UC Davis scientists Marcelo Prado and Katie Zegarski load samples onto trays to test for the coronavirus in 2020. UC officials say cutting-edge research will be threatened if federal funds are reduced.
Courtesy of UC Davis Health
More crowding in undergraduate classes. Worse patient care at health centers. Harm to academic and scientific research.
Those are some of the impacts officials fear will result from an across-the-board hiring freeze announced Wednesday by the 10-campus University of California in response to threatened cuts in federal funding and worries about state budget support. But given those uncertainties, UC leaders said they had no choice but to act now to conserve funds.
The potential decline in federal contracts and grants would “threaten our ability to deliver on our core missions, education, research, patient care, and student support services, and our work to expand educational access for all Californians,” UC President Michael Drake said in announcing the freeze and other austerities.
Thousands of vacancies that already exist across UC would remain unfilled under the new policy. In addition to the hiring freeze across all UC campuses, six academic health centers and 20 health professional schools, Drake directed every UC location to implement additional cost-saving measures, such as delaying maintenance and reducing business travel when possible. All that would “help the university manage its costs and conserve funds,” Drake said, also noting a cut in state financial support for UC.
UC receives about $6 billion annually in federal funds for research and other program supports, with the National Institutes of Health being the largest source. That does not include more than $8 billion the university gets through Medicare and Medicaid for patient care, funding that Drake noted Wednesday is also at risk. Cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, he said, “would have significant impacts on the UC Health enterprise and on the patients we serve.”
UC is the latest of a growing number of universities nationwide to pause hiring in the wake of new policies and threats to funding from the Trump administration. Other institutions that have taken similar steps in recent weeks include Harvard, Stanford and North Carolina State University.
President Donald Trump’s administration has threatened to slash university research funding and other money for what he says is needed streamlining and in response to what he has labeled illegal race-based programs, such as cultural graduation ceremonies or racially themed dormitory floors. UC Berkeley is among three California campuses, along with Cal Poly Humboldt and Cal State San Bernardino, that are currently being investigated for running programs that the administration alleges hurt white and Asian students.
Trump has also threatened campuses over the handling of pro-Palestinian protests last year. His administration has sent letters to 10 California colleges, including four UC campuses, threatening to pull funding if they weren’t doing enough to protect Jewish students on their campuses. The four UC campuses were Berkeley, Davis, San Diego and Santa Barbara.
Potential federal funding cuts would be especially consequential for research-heavy institutions like UC.
Jesse Rothstein, director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, said he had been expecting the hiring freeze because the Trump administration has “dramatically threatened the kind of funding” on which research universities depend.
The ramifications of the hiring freeze and possible funding cuts could be felt for decades to come, Rothstein said. “It’s going to be harder to persuade people to be scientists in the future if they know that their careers can be upended at any moment,” he said. “It’s going to create problems in terms of attracting the best researchers from around the world. All of that is going to damage the scientific enterprise in this country.”
Further complicating the matter is that UC is separately facing a nearly 8% cut to its state funding as part of this year’s budget process. In a typical year, that level of funding reduction would be “alarming,” said Drake, the UC president. Pairing it with the prospect of federal funding cuts makes it even more worrisome, he said.
Leaving vacancies unfilled for service and health care workers will have far-reaching consequences on UC campuses and hospitals, said Todd Stenhouse, a spokesperson for AFSCME 3299. That union represents tens of thousands of workers across UC, including patient care technical employees, security guards, parking attendants, custodians, food service workers and others.
Even before Wednesday’s announcement, union leaders were already irritated by the growing number of vacancies across the system and blamed UC for not investing in those employees. The hiring freeze will exacerbate the problem, Stenhouse said. UC hospital patients, for example, will face longer wait times when they press their call buttons and need a worker to come to their aid, Stenhouse said.
“UC is a world-class institution, but you have to have enough staff to deliver the services,” he added. “Our members are what make it run.”
The announcement of the hiring freeze was disappointing to Constance Penley, a professor of film studies at UC Santa Barbara and president of the Council of UC Faculty Associations.
Penley said she sees the hiring freeze as part of a “wave of capitulation” on the part of universities toward the Trump administration. She noted, for example, that Columbia University was reportedly planning to yield to the Trump administration’s demands to change, among other things, the handling of student protests and discipline to get $400 million in federal funding restored.
“If there were a hiring freeze or other tactics within some kind of overall plan, then I could understand it,” she said “But this seems to just be totally defensive.”
During his remarks Wednesday, Drake said that groundbreaking advancements in medicine, such as learning to diagnose and treat HIV, is in “large part due to research discoveries made at universities,” including UC. That kind of work, he said, “is at risk today.”
“I recognize that this is frightening for many people in our UC community, and these feelings can make it hard to study and to work and to teach,” Drake said. “But still, I can say unequivocally that the University of California will be here. At the end of the day, the rules of engagement may have changed, but our foundational values have not.”
The UC Student Association and the faculty’s Academic Senate leaders did not return requests for comment Wednesday.
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