Who is in? Who is out?

The systemwide Academic Senate is circulating a letter from UC President Milliken to the chancellors regarding shared governance for clinical faculty who are not members of the Senate. Only ladder faculty, in residence faculty, and clinical X faculty are members. There is concern about lack of shared governance for clinical faculty who aren't. Apparently, a proposal to add them to the Senate was earlier rejected.

...As the University of California’s health enterprise has grown, the growth in some faculty series, notably the Health Sciences Clinical Professor series has raised questions about how to best integrate clinical faculty into University governance. Faculty in the Clinical X, In-Residence, and Ladder-rank series are members of the Academic Senate. However, the majority of clinical faculty are in the Health Sciences Clinical Professor series, which is not a faculty series in the Academic Senate.

Non-Academic Senate clinical faculty requests for a role in shared governance were noted in a 2020 task force report. To begin to address these concerns, a Special Committee on Health Sciences and Clinical Affairs was then formed. From 2024 through 2025, under then-President Michael Drake’s tenure, non-Academic Senate clinical faculty, Academic Senate leadership, and UC’s health science schools proposed various approaches to expand access to University governance for clinical faculty. However, the issue remains largely unresolved to this day...

Full letter and other documents at:

https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/systemwide-senate-review-tf-on-clinical-faculty-representation-9-30-26.pdf.

Comments concerning establishing some alternative method of representation are due in mid-November. There has also been a suggestion of raising the limit on the number of clinical X faculty, presumably to allow some conversion of clinical faculty to the clinical X series - which would put them in the Senate. 

Remember what they used to say?

They don't say that anymore:

University of California leverages systemwide expertise to advance purposeful, human-centered uses for AI

UC Office of the President, September 16, 2026

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/university-california-leverages-systemwide-expertise-advance-purposeful-human-centered

Under President Milliken’s direction and leadership, the University of California launched the AI Steering Committee to highlight and focus UC research on harnessing AI for the public good.

At the September UC Board of Regents meeting, the UC AI Steering Committee provided its first report to the Board, detailing the progress of its working groups and announcing showcase events involving each UC campus over the next year that will highlight campus AI initiatives and research in the fields identified by those working groups.

Formed by President Milliken in May of 2026, the University of California’s AI steering committee was established to leverage the university’s extraordinary scale of 10 campuses, six academic health centers, and three national labs in navigating AI’s increasingly broad impacts on everyday life and the university’s mission of education, research, patient care, and public service. The Steering Committee created five working groups focused on AI applications and their impact across the following areas: health and longevity; learning and work; discovery and innovation; protecting humans and humanity; and AI for the public good.

“AI is transforming the way we learn, work, and live,” said UC President James B. Milliken. “We hear every day about the increasing potential and the risk of AI. The task force is sharpening our focus on how UC can advance human potential, not diminish it. As a public university with a commitment to California and the nation in its DNA, UC is also ideally positioned to contribute to the broader public discussion on managing the benefits and risks of AI.”

Amid calls for a slowdown of AI development, the University of California's AI Steering Committee informed the Board of Regents today of its work in establishing a different path for AI, one of responsible public adoption for the public good. 

The report began by addressing the risks of unconsidered AI adoption, including security breaches, fragmented regulation, and increased energy and utility consumption. It established that UC was among the first in the country to adopt a formal set of AI Principles, and the first university to address artificial intelligence explicitly in a Digital Risk Appetite statement, a formal declaration of how much technology risk the institution will accept, and where.

AI Steering Committee Co-Chair Van Williams highlighted the need to responsibly govern AI capacity for UC and detailed existing initiatives to broaden access to AI tools for researchers, employees, and students while promoting ethical and responsible use. These include research awards and computing credits from Amazon and Google, the latter of which has granted more than $32.7 million across 61 funded projects, spanning AI safety and trust research, frontier research, workforce development, and public impact applications at the campuses. 

The Steering Committee is seeking coordinated, systemwide approaches with AI developers and cloud providers to ensure UC is not reliant on a single vendor. The committee is also exploring the creation of a systemwide learning platform to support the responsible adoption of AI tools and use of resources. 

Sharing perspectives in cybersecurity and in education were two of the steering committee’s working group leaders who presented alongside Williams: Giovanni Vigna, distinguished professor in the Department of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara, head of the working group on protecting humans and humanity, and Rita Raley, professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, who leads the working group on AI for learning and work.

Professor Vigna, who also directs the UC Santa Barbara-based, National Science Foundation-funded Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and Operation (ACTION), described the sophistication of AI agents in exploiting security flaws, a source of increasing concern. “There is hope,” he said. “We need to make an investment in educating people in AI tools and create coordination between all the stakeholders so that threat intelligence between different parts of critical infrastructure can be shared at a scale and pace that is required to make progress in protecting our networks.”

Professor Raley, co-director of the new Center for the Humanities and Machine Learning (HUML) at UC Santa Barbara, described a course she developed, “Critical Artificial Intelligence,” and the scope of her working group, which will provide systemwide recommendations on what each student needs to know about AI. “The University will continue to certify students on the basis of disciplinary knowledge attained. But, no less important, we must now give students the critical judgment to ask what this technology is, who needs to be accountable for it, how to use it, when to refuse it — and what it could be instead.”

Among the examples highlighted by co-chair Williams of AI’s potential for public good was the work done at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco to restore speech back to a patient named Ann, who had lost her speech to a brainstem stroke nearly two decades ago. A joint UC team built a brain-computer interface to convert her attempted speech into audible, natural-sounding words in approximately a second. 

“The technology will keep getting more capable whether or not any of us are ready for it,” Steering Committee Co-Chair Van Williams said. “How it gets used is still a choice. The university that helped give Ann her voice back intends to keep making that choice deliberately, in public, and for the public.” 

Afterwords

Outgoing systemwide Academic Senate Chair Ahmet Palazoglu wrote a long letter to UC President Milliken reflecting on shared governance.* It's too long to reproduce but the key points were listing areas in which there was lack of consultation. These included discontinuation of a fellowship program, creation of a program at two campuses which augment degrees with a paid internship, creation of a program to assist junior faculty which replaced a diversity program, and enhancement of a language program. 

Prof. Palazoglu then goes on to highlight two programs that, he said, developed without consultation and which directly affect the pay and working conditions of faculty. I will reproduce that segment:

Both the Total Remuneration Study (Deloitte) and the Systemwide Assessment of Online Education (Noodle/Huron) could have benefited from early Senate engagement. Both studies were developed and contracted without meaningful early consultation with Senate faculty with relevant expertise. When faculty were eventually given an opportunity to review the work, significant methodological and design concerns became apparent, but only after the scopes of work had been established and contracts executed. In both cases, earlier engagement with faculty experts would not simply have increased faculty confidence in these studies; it could have materially improved their design, methodology, and usefulness to the University.

The two programs involved bringing in outside consultants to do evaluations. "Total Remuneration" involves assessing the value of noncash benefits such as pensions and health care. Longstanding methodology has involved looking just at cash pay in comparison with other universities. The total remuneration approach looks at wider definition of compensation. Note that the direct cost of a benefit is not the same as its value to the recipient. To take an example, there was a long period in which no contributions were made to the pension plan because it was deemed overfunded. But clearly, having a pension during that period was not seen by pension participants as having no value. As regards online education, there are issues of cost, convenience, and assessment of actual learning.

Prof. Palazoglu notes issues related to litigation with the feds which are typically discussed at Regents meetings behind closed doors. He acknowledges a need for nonpublic discussion, and it is somewhat unclear what he proposes. He also points to the (huge) health enterprise that is growing somewhat autonomously on campuses with such activities and for which shared governance is "far less developed." Again, exactly how that issue should be addressed is unclear.

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*https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/reports/senate-chair-to-president-state-of-shared-governanace-report-9-10-26.docx.pdf.

The SAT Goes Political

We live in a world in which there is no issue that can't be politicized. If Trump says the sky is blue, Republicans see it that way and Democrats don't. If he says the sky is green, the same occurs. And no one bothers to look up. There was even a movie five years ago titled "Don't Look Up" about this tendency. The thing is, the color of the sky is a matter of observation.

Apparently, the SAT issue at UC is becoming politicized. From the LA Times:

Three Republican state senators are pressing the University of California to reinstate SAT and ACT scores in undergraduate admissions, urging the Board of Regents to act “as soon as possible” and warning that six years without the tests has left students underprepared. “Please re-instate the SAT or ACT ASAP,” wrote the three legislators — Sens. Roger Niello (R-Fair Oaks), Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh (R-Yucaipa) and Steven S. Choi (R-Irvine). Ochoa Bogh is vice chair of the Senate Education Committee and Choi is a member. Injecting legislative politics into what has so far been a largely academic debate about UC admissions policies, Ochoa Bogh also said in a statement that she plans to introduce a bill next session on testing...

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-08-26/gop-senators-uc-sat-testing-legislation.

A related letter was sent to UC President Milliken and others to the same effect by Ochoa Bogh and Niello:

https://sr19.senate.ca.gov/sites/sr19.senate.ca.gov/files/OCHOA%20BOGH%20AND%20NIELLO%20Letter%20to%20the%20UC%208.20.26.pdf. 

Robinson Retires as UC general counsel

From UCNet: 

UC Board of Regents Chair Maria Anguiano and UC President James B. Milliken made the following announcement last week:

Dear Colleagues,

We write to share that Charles F. “Charlie” Robinson, general counsel and senior vice president, Legal Affairs, has announced his plans to retire in June 2027, after 20 years as the University of California’s chief legal officer.

Charlie joined UC as the general counsel in January 2007, and in the two decades since, he has built and led one of the most respected legal departments in higher education — a team of more than 165 attorneys spanning our 10 campuses, six medical centers, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. As the university’s chief legal officer with responsibility for all of the institution’s legal matters, Charlie has provided counsel to the Board of Regents, five university presidents, and countless chancellors and other university leaders, guiding the institution through an extraordinary range of legal and institutional challenges...

Full release at https://ucnet.universityofcalifornia.edu/employee-news/charles-f-robinson-to-retire-as-general-counsel-and-senior-vice-president-legal-affairs/.

Going Down

We now have some numbers on federal funding cutbacks:

From the San Francisco Chronicle: 

Citing a steep reduction in federal research grants to the University of California under the Trump administration, UC President James Milliken is asking California’s congressional delegation for help in freeing up the stalled science funds. Grants from the National Science Foundation are down 39% from recent years, while funding from the National Institutes of Health has fallen by 22% as of July 13, Milliken told 54 members of Congress in a letter sent July 29, noting that these rates are a “substantially slower pace than historical norms.”

The slowdowns not only hamper UC by forcing hiring freezes and research delays, Milliken wrote, but they also “affect the economy, biomedical advances, technology commercialization, national security research, and partnerships between academia and industry” across the country...

UC spent $102.4 million on outside legal counsel alone in fiscal 2025-26 — a nearly 57% increase from the $65.4 million spent the year before, UC told the Chronicle...

Full story at https://www.sfchronicle.com/california/article/uc-congress-trump-research-funding-22376388.php.

Congressional Mail

Letter from UC President James B. Milliken 

Re: Slow Spend Rate of Federal Scientific Agencies 

UC Office of the President, July 29, 2026

California Congressional Delegation

Dear Members of Congress:

On behalf of the University of California (UC) — a system of over 300,000 students, 266,000 faculty and staff, and 2.5 million alumni across ten campuses and six academic health centers — I write to express my deep concern regarding the significant slow spend rate of the federal science agencies.

The federal government’s partnership with UC has always been essential to America’s unmatched leadership in science and innovation, and today the significance of our work together is more important than ever. Reliable federal investment is essential to sustain American innovation in science and technology, train the students who will become the country’s future workforce, retain and attract researchers who are working on our country’s complex challenges and support the patients whose lives depend on this partnership. Federal investments in research have helped make UC America’s leading public research university while generating discoveries, technologies, medical advances, and economic growth that benefit the entire nation.

Unfortunately, UC’s status as the national leader in research, and America’s position as a global research powerhouse, are increasingly at risk. Across multiple agencies — and most notably at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) — funding decisions, award processing, competitive renewals, and the release of new funding opportunities appear to be proceeding at a substantially slower pace than historical norms. At NIH, as of July 13, the agency’s new award rate is 22% below pace relative to typical rates in past years. At NSF, as of July 13, the agency’s new award rate is 39% below pace relative to typical rates in past years. While NIH’s rate is improving, the pace continues to have a detrimental impact on UC and the biomedical research community’s efforts to develop new cures and vaccines to address diseases.

As a top recipient of both NIH and NSF funding, UC’s researchers and graduate students are disproportionately affected by these delays. But the consequences extend well beyond universities. Delays in federal research funding affect the economy, biomedical advances, technology commercialization, national security research, and partnerships between academia and industry. Our campuses are already experiencing the consequences of the slow spend rate. Some examples of impacts reported by some UC campuses include:

Significant delays in new awards, funding for recompetes and new research opportunities from NSF and NIH. These delays are forcing a systemwide reduction in facilities and administration costs, which support the broader research ecosystem. 

Effectively freezing the hiring of new postdoctoral and graduate students, limiting job and economic growth and reducing our ability to train the next generation of scientists. Federal grant funding supports both advanced education and the development of the skillsets needed as part of the future STEM workforce. 

Delays in onboarding faculty, staff, postdoctoral scholars and graduate students, which are disrupting workforce continuity and making it more difficult to recruit and retain top talent. 

Weakening university and industry research partnerships, which are critical to developing new technologies and supporting the future STEM workforce pipeline. 

Strain on critical scientific infrastructure, which depends on stable and predictable funding to maintain research capacity and operational readiness.

If not addressed in the immediate future, the slow spend rate will detrimentally impact our ability to lead the nation and the world in scientific research. I respectfully ask that you use every mechanism available to ensure that the science agencies are implementing enacted appropriations consistent with congressional intent and processing awards, renewals, and funding opportunities in a timely manner.

Please let me know if you have any questions, or if there is anything the University can do to assist with your efforts. We appreciate your long-standing support.

Sincerely,

James B. Milliken

President

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Source: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/letter-uc-president-james-b-milliken-re-slow-spend-rate-federal-scientific-agencies.