have ended $350 million in funding for key minority-serving institutions, and all nine undergraduate UC campuses are federally designated AANAPISI, and five of them hold HSI designations.
That is not trivial funding for our students, for our programs. For us alone, this represents more than $12 million that would have supported services and programs and resources to support California’s students, including the 40% of our students who are first-generation in their families. We continue to comply with state and federal non-discrimination law, including Proposition 209, but without the funds that we have been using to reach out to underserved communities, underserved high schools to help students qualify for admission to UC the, the funding that we use to help our students enter the workforce and prepare for their futures, you know, that’s all funding that we have been deriving from federal resources.
And that then is, is leads me to my next source of vulnerability, the One Big Beautiful Bill. The law school will be very familiar with this, but so will our programs in public health, in medical school, in social work, because the Graduate PLUS Loan Program, which is relied on by more than 7,000 UC undergrad, UC graduate students is being phased out, and that will make graduate education much less accessible to low-income and first-generation students, and student undergraduates who are less than full-time will feel this through the Pell Grant system. You know, our students borrow a lot less money than students in other institutions do, but they, those who need to, you know, those are pretty important sources of support for them.
I wanna add, before we turn it over to the next speaker here, that on top of the federal issues, there are a whole series of state-level vulnerabilities. The state budget has been very volatile and has not been in great shape. That said, we have been lucky that this governor has been quite supportive of higher education, way more than many other governors I can think of.
Nonetheless, the state’s finances have not been in great shape either. We were expecting an 8% cut, 8% cut while our costs continue to rise is a pretty dramatic you know, potential catastrophe. We were lucky that not just lucky, we are grateful for the fact that that didn’t actually come to pass.
But there are many vulnerabilities going forward, and many people who are better schooled in the budget than I am believe that while this year we might be okay, the next four years are going to be very, very problematic. So, what are the possibilities? To answer some of, of Charlie’s questions, there are groups that are meeting together.
They have been speaking through those group voices to avoid some of the difficulties that come with standing out. We have a very, very active and effective federal government relations team in Washington, so the fact that many of these efforts were beaten back in Congress is not an accident. It comes from very heavy lobbying by people that we employ to voice the university’s interests and the interests of our low-income, you know, medical subscribers through Medicaid and so on in Washington.
We have also been very active in Sacramento. So last, excuse me, last summer, I spent some time working with my colleague Dave Rubin, who is kind of my analog on the health science side, working on a white paper that has now surfaced as the Wiener Bond Bill. This is a bond bill for a $23 billion research fund for the State of California, which would be like standing up our own national science foundation.
’cause I think what we have learned is that we cannot be solely reliant on a federal government. It isn’t reliable enough. And if we can act like our own nation state in some respects, that is the sort of independence you’re advocating we will probably be better off.
I spent this morning talking to colleagues in the Russell Group, which is the equivalent of the AAU in the United Kingdom, about setting up research relationships with them. Those are the 24 top research universities in England. And in March, I will be meeting with their counterparts in the EU.
All of this comes under the heading of being the fourth-largest economy in the world, we should be able to come closer to standing up something that looks like our own programs and not be so reliant on the rest. So, I hope that gives you a sense of what is at stake, and a little bit reading between the lines, why one needs to be judicious about standing out too much, but why it is so important for us to seek the the bosom of our colleagues in the AAU, in the APLU, who have not only been vocal, but have filed some of the most consequential lawsuits along with our colleagues here at, at Berkeley who have done the same. With that, I turn it over to Juan.
(applause)
[JUAN PABLO PARDO-GUERRA]
Well, thank you very much for inviting me. Thank you for all the amazing things that I have to follow up on. It’s going to be difficult.
What I’ll do is I’ll start with some catastrophizing. I’m excellent at catastrophizing. I’ve been catastrophizing since last October.
And unfortunately, I’ve been pretty spot-on. So when I have to think about the challenges that we face as institutions of higher education and research enterprises, I can see four fundamental risks that we need to address somehow. The first is that this is not going to go away.
The paradigm that has been central to the organization of the scientific enterprise in the United States that was articulated by Vannevar Bush back in the 1950s has disappeared. The generous funding that we received from the federal government, the idea that science is autonomous, and support for basic research as something that is fundamentally good for society is evaporating quickly. Now, this end of that, by that contract, that social contract that traces back to, again, Vannevar Bush’s contributions, implies that the close relationship between the state and scientific institutions that served as a foundation for the broader research enterprise is eroding quickly.
Now, it hasn’t been the case that this compact or this contract has been entirely sort of solid for, throughout the last 50, 60, 70 years. We’ve seen, of course, an increasing privatization of science since at least the 1980s with business enterprises originating more funding than the federal government in terms of support for science, both applied and basic. More importantly, though, the relationship between scientific institutions and the state is, however, again, eroding considerably.
We see evidence of this in numerous domains and in numerous examples. The difficulties, for example, of convincing the NIH and the NSF to modify their policies on stipends for graduate students in the last couple of years shows that there’s a lower ability of large research enterprises, like the University of California, to negotiate with the federal government, even under Democratic administrations. So this is something that will not change, even if there’s a change in DC.
Now, the second risk, this has a direct consequence on our institutions, this collapse of the relationship between scientific institutions and the state, this end of the Bushian contract. Most R1s are built around very specific budgeting principles and techniques that depend immensely on things like indirect cost recovery and that are foundational to the operation of the university. Expenses associated to research administration, maintenance of facilities and infrastructures, and even some forms of faculty support, like, for example, startups, the money that faculty get when they are hired, and funding that can sometimes be converted into faculty lines, are linked to these sources of funding from the federal government fees, indirect costs.
Now, this is particularly true for health sciences, but but it’s also something that affects every single aspect of sort of campus, every single part of campus. As policies on funding change, this will, of course, have a profound repercussion on every department and every unit in our institutions. And it’s not only the hard sciences that may suffer.
Campus administrators have an obligation to balance the books. Some do it better than others. I won’t name names, but some do it really, really terribly.
But in any case, when one side of campus loses money, they will have to make it up with savings on a different part of campus. What does this mean? It means fewer faculty lines, increasingly deferred maintenance, which is already a problem at our institution, and fewer instructional spaces, lower levels of overall staffing, et cetera, et cetera.
So, this is the second challenge or risk. The third is, of course, internal, and it’s more difficult to resolve, which is the inertia that is part of the system. We are simply not prepared for this shift in the underlying paradigm of higher education.
Our institutions are built around the expectation of stability. A 30-year tenure track line, for example, rests on the idea that the discipline will be there in 30 years time and you’ll have students generating revenue for that tenure track line. Our way of educating researchers has also been relatively stable over the last 50, 60, 70 years.
We still operate under an apprenticeship model that has, in most cases, an academic position as the ultimate goal for graduate students, for example. Now, this is no longer an assumption that we can hold. It’s not something that we can defend, and that makes sense in the current situation or the current reality.
Rapidly changing costs from labor to maintenance, from hiring staff to the creation or the maintenance of existing programs, along with a change in funding landscape, make all of this even more complicated and uncertain. Additionally, whether we see it as a gimmick or not, lots of people see it as a gimmick, the fact that AI is growing exponentially both in scholarship and science as well as in management and administration adds uncertainty to this picture. What should university look like is an open question that is often answered, ‘Pretty much what it is today, but with lower paid administrators.’
Even when we explicitly address this shift, we often do so in ways that aren’t entirely clear. I’ve heard the word right-sizing quite a bit over the last year. But in reality, we have no clue what the right size is for an R1 like the ones comprising the University of California servicing tens of thousands of students.
This is both a problem of having built institutions that don’t change easily and that it’s difficult to imagine how you would reorganize them, but it’s also a lack of knowledge that would allow us to be reflexive about what universities are for and what they might look like in the future. The fourth risk or the fourth issue that I, I’ve been thinking about is that we are, in this system, in universities in general, a fragmented community. There really isn’t such thing as a university, but multiple universities sharing the same institutional space.
Budget models, for example, work very differently for the hard sciences than they do for the humanities. And the realities of faculty, students, and so forth in those different settings are also quite different. The arts and humanities have a different set of incentives and missions than, for example, the physical sciences.
And we can see this clearly in how our colleagues and our leadership reacted to two very different risks that emerged over the last year, the loss of federal funding on the one side and direct attacks to academic freedom on the other. The fact that funding is mentioned more than mission or freedom in many communications from the administration isn’t encouraging and reflects that there is this bias in a certain direction, which may be rational because we can’t operate without money, but nonetheless shows that the foregrounding of the mission is not entirely clear. Without a common goal, without alignment about what we want our institution to be and to do surviving this coming shift as a community that is invested in the pursuit of some kind of universalistic knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself will be quite difficult, and we will probably not survive in one piece.
So, I’d like to be more positive, and I’d like to be able to offer some takeaways on what we might want to do to come out of this situation better prepared than what we came in. But I don’t want to pretend that I have the ultimate solution. I’m not McKinsey, so I cannot offer you the solution.
Whatever approach will work, however, should come from an honest, difficult collective discussion about the future of the university, not a constant reliving of a past that is here no more. Thank you.
(applause)
[CHRISTOPHER KUTZ]
So, we now progress to the panel discussion phase of this event. I thought I might just actually prompt you all with a easy question that partly comes out of uh, Juan Pablo’s remarks. So a lot of people, including many academic leaders, say that while the Trump attacks on higher ed are shocking in their intensity, we made ourselves a soft target and our rapidly declining public popularity is evidence of that.
I’m curious if you share that view, or do you think, as I do, that some of that declining popularity comes less from academic institutions losing their way and more from broad-scale populist attacks, sometimes funded by billionaires, on basically claims of elite technocratic competence? Have we made, have we set ourselves up for this crisis in some way? Happy to have anybody respond.
[KATHERINE NEWMAN]
Well, I’ll give you a, give it a shot. Um, so I am concerned about the amount of time we are dwelling in, in many of the circles I’m in, on this idea that we have lost the faith of the public. Because I think there’s a lot more mixed data out there and the fact that we keep repeating this one version worries me, ’cause we are on the verge of talking ourselves into the idea.
There certainly are national datasets that show declining popularity. But that’s not true of employers, who nationally are very clear that higher education is very valuable. And the Intergovernmental Studies polls here at Berkeley also don’t show this.
They show actually remarkable public support among registered voters in California this year for universities in general, and for the University of California in particular. In fact, even to things that I didn’t think the general public had a view on, like research. The value of research, the value of education, and the value of healthcare are the three domains that intergovernmental studies polls tried to assess.
Three twice this year alone. And what they, what those findings show is that Republicans are more conservative than Democrats, but in general, across political parties, in every region of the state, at every educational level where you’re talking about people without a college degree or people who have a lot of education, 65%, and north high confidence in the University of California. I’ve had a h– a hard time squaring what I’m hearing and what I see in those polls.
Um, and it’s even harder to square with the thunderous crowd of students headed in the directions of all of these universities, who are quite eager to join the University of California. So, I’m not sure that we’ve actually lost that, that public confidence. I do think that there are two things that lead the general public to have questions.
Maybe they answer them differently in California. One is the exorbitant costs that our sister private institutions are exacting. Actually, just this morning, I used to live in New York City, I was looking at the cost of private schools in New York City.
Schools, K through 12 schools, are now $70,000 and above. But their university counterparts are north of $100,000 in, you know, increasingly. We don’t cost anything like that, but we are often confused as a sector with private institutions whose price tags are insanely exorbitant.
Now, the sticker price that anybody pays is always different from that advertised price. But you know, in the University of California, I think it’s something like 60% of our students graduate without any debt at all, and the ones who do, graduate with very modest debt. And I’m not saying that’s a good thing.
I actually took this job under the aegis that we were gonna try to create and are still trying to create debt-free pathways to a UC education. But we are often confused with institutions that are costing a whole lot more, and I think that is one of the reasons why there is public frustration with higher education. And the other thing, quite honestly, is that, you know, the press has dwelled on, and the government has dwelled on the level of activism in universities, and there are a lot of people who don’t approve of that.
And they don’t hear as much about the other things that universities do, like provide people with pathways to employment that they value and a lifetime for, I think, considerate of thinking skills that they value too. I’m gonna end this comment by speaking to something that Juan Pablo mentioned. If you look at President Miliken’s communications, here’s the last line that you’ll see in every letter he wrote.
“We won’t compromise on academic freedom. We won’t compromise on who we hire or on what they teach, or what we write.” Those are steadfast commitments that we mean quite seriously, so I don’t think it’s fair to suggest the university has not dwelled on this.
It has. Yes, it reacts to the financial constraints because we’ve got faculty who are immediately terrified about what they’re going to do. But the one thing I don’t think you need to worry about is whether or not we will hold to those values.
It would not be the University of California if we didn’t, and there isn’t a soul in the president’s office, or in any of the administrative offices on this campus or anywhere else that I think would say otherwise.
[CHRISTOPHER KUTZ]
Please, go ahead.
[CHARLIE EATON]
Yeah. One thing I’ll just add about the University of California, I don’t know if I ever switched off. No, I’m on.
I think, you know, I’ve long been a critic of elite exclusion at universities. But I think it was something that Henry Brady, who was here first alerted me too, is that in many years the University of California, Berkeley alone enrolls more low-income students than the entire Ivy League combined. And I think that difference at UC, not just at UC Berkeley, but across the UC system, is part of why you do have really persistent, strong public support for the University of California.
I’d also add though, I kinda think that the loss of confidence in universities is a bit overstated. I do think there’s plenty that universities should be, do to be more inclusive to those who do not come from advantaged backgrounds and to serve those, whether it’s through medical research or otherwise. But the loss of confidence in universities I think is overstated when you don’t situate it, and there’s a loss of confidence in all elites and all elite institutions and anything that you might call the establishment in the US.
And the decline in confidence across some of these survey measures that you’ll see in universities is actually less than for some of those other institutions. And when you get to really concrete questions, like any polling data about any of the proposed Trump cuts that were proposed in the One Big Beautiful Bill or otherwise, the public opposition is, like, overwhelmingly, like, over 60% or over 70% to those cuts.
Consistent with that, one thing we didn’t mention is that you know, a lot of the proposed Trump cuts to NIH funding did not end up going into the budget bill that was just passed, and that’s a, that is another testimony to public support that through the polity makes its way to, to these folks.
So, but again, there’s a break between, I think, public opinion is actually– we often sort of say, “Well, there’s this anti-elitist public opinion that’s angry at universities.” A lot of the policy objections and aggressive anti-university proposals do not come from working class, non-elite Americans. They come from a set, not a, not the entire business class, but a set particularly of the wealthiest Americans, and I think that is what we have to grapple with. And that is where our convening power is needed. Not just convening of universities together to speak with one voice as universities, but convening with, convening the business, nonprofit, philanthropic elites who are also threatened.
Because if they don’t speak out, there’s no maintaining the university enterprise if we lose the democratic order that is really threatened. And I think that is something that we need to really grapple with and grapple with what we can do more of in California.
[JUAN PABLO PARDO-GUERRA]
I completely agree. I think that’s the sort of public lack of confidence in higher education is very much a manufactured statistic that is used very strategically. There are some interesting data points in terms of who expresses less support and who express less support of things like scientific institutions from polls prior to the Trump administration.
And it is interesting that those that had the largest decline, actually people who identify yourselves as working class or relatively stable over the last 30, 40 years. The ones that had the largest decline are those with a college degree or more than a college degree. It’s not a massive decline, so saying that this is an evaporation of confidence in higher education would be exaggerated.
And of course, the difficulty of this is that now presenting the university to the public is more difficult given the kind of ecosystem that characterizes the media. So the way universities can reach out to the public today is not the same as what they could do in the 1980s, 1990s, before, in a sense, the fragmentation of the media landscape that we see today. So that is, that makes it more difficult.
So to put it more directly, Rufo would not have happened in the 1980s. Rufo is something that specifically is the product of the ecosystem of the media today and that would not have happened 20 years ago. And the fact that it’s happening today means that we have a less of a capacity to influence the public discourse, whatever that may be.
So I completely think that it’s exaggerated. It’s still something that could always be performative. So remember that these things can be said until people start believing them.
And if the media says for decades or for years and years that universities are a bastion of liberal nonsense, et cetera, et cetera, that might change public opinions in certain ways. The, the increase in support of the University of California, for example, had to do with the fact that the defunding from the federal government was extremely public, and it made us visible again in a state where we were sort of visible, but not completely visible to sort of the general public. Sort of talking to my neighbors, they really do not know anything about UC San Diego.
Their reference is something completely different. And I live in a neighborhood that is heavily working class, and it’s interesting to see how they started talking about that in the last six months because it became a point of conversation in the press. So I think that that’s one thing that universities have to grapple with and have to deal with, and I completely agree that it’s not that, so the sense that there’s more concern with funding comes from a series of communications, not only from the president’s office, but from other sort of campus-based offices where it’s clear that there’s, or there’s a sentiment amongst faculty, particularly faculty in arts and humanities and social sciences, that initiatives that were longstanding projects of the faculty like, for example, diversity and equity requirements of classes, are more precarious and are being considered less and supported less than in other things.
And I understand the signaling, but at the same time, not having that conversation creates a sense that what matters is the indirect costs rather than preserving certain integrity within the curriculum.
[KATHERINE NEWMAN]
So this may strike you as really anodyne, but I’m gonna give it to you anyway. The most useful thing any of us can do is to be as resoundingly supportive of the university itself as possible, to let everyone know that the university matters to the citizens, matters to their children, matters to the people who are part of it. Because the more we signal support and the more we avoid internally eating each other alive, the better.
And I do worry about that, by the way. There’s lots of reason for people to be feeling very sensitive and very concerned about the future. There’s a lot of reason to be concerned about the future.
But apropos of your comments about Chris Rufo, I remember listening to some of the interviews that he did, where he said, essentially, “Just cut the budget and then watch them eat each other alive.” This man knows what he’s about. He’s not a fool.
He understands that if you start pressuring the budget, you will see an eruption of differences between scientists and humanists or whatever. We all have a lot to gain from standing together in defense of the university that we love, and I do worry that these internal divisions could, and I’ve seen some of the evidence of that growing, will end up doing exactly what Rufo thought it would do, undermine, enable us to undermine each other internally. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t robust discussions to be had about how resources are used and how we manage these unbelievable pressures.
I more or less have to worry about that every day. But I think that would be my one rather anodyne suggestion, that it’s, I hope that you will have more faith in what your leaders are trying to do, including leadership on this campus and on the other campuses as well, ’cause I can guarantee you they are spending every living moment, trying to figure out the best way to pull these institutions through what is the most frustrating, difficult, and potentially wounding episode, I think of any of our lives.
[CHARLIE EATON]
I have a maybe less anodyne suggestion, but I think a complementary one, which is to look at some places where it’s important to direct criticism and public pressure in our backyard. And so on the topic of Christopher Rufo, there was a really important investigative report by the, in the publication Semaphore by Ben Smith, about a year ago about how early in COVID, Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz started a secret Signal chat called Chatham House for top venture capitalists, and tech executives, and financiers.
A lot of the strategy and a lot of the ideas and elite support for what we’ve seen was developed in that Signal chat and in parallel conversations by Marc Andreessen and together with Rufo and folks like that.
Marc Andreessen is based in Palo Alto. Andreessen Horowitz is based here locally. These are folks who, you know, in multiple podcast interviews before Trump took office in ’25, he laid out the “cut their funds, watch them eat themselves alive” strategy.
Mark Rowan, the private equity billionaire is himself the self-described architect of the compact. He’s not in our backyard. He’s based in New York.
But the point is, you know, the people behind this are not President of the UC System or the UC Regents. And there may be more that we wanna ask of all of them, but I think putting criticism and pressure among these powerful folks where a lot of these proposals have started is really important, especially in our own backyard.
[JUAN PABLO PARDO-GUERRA]
So I think it would be a mistake to read their position as wanting to disappear universities altogether.
If you have a look at Project 2025 and the new document by Heritage Project 2025 and ’26, it’s not about disappearing us. It’s about profoundly changing the organization of the institution. It’s getting rid of some parts of the institution that they find awkward and unnecessary, and retaining precisely those that feed into Silicon Valley industry and so forth.
And I think that that’s the challenge, because the incentives for that confrontation within the institution are there. And I think that part of the challenge in the next few years is finding ways of generating the solidarity that will allow us to navigate through this period and to do so in a way that maintains sustainability for the institution in the long run. But it’s not about disappearing us.
It’s about disappearing some of us. All right.
[KATHERINE NEWMAN]
Well, I’ve spent a lot of my time in the last six months, and will be doing more of it going forward, working with faculty across the whole system in something that we’re calling UCAD Plus.
I just wanna be sure you all know about it. So UCAD was a Senate document University of California academic disruptions. It was a focus on academic disruption, and it was a really quite remarkable statement about what we needed to focus on to navigate through these very difficult times.
UCAD Plus is an administration-faculty effort to try and turn those ideas, those faculty ideas into action plans. That is my contribution to how we navigate through this, because whatever we do, it’s got to be embraced by our faculty. It eeds to be led by them as much as possible.
It needs to preserve the things that they believe in, but it can’t shy away from thinking about new configurations that are possibly even better ways of doing what we do. So let me give you some examples, and these are not high-profile political claims, but these are practical ideas that could make a difference. Throughout the system, we have a lot of very, very expensive research equipment.
We call them core facilities. They have been all over every single campus, and we have spent relatively little time asking what it would mean to collaborate across our campuses to make use of to support those instruments. But we may need to do that.
So that’s just one example, but it’s one that’s quite important if you think about how we preserve the scientific enterprise if we can’t afford to do it the way we have always done it. We have a deep investment in our language programs, right? We care about those language programs.
We offer some 70-plus languages across the UC system. The top four or five enrollment-wise can be sustained on pretty much any campus. But you go below that level, and it starts to get very, very difficult.
Starting this term, we are standing up a global languages program across the whole UC system in which enrollment can be sourced anywhere within the system. We have never done anything like that before, and these financial pressures are causing us to have to do that, but it may be a way in which we can support and retain things we care about in a way that’s more efficient and more cost-effective.
I mentioned before that, you know, because of all kinds of financial pressures, some, only some of which have to do with Trump, and some of which are longer-standing, we are seeing a shrinkage of graduate programs. What can we do to create graduate programs that span our campuses? Maybe not the whole thing, but pieces of it which could be intellectually enlivened by pulling campuses together across disciplinary boundaries.
This is something that we’re working on through UCAD Plus. It’s a way of trying to ask, how do we preserve the value of our programs, for example, in, I don’t know, English literature or medieval history if the number of students we can afford to enroll at the level they deserve to be supported shrinks? Well, supposing we put together the medieval historians at Santa Cruz and the ones at Berkeley and the ones at Davis and in Southern California similarly, are there forms of academic discourse that could be enriched and sustained through that kind of collaboration?
These are not high-profile political solutions, but these are ways of looking at our cost structure and asking, if these things matter to us, are there ways that technology can help us preserve them? Are there ways that we can make the environment in our classrooms richer than it has been? There are many other things besides that.
The UCAD Plus task force is five sub-committees deep, and there are many people involved in it. But this is a way in which we are trying to ask the question, what does the University of the future look like? And so I hope that that will be something that will be a contribution to its sustenance.
[JUAN PABLO PARDO-GUERRA]
I mean, just to follow up on that, I think it’s terrific. I think the work of UCAD has been exceptional. One thing that I would suggest that is in, under control of faculty, actually, and the Academic Senate is that a lot of this transformation will require a lot of work, and it’s a lot of invisible work that tends not to be rewarded.
And as we move into this new period, it might also be an opportunity to rethink how we reward faculty for the kinds of work that they perform. I think that’s, even though we are in R1 or most yeah, all campuses are in R1, we need to, yeah. Yes, yes.
Recently, but, yes, all campuses. We need to focus also on the invisible work that maintains the R1 hole. And this hasn’t necessarily been the case in the past.
I think that the Bushian paradigm of science didn’t really consider those forms of work as essential to, to the maintenance of science and scholarship, but this is something that a more caring university could take forward. And a lot of that will take lots of work by faculty, and rewarding that work through the action of the academic senate, for example, in the review of files would be an important way of making sure that the incentives are aligned with the objectives.
[KATHERINE NEWMAN]
This is why a whole section of UCAD Plus is about the academic evaluation process, which is entirely under the control of the faculty, as it should be.
[CHARLIE EATON]
I’ll end in a similar vein, I actually wanna read a quote from Marc Andreessen, before I do, that sets us up, I think a little bit. He says so, “If you withdrew those sources of federal taxpayer money and state money, they all instantly go bankrupt, and then you can rebuild.” And that was him in January 2025 enumerating the Trump plan to try to cut federal student loan programs, which, as we heard, has been done with PLUS loans cut federal research funding cut the tax exemption at the operation level and cut tax exemptions at the endowment level.
Those are the four things he said in January of 2025, all of which were pursued by the Trump administration. As I said, if we wanna provide an alternative to not just the not jhust the dark future for the university, but for our society that we’re facing. We gotta keep the lights on, and that includes preserving graduate education as a place where we really do the longer term thought work that you have to do to build the different ideas that can coalesce society.
At UC Merced, we’re living some of what Kathy just said. We have a 18% proposed budget cut over the next three years, so almost one-fifth of our budget.
It’s like, I don’t know how you keep running the thing with a reduction that big. We, this semester and, or this year in our sociology program, even though we didn’t admit a cohort last year, we’re only able to admit four students this semester, or this year, and we don’t know if we’ll be able to admit more next year. We’re trying to figure out, can we build synergies with other programs which I hope we can, but I think which could, you know, create some critical mass and the kind of economies of scale that you need and the sufficient, just a sufficient number of people exchanging ideas that you really need to do graduate, deep graduate learning.
My other pitch would be, you know, I took the train up here this morning, took me two and a half hours. Uh, are there ways we can pull resources across UC Merced and UC Berkeley? Can we cut across space to do that?
Because you need our students. They need to be, our graduate students, our faculty need to be part of imagining a new world. We are, you know, disproportionately much more than the rest of the UC from underrepresented racial groups and from working-class backgrounds.
And they’re the kinds of folks that a lot of us have said we need to be more part of this project of imagining a different world. So, hopefully, we can come up with some good ideas on the margins after this talk.
[KATHERINE NEWMAN]
And that is what UCAD Plus is designing. It is designing architecture for exactly what you’ve just suggested.
[CHARLIE EATON]
Count me in.
[KATHERINE NEWMAN]
I wanna end with one little anecdote I thought you’d find interesting, all of you. We have occasional what we call a congress, which is sort of like a gathering across the whole UC system. It used to be face-to-face. Now to save money, it’s all on Zoom. We had one on academic freedom last spring, and I, I took a lot of punishment for this, but I invited Chris Rufo to give a presentation.
He said he wanted $60,000 to do that. I said, “This is a public university, and So no, but you know, if you’re willing to do what everyone else is willing to do for free, you are most welcome.” And the reason I did that is that, as far as I can tell, neither he nor any of the other people you’ve talked about ever have to debate their ideas. They speak from an echo chamber. They speak from their own corner. They’re given a loud degree of visibility, and they never actually have to debate, and I wanted him to have to debate. I’d like him to debate Charlie and Juan Pablo. You know, I’d like him to ex, I’d like him to have to answer for some of these ideas, and frankly, I think we should have to answer for our own perspective as well.
We can’t proclaim that we believe in academic freedom and then refuse to talk to these people. But I got hammered by some of my, you know, progressive colleagues, “Why are you giving this man a platform?” And the answer is because I think he oughta have to stand on the platform with the rest of us.
So when we say we believe in academic freedom, that means we believe in the freedom to debate, and that means debating everybody. And I think we have shied away too much from taking on these questions that you have been raising.
[CHRISTOPHER KUTZ]
Thank you so much.
[CHARLIE EATON]
I’m inviting Marc Andreessen.
[KATHERINE NEWMAN]
Good. Go for it. Tell him to take the train to Merced.
[CHARLIE EATON]
I got my, that’s my Number one homework assignment. Wonderful. Thank you very much. He can take the Hyperloop.
[Upbeat electronic music]
[WOMAN’S VOICE] Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.
