‘This isn’t only about students — it’s about all of us’
By KHADEEJAH KHAN — campus@theaggie.org
Facing federal threats to academic freedom and funding, faculty have taken it upon themselves to advocate for their rights, shared governance and academic freedom through the Davis Faculty Association (DFA).
DFA belongs to the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA), which emerged in the 1970s with UC Academic Senate faculty from UC Berkeley. They believed that the UC system alone could not address issues relating to faculty compensation in a period of rising inflation. This turned into faculty mobilization at Berkeley and subsequently all UC campuses.
Newly emerged faculty associations then drafted the 1979 Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act (HEERA), which allows for employees to seek redress for violation of labor rights.
Today, DFA board member and UC Davis History Professor Stacy Fahrenthold believes DFA’s work continues the lineage of faculty advocacy that emerged in the UC.
“We function as advocates,” Fahrenthold said. “We function as watchdogs and protectors of faculty rights in a context where there really isn’t another body that’s doing precisely those things.”
In the past few months, DFA has taken part in on campus actions, from joining CUCFA’s Emergency Day of Action on March 19 at the Memorial Union Quad and hosting a “Know Your Rights” panel at the UC Davis School of Law as part of the April 17 National Day of Action.
DFA operates as an autonomous group independent of the university’s internal infrastructure, able to write public letters and engage in lawsuits. On March 28, DFA issued a letter to UC Davis administration, calling on them to protect students, staff and faculty from privacy violations and political targeting.
One of the biggest threats to academic freedom is cuts to federal funding based on viewpoint retaliation, according to UC Davis Law Professor Brian Soucek. A trend mirrored across private and public institutions across the nation, Soucek believes these threats are especially harmful to the mission of the University of California as a public institution made to serve the interests of all Californians.
“At the University of California, serving the needs of the public as diverse as California’s is a central part of our mission,” Soucek said. “Some of the attacks from the current administration on diversity, equity and inclusion in particular, really go to the heart of what we see ourselves as doing here at the University of California in a way that it might not go to the heart of what Harvard or Columbia [University] or some other [private] school sees itself as doing. We would be a very different university if we didn’t care about the extent to which our teaching and research is reaching a diverse public.”
In April, DFA also joined CUCFA and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT Local 1474) in their letter calling on the UC to address student visa revocations. That same month, DFA joined CUCFA, alongside 30 faculty associations nationwide, in submitting an amicus brief in American Association of University Professors (AAUP) v. Rubio to “halt the ideologically-targeted deportations of students nationally.”
As a Professor of History and Middle East Studies, Fahrenthold sees how fears of visa revocations enter the classroom through the ways in which students engage in critical and candid conversations about Palestine and Israel.
“Revoked visas create a pervasive and hostile climate of fear,” Fahrenthold said. “It’s not just about terrorizing the people who find out that their visas have been revoked. It’s also about the way that these revocations impact the work that we do as faculty. This isn’t only about students, it’s about all of us.”
The DFA is also greatly concerned over attempts to silence pro-Palestine activism as part of the Donald Trump administration’s investigation into allegations of antisemitism in higher education. Specifically, the administration has conducted operations under Title VI, a law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in programs and activities.
As AAUP wrote in a brief on the investigations, Title VI does not require higher-education institutions to provide information of individual students and faculty to the federal government, and that sharing information may violate the first amendment rights of students and faculty.
As part of a federal Title VII investigation, which prohibits employment discrimination, the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) disclosed personal and demographic information of over 850 UC faculty members after being subpoenaed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in late March of this year.
“The EEOC subpoena shows brazen disregard of academic freedom and shared governance and reflects a broader effort by the federal government to stifle dissent and pit faculty members against one another,” CUCFA said in a written letter.
The faculty whose information was disclosed signed one of two letters, with the first being an open letter to the UC Berkeley community expressing concern about “recent events in Israel and Gaza.” The second letter was UC-wide and alleged that faculty and students were facing antisemitism amid students’ “anti-Zionist” protests.
A similar incident occurred at Barnard College in April, when faculty received texts by the EEOC to ask if they were Jewish.
Soucek and other professors speculate that both the UC and Barnard investigations are part of an attempt to identify complainants or witnesses of alleged campus antisemitism in federal investigations. Soucek is especially concerned with their “one-sidedness,” rather than the investigations themselves.
“What is strange and problematic is the fact that the EEOC and the Trump administration’s so called ‘Antisemitism Task Force’ are only focused on allegations of antisemitism on campus without at all, it seems, caring about equally problematic, if not more problematic, allegations of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim animus and actions,” Soucek said.
Facing internal threats, faculty are also organizing to protect UC shared governance — the model in which faculty, staff, students and administrators participate in decision making.
In a January 2025 Regents meeting, Regent Jay Sures said faculty governance “is not working.” Fahrenthold is concerned how eliminating shared governance would grant outsized power to the Regents, the majority of whom are non-elected governing members of the university.
“[Ending shared governance] would be a death knell of the American university,” Fahrenthold said. “It would be the end of our competitiveness as the leading public institution in the United States. It would be the end of a public university.”
When asked about the future of shared governance, a UC spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the UC is “committed to our shared governance model and our partnership with faculty across all campuses” to serve California, deliver patient care and advance academic freedom.
As faculty towards the future of the UC with new President James B. Milliken, Soucek hopes to see the UC lead in protecting the principles that define the public university.
“The University of California, as the greatest public university in the world when you combine the 10 campuses together, is just in a unique position to be leading the way on these kinds of issues,” Soucek said. “I think one thing that you have to take away from the example of Harvard these last few weeks is that people are thirsty for that kind of resistance. People are eager to see an institution standing up for itself and showing the world why it matters and why the attacks against it are just utterly un-American and unconstitutional.”
By Khadeejah Khan — campus@theaggie.org
