Beyond Technological Inevitability: Democratically Remaking the University Without Flooding the Zone, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., July 18, 2026

Beyond Technological Inevitability: Democratically Remaking the University Without Flooding the Zone

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

July 19, 2026

In his provocative essay, “The University as We Know It Is Finished,” Nils Gilman argues that artificial intelligence is accelerating the collapse of the modern “multiversity”—the sprawling research university that combines teaching, research, credentialing, professional preparation, and student life within a single institution. This model, he contends, was already weakened by declining public investment, rising tuition, adjunctification, and an increasing emphasis on marketable credentials over liberal education. 

AI now exposes its deepest contradictions by making conventional lectures, term papers, standardized assessments, and routine information delivery increasingly easy to automate.

Gilman does not regard this disruption solely as a catastrophe. He argues that universities should move away from mass lectures and conventional papers toward seminars, oral examinations, live debate, collaborative problem-solving, and other forms of demonstrated reasoning. Professors would become less like transmitters of information and more like mentors and intellectual interlocutors. 

At the same time, the liberal arts—history, philosophy, literature, and political theory—would become more, not less, important because they cultivate judgment, ethical reasoning, historical understanding, taste, and the distinctly human capacity to determine which goals are worth pursuing.

Gilman is especially critical of the recently published report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education. Although the report addresses affordability, admissions, intellectual pluralism, academic freedom, classroom practices, and other sources of public dissatisfaction, Gilman argues that its discussion of AI is strikingly cursory. 

It treats faculty members’ struggles with AI largely as a problem of syllabus and classroom redesign rather than confronting AI as a force capable of restructuring the economics, practices, and institutional organization of knowledge itself. Yale’s report presents twenty recommendations intended to rebuild public confidence, including measures concerning affordability, openness, free expression, admissions, teaching, and the university’s public mission.

I share Gilman’s concern about the report, but my own misgivings go further. As I have written previously, the Yale report is serious and welcome, but it feels incomplete (Valenzuela, 2026). It names many of the symptoms of declining trust while largely sidestepping the political conditions producing them. Its framework can consequently read as a technocratic conversation about institutional repair—better communication, greater transparency, more intellectual openness, and renewed attention to affordability—rather than an account of the organized political forces seeking to reshape higher education.

The crisis is not simply that portions of the public have lost confidence in universities. Nor can distrust be understood as a matter of perception alone. We must also examine the political economy of higher education, the intensifying role of the state in regulating knowledge, and the emergence of an anti-democratic coalition seeking to centralize governance, discipline faculty, restrict fields of inquiry, and redefine the university’s public mission. 

The racialized dimensions of this campaign are also crucial. Accusations of ideological “bias” are increasingly used to delegitimize the disciplines and programs that examine race, inequality, gender, history, and power. A discussion of trust that does not adequately address these political developments risks mistaking an organized project of institutional transformation for a public-relations problem.

This omission is especially consequential because the dizzying speed of technological change coincides with the Trump administration’s shock-and-awe, flood-the-zone approach to higher education. Rapid and overlapping investigations, funding pressures, executive actions, lawsuits, and demands for institutional change can overwhelm universities’ capacity to deliberate, organize, and respond. Legal scholars have characterized the use of federal funding to compel ideological conformity and alter university governance as a fundamental threat to institutional autonomy and academic freedom.

The convergence of these forces matters. Technological disruption creates pressure to act quickly, while political disruption weakens the conditions necessary for thoughtful and independent decision-making. Under such circumstances, declarations that the university is “finished” can become self-fulfilling—or provide intellectual cover for those already seeking to dismantle public higher education, weaken faculty governance, narrow academic freedom, and redefine universities according to partisan and commercial priorities. The speed of change is therefore not merely a technological or administrative problem. It is itself a democratic problem.

Ultimately, Gilman predicts that research, teaching, residential life, and credentialing may become separated into different institutions. AI may not destroy higher education, he argues, but it will force universities to reconsider what education is actually for and which distinctly human capacities they are responsible for developing.

Yet his argument raises a larger question: Does Gilman underestimate the university’s democratic, public, and community-serving purposes by treating its transformation primarily as a technological problem? Universities do more than transmit information, develop cognitive skills, or award credentials. At their best, they preserve historical memory, sustain independent inquiry, prepare people for democratic participation, produce knowledge in the public interest, and provide spaces in which society’s most difficult conflicts can be examined rather than suppressed.

How universities respond to AI should therefore not be determined exclusively by technology companies, consultants, governing boards, political appointees, or university presidents operating under emergency conditions. These decisions should be made democratically through meaningful participation by faculty, students, staff, communities, and the broader public. Major changes to curriculum, assessment, faculty roles, research priorities, data governance, and institutional structure require deliberation, transparency, experimentation, and genuine shared governance—not another version of shock and awe.

Trust cannot be restored through messaging or institutional repair alone. We must also talk about power. The defense of higher education must rest on democratic clarity: a clear understanding of who is seeking to transform the university, whose knowledge is being restricted, whose interests are being served, and who will have a voice in determining what comes next.

The challenge posed by AI is therefore not simply to redesign assignments or disaggregate institutional functions. It is to ensure that the remaking of the university does not occur through speed, exhaustion, political coercion, administrative fiat, or claims of technological inevitability. The fundamental question is not only what kind of university can survive AI, but what kind of university a democratic society should choose to preserve—and collectively create.

Reference

Gilman, N. (2026, June 17). The university as we know it is finished: That’s a good thing, Substack. Gilman, N. (2026, June 17). The university as we know it is finished: That’s a good thing. https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-multiversity-is-finished

Valenzuela, A. (2026, April 28). The wrong crisis: What the Yale report misses in the age of manufactured mistrust [Blog post], Educational Equity, Politics and Policy in Texas. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-wrong-crisis-what-yale-report.html

The University As We Know It Is Finished
That’s a good thing. by Nils Gilman
Jun 17, 2026 | Substack

Clark Kerr (center), president of the University of California, at Occidental 

graduation, 1958. (Photo by Los Angeles Examiner/USC Libraries/Corbis.)

When University of California President Clark Kerr delivered the Godkin Lectures at Harvard in 1963, published shortly thereafter as The Uses of the University, he was doing something unusual for an academic administrator: he was offering a sophisticated social theory, and doing so with wit. In these lectures, Kerr coined the term “multiversity” to describe what the postwar American research university had become. In Kerr’s account, the modern university was no longer to be understood as a community of scholars united by a shared ideal of learning, but rather as a sprawling institutional conglomerate serving at once as a research engine, a job-training facility, a credentialing mechanism, a coming-of-age experience, and an incubator of the national technical elite. The University of California, which Kerr had just finished steering through a near-decade of explosive growth, was his exemplar.

Kerr was a droll man. He once observed that the three great problems facing any university president were “parking for the faculty, athletics for the alumni, and sex for the students.” He described the university faculty (and I can confirm from personal experience that this remains accurate) as “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.” And when Ronald Reagan made good on his 1966 gubernatorial campaign promise to fire him for being too lenient with the Free Speech Movement protesters, Kerr offered one of the great farewell lines in American academic history: “I leave the University of California as I arrived: fired with enthusiasm!”

Despite the jokes, Kerr was a serious man. The argument underneath The Uses of the University was that the multiversity, precisely because of its sprawl and apparent incoherence, was the institutional master key of mid-century American civilization. It was the nexus at which basic scientific knowledge was produced, technical and professional talent was credentialed, democratic citizenship was cultivated, and the national project of technological supremacy was advanced. The multiversity didn’t need to be coherent in order to be functionally useful as a platform for what Kerr called “administering the present.” He wrote with the high modernist confidence of someone who believed that hierarchical technocratic institutions, if competently managed, could keep these various volatile elements in balance.

Kerr’s dismissal by Reagan in 1967 was, in a sense, the first indicator and warning of the crisis of the high modernist technocratic model that he championed and sought to institutionalize through the multiversity.

It is time to acknowledge that Kerr’s model of higher education is finished: long on its last legs, the arrival of AI announces its death-knell. What comes next is disaggregation: the multiversity as we know it being disassembled into its component parts. This need not, however, be a catastrophe for higher education. Actually, in many ways, it represents an opportunity to return to roots, in a classical model of education and in attentive pedagogical instruction. But higher education can only weather this period of disruption if it is clear-eyed about what is happening and moves confidently toward a new model.

The Crisis of the University Is Not New

The present crisis of the American university began building already sixty years ago as the postwar bargain that Kerr’s vision embodied started to fray. What followed was a slow-motion privatization of university finances, producing a slow-motion tuition hyperinflation that has burdened a generation of students with debt while hollowing out the public mission of the university. The shift from grants to loans, from tenured faculty to mass adjunctification, and from a broad education in the liberal arts to vocational credentialism all occurred under the banner of making universities more “responsive to market demands.” In practice, this has meant transferring cost from the public to the individual “student consumer,” while defunding the parts of the institution that didn’t produce monetizable outputs. The net result has been the ever-upward-spiraling costs of undergraduate education, without a corresponding increase in the value of educational training or credentialling, and a loss of political support for the mission of universities. These financial and political travails have heightened the contradictions between the disparate missions and functions of the multiversity.

Into this increasingly unstable compound, add AI.

The arrival of large language models is acting as a catalytic solvent, titrating out the incoherence that was always there. When a student can produce a plausible term paper in twenty minutes using Claude Opus or Google Gemini, what is the point of assigning term papers? When an AI tutor can explain any concept at any level of sophistication with infinite patience, what is the value of a lecturer reading from notes? When AI can ace most standardized professional examinations, what is a credential certifying? These are old problems that AI has made it impossible to ignore.

Beyond the pedagogic challenges posed by the arrival of LLMs, AI is also exposing that the Kerrian bundle held together for as long as it did because its components shared a common and venerable set of technologies of knowledge transmission: the book, the lecture, the problem set, the written examination. In a pre-LLM world, these formats made cognitive demands of students that were difficult to simulate or shortcut. That is no longer true. AI doesn’t just automate some of the tasks associated with these formats; it renders the formats themselves obsolete as instruments of either intellectual discipline or assessment. And when the shared technological substrate dissolves, the contradictions built into the multiversity from the beginning become impossible to paper over. 

The world-class research mission and the undergraduate teaching mission have always been in tension. The prestige economy that rewards publications over pedagogy always distorted faculty incentives. The credentialing function was always only loosely connected to the educational one. These were the open secrets of the American research university. In a post-AI world, these divergences are being rendered untenable.

It is striking, then, that the most widely discussed recent attempt at university self-examination, the April 2026 Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education, barely registered any of this reality. The report was in some ways an admirable document. It was clear-eyed about costs, scathing about admissions opacity, and candid about the political monoculture that has eroded public trust across partisan lines. Yet its treatment of AI was cursory to the point of negligence: a few sentences in the section on the classroom, expressing uncertainty about AI’s effects and noting that faculty are “scrambling to redesign syllabi.” It is remarkable that a report tasked with understanding why public trust in higher education is collapsing would fail to reckon with the technology that is restructuring the economics and logic of knowledge work. It suggests that even the most self-aware corners of the academy are still treating AI as a pedagogical inconvenience (or literal cheat-code) rather than what it actually is: the force that is making the entire inherited architecture of the multiversity impossible to sustain.

The Co-curricular Dodge

So how should the university respond to this crisis of purpose, identity, and even faith? The most popular present answer in certain administrative circles to this question is an emphasis on the “co-curricular,” that is, on residential life and human connection as the university’s irreducible value in an age of AI tutors. Perhaps the most cited proposal is Molly Worthen’s New York Times piece from three years ago, “Why Universities Should Be More Like Monasteries,” which argued that universities should offer radically low-tech, high-presence educational environments.

This argument isn’t meritless: there is evidence that learning works differently when embedded in community, that chance hallway encounters with faculty members, late-night bull sessions in the dormitory common room, and heated dining hall debates are often the most generative moments of learning. Students’ own accounts of what matters most in college consistently center on relationships, belonging, and dialogue. The argument for residential education, for the ancient model of the Platonic Academy as gymnasium and garden as much as classroom, is stronger now than it has been in decades.

This is continuous with a long-standing function of universities as sites for passage from childhood to adulthood, for coming to a new understanding of oneself. In the 1960s more than four fifths of college freshmen reported that a major goal of college was to help themselves “develop a meaningful philosophy of life,” a number which collapsed by half in the 1970s and 1980s. A reemphasis on the co-curricular could help revivify this ideal, which would in turn help prepare students for the AI-forward world they are entering. As Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark recently argued, the people who will most benefit from AI are those who have first built deep, idiosyncratic human capacities through “repetitive practice and creation.” The machines will work best when helping you to amplify what you’ve already made of yourself.

But by itself, the co-curricular is an evasion. It leaves untouched the question that determines what students and families are paying for: what happens in the curriculum, in the classroom, in the formal educational encounter. That is where reform needs to be most radical, and where the response of universities so far has been most quavering. If the primary response of universities to the most dramatic new knowledge technology in decades, one that employers everywhere are expecting employees everywhere to use, is to demand that students stick cotton in their ears and keep rowing, it will only hasten their decline into institutional redundancy, if not irrelevance.

Cognitive Requirements in the Age of AI

Any reimagining of the university in the age of AI must begin with an honest reckoning with what AI cannot do—and what therefore becomes relatively valuable precisely because AI can do everything else. The key distinction is between work that AI does well (such as synthesis of known patterns, argument elaboration, template instantiation, and generating local coherence) and work it structurally cannot do because of the architecture of the technology as such. AI cannot build the trust on which institutional cooperation depends, because trust is not a conclusion reached by processing information about another agent but instead is a relationship constituted over time between persons who have staked something on each other, and who can be betrayed. AI cannot give a person good taste or style, because taste and style are about personal distinctiveness within a community which shares an aesthetic. AI cannot constitute goals, because that act requires a valuing subject. These are not gaps that more compute will close. They are absences that follow from the ontology of the technology itself.

A curriculum designed around AI’s limitations should be seen neither as an exercise in nostalgia nor as a denial of the burgeoning power of these systems. In fact, given the trajectory of AI capabilities, it is the only curriculum with any hope of finding a stable foundation.

What does this mean in practice? Start with the most obvious casualty: the term paper, as an assessment instrument, is dead. Written homework assignments were meant to push (and test) a student’s ability to produce a well-structured, coherently argued text. But this is exactly what LLMs do effortlessly and without demanding of the user any of the underlying cognitive work for which the traditional term paper was supposed to be a proxy. This included sustained argumentative reason: the ability to construct and maintain a complex argument across an extended piece of discourse, distinguishing claims from evidence, handling counterarguments, and reaching a defensible conclusion. Written assignments also demanded epistemic self-regulation, that is, the metacognitive capacity to monitor one’s own understanding, recognize gaps in evidence, revise positions in response to what the evidence shows rather than what one hoped to find. This pedagogically valuable work always operated below the waterline of the actual output of a term paper; what LLMs do is deliver results that simulate these actions without putting the students through their cognitive paces.

The replacement, as many education researchers are arguing, is live assessment and demonstration: real-time diagnosis of novel situations, design critique, structured adversarial debate, and Socratic examination. These formats test the ability to sense-make under pressure, defend a frame against live challenge, revise a model when evidence contradicts rather than confirms it, and recognize when uncertainty is too high to proceed. In practical terms: collaborative student projects will require documented decision logs tracing reasoning behind commitments, the canonical deliverable shifts from polished artifact to demonstrated live reasoning, and oral examinations and hand-written exams will become the primary assessment instruments. But despite this emerging consensus among education researchers, institutional practice has barely moved.

If the post-AI university’s pedagogic value proposition is the formation of cognitive capacity in conditions that cannot be replicated on a screen, then the function and responsibilities of faculty members must also be reconceived. It clearly no longer makes sense for professors to stand in front of a hall full (or, too often, only half full) of students delivering lectures. As a mechanism of information conveyance, AI can now provide the same at near-zero cost, tailor-made to the specific knowledge gaps of individual students. Instead, professors must reconceive of themselves as interlocutors, serving as performative models of how to calibrate uncertainty and revise frames in real time. The classroom experience should focus on helping students to understand how to constitute a goal rather than generate a text in response to a prompt provided by the professor.

This is something closer to the Oxbridge tutorial system, the clinical ward round, or the seminars of many small liberal arts colleges in the United States. These pedagogies were once defended on grounds of tradition or prestige. The post-AI argument is structural: they are the delivery mechanisms for exactly the cognitive capacities that the architecture of AI cannot replicate, because those capacities are developed only by being exercised, not described. Interestingly, this means that the coming of AI is going to mean there will be demand for more professors, rather than fewer.

None of this implies that faculty should pretend AI does not exist, or that the tutorial and seminar should be conducted in proud ignorance of a tool students will be spending the rest of their professional lives using. The opposite is true. Faculty should integrate LLMs directly and deliberately into their instruction as tools that need to be used correctly in order to not be harmful. (The analogy of a blowtorch or a chainsaw comes to mind: these are useful tools, but you need to learn how to use them safely.) Teaching a student to prompt effectively is teaching them to think precisely about what they want to know and why; it is, in this sense, an exercise in goal constitution. Teaching students to evaluate an LLM’s output critically by scrutinizing the machine’s often over-confident syntheses against evidentiary standards defined by the phenomenological reality of the external and material world is teaching them epistemic provenance tracking and calibrated self-assessment. LLMs can also become objects of critical study in their own right: students should be asked to assess why the model did not produce exactly what they had a priori in mind when they initiated the interaction. Handled this way, LLMs can serve as clarifying instruments in the pursuit of the classical objectives of enlightened education: the inculcation of critical thinking and logical reasoning, rhetorical and communicative competence, aesthetic appreciation and the cultivation of taste, moral and ethical reasoning, and ultimately the ideal of self-knowledge and Bildung.

This brings us to the content of the curriculum itself. As I recently argued in Noema, if the goal of a college curriculum is (as it should be) to inculcate oral reasoning and persuasion, ethical analysis and moral judgment, historical and comparative thinking, and the cultivation of taste and discrimination, then we are precisely in the domain of the classical curriculum of the liberal arts. Skills such as goal constitution, situated judgment, and value alignment are exactly the capacities that a serious engagement with history, philosophy, literature, and political theory develops. History trains temporal imagination and frame revision; philosophy trains epistemic precision and the discipline of distinguishing solid argument from vapid sophistry; literature sharpens an appreciation for style and a feeling for hidden meaning; political theory trains the recognition of suppressed goal contestation and the conditions for legitimate alignment. Together they enable students to imagine lives unlike their own, a hugely valuable experience in a world changing as fast as ours.

How to convey the content of these disciplines to students is going to have to change dramatically from the homogenous one-to-many mass-delivery model of the postwar multiversity, but the content is perfectly classical. The university’s present crisis of purpose is, in this light, at least in part a crisis of having abandoned its own best tradition in pursuit of vocational or technical training that AI is now rendering obsolete.

But Does It Scale?

The central challenge for universities will be how to move toward this model at scale. The tutorial and seminar model is labor-intensive by design: a professor working as interlocutor rather than lecturer can engage only a fraction of the students she could previously reach from a podium. The skills required of faculty will also need to change substantially. Under the old model, a brilliant researcher delivered expected value simply by speaking one-to-many; the new model requires someone with the pedagogic sensitivity to calibrate each student’s specific confusions and capacities—qualities that research prowess neither produces nor rewards. Elite universities in particular have built their faculties almost entirely around research achievement, with teaching treated as a secondary obligation. Reconceiving the professoriate will mean altering tenure criteria and promotion incentives, and it will face fierce resistance from scholars whose professional identities are bound up in the research function. None of this is impossible, but none of it will be easy. No doubt some tenured faculty will pour boulders and boiling oil down the side of their ivory towers to prevent these changes from taking place.

Longer term, however, we should expect the disruption caused by AI to be not just pedagogical but to the structure of the university as such. Kerr’s great insight was that the multiversity’s incoherence was not a bug but a feature—that a loosely bundled institution mirrored a loosely bundled society by providing something for everyone, from the Nobel laureate to the newbie grad student, from the NIH grant-seeker to the remedial English student. What held those disparate functions together was a social infrastructure of knowledge transmission: the laboratory, the lecture hall, the examination, the credential. Once AI can provide information delivery at near-zero cost there is no longer a compelling reason why research, teaching, and credentialing need be co-located in the same institution. What will replace the multiversity is likely to be not one thing but several: research centers that focus exclusively on the new-knowledge-production business; independent communal residence facilities that know they are in the coming-of-age business; and teaching systems that are honest about what skills they are inculcating. Even credentials from the most exclusive universities may not retain much social signaling value.

Clark Kerr would have recognized this moment. He was no naïf about the multiversity’s contradictions; but he also believed that competent management could hold them in productive tension. What he did not foresee was that the tension would be dissolved not by political upheaval—as it nearly was in 1964, when the student movement that eventually got him fired also signaled the coming fracture of the postwar liberal-technocratic consensus—but by technological rupture. The irony is that the research university, which Kerr celebrated as the engine of American technopolitical supremacy, incubated the very instrument that is now rendering untenable the research university’s inherited form.

What the students who booed the mention of AI at recent commencement ceremonies this spring were registering, in the way that students have always registered institutional failures, is that they were not getting what they came for. But as with more than one student movement before them, just because they rightly identified a structural problem doesn’t mean that they have particularly good ideas about what a better institution would look like. Just as Kerr recast the University of California to match the liberal-technocratic imperatives of the postwar period, so do visionary college leaders today have an opportunity to remake the university to match the requirements of an economy that will be redefined by AI. Achieving this will be a generational project.

Nils Gilman is Senior Advisor to the Berggruen Institute and former Associate Chancellor of UC Berkeley.

Follow Persuasion on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.

We Bled For This: The Ongoing Assault on Mexican American and Ethnic Studies by Christopher Carmona, Ph.D. Our Lady of the Lake University May, 2026

Friends, I’m honored to share this powerful guest column by Dr. Christopher Carmona on the history, sacrifice, and continued struggle behind Mexican American and Ethnic Studies in Texas, as well as nationally. —Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

We Bled For This: The Ongoing Assault on Mexican American and Ethnic Studies

by 

Christopher Carmona, Ph.D.

Our Lady of the Lake University

San Antonio

May, 2026

Can you imagine what it was like to stand up for what you believed was right? To be taught that your people were important enough to be taught? Can you imagine men with badges and guns and tear gas ready to hurt you? To be beaten with batons, to starve yourself so that maybe the university will sit down and listen to you? Can you imagine that you fought so hard to be seen in the history of these United States only to have your children and grandchildren stripped of that knowledge?

You are lucky enough to be in this college, don’t rock the boat. Just keep your head down, go to class, and get your degree. It doesn’t matter that your people are being shot down in the streets, too poor to buy new shoes, or too scared to walk on the same sidewalk as a white man. 

Mexican American Studies and Ethnic Studies programs are unique in American higher education in one undeniable way: they are the only academic disciplines whose very existence was extracted through sacrifice. These programs were not invited into the academy. They were demanded into it, and the demanding came at a cost measured in arrests, hunger strikes, and blood.

It is long past time for universities and policymakers to reckon with that history, and with the continuing failure to fund what communities bled to build.

Born of Struggle, Not Invitation

The founding of Centers for Mexican American Studies across the nation is not a footnote in higher education history. It is a chronicle of sustained resistance against institutions that consistently refused to recognize the legitimacy of the discipline until students and communities forced their hand.

It began in 1968. Throughout the country, racial justice and student activism were front and center, leading to a cascade of activism for ethnic studies programs, including Chicano studies, Black studies, Asian American studies, and American Indian studies. Building from this work, Chicana/o/x activists came together at the University of California, Santa Barbara and published El Plan de Santa Barbara, a document that united diverse activists from around the state and laid out a roadmap for Chicana/Chicano studies (Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education, 1969). In response, UCSB created the first Chicano Studies Department in the UC system in 1970. California State University, Los Angeles had established a Mexican American studies program two years earlier, in 1968.

At California State University, Northridge, the price was higher. From 1967 to 1971, Los Angeles police arrested 400 students and faculty members across six major demonstrations. Eventually chaos ensued, fights erupted, and arrests were made, yet this didn’t stop students from being heard. The following morning, 2,000 students gathered in front of the Administration Building, causing the university president to declare a state of emergency. The activism ultimately established the creation of both the Afro-American and Chicano Studies departments (Acuña, 2011).

At UT Austin, Mexican American student activists in the 1960s agitated for the creation of an academic program that reflected their lives, experiences, and ways of knowing. From their efforts, in 1970, UT created the Center for Mexican American Studies, with Américo Paredes named its first director. Yet it would take 44 more years, until 2014, for the university to grant it an independent undergraduate major (University of Texas at Austin, Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, 2024).

Perhaps the most dramatic confrontation came at UCLA. UCLA first established an interdisciplinary Chicano studies program in 1973. But the retrenchment in California’s social and budget policies during the 1980s and the recession of the early 1990s took a toll. By 1989, funding had dwindled significantly, and UCLA suspended new admissions to the program. On April 28, 1993, the chancellor announced the program would not receive departmental status. What followed was a sit-in, mass arrests, and ultimately a hunger strike. 

On May 25, a small group declared a water-only fast. A village of tents sprang up outside Murphy Hall. Four days in, one protestor collapsed requiring medical attention. The group persevered, and on June 7, more than 400 students, faculty, and community supporters celebrated the creation of the César E. Chávez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicana and Chicano Studies. The strike drew the support of state senators, state representatives, city officials, and the Mothers of East L.A., resulting in one of the largest student and community mobilizations in UCLA’s history. Even then, full departmental status was not granted until 2005 (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 1993; UCLA Newsroom, 2021).

source: UCLA Magazine

In Arizona, a thriving program was simply legislated out of existence. The Tucson school district’s Mexican American studies program grew to 48 course offerings and became the largest ethnic studies program in any school district in the nation, directly increasing graduation rates and grades across all classes (Cabrera et al., 2014). In 2010, state lawmakers passed a law that dismantled the program and banned a range of related books from classes statewide.

The pattern is consistent across decades and geography: communities bleed to establish these programs, and institutions continuously find ways to cut, consolidate, or erase them.

Community Anchors Running on Empty

These Centers are not simply academic units; they are community infrastructure, and they function as such every single day. The Center for Mexican American Studies at UT Austin was intended toconnect students to the Austin community through outreach and public events, building on its legacy of collective action. At UT Arlington, CMAS was established by the Texas Legislature as the university's focal point for interdisciplinary education, research, publication, and public outreach relating to Mexican Americans, and serves as a bridge between UTA and the Latino community in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. 

Before it was shut down, Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, CMAS collaborated with faculty, student affiliates, and community organizations to produce events, training, and programs that promote a deeper understanding of Mexican American culture and supported the K-12 to higher education pipeline and first-generation college student success. The University of Arizona's MAS department works collaboratively with community organizations to address issues and produce knowledge benefiting historically marginalized communities, and engages public policy on criminal justice, immigration, and systemic inequity.

These Centers do more community work per dollar than nearly any other academic unit on campus. Yet they have operated for decades on the edge of survival.

A UT Austin graduate described his undergraduate experience as "frustrating," noting that there "seemed to be such battles for funding for the Center for Mexican American Studies, and that was disillusioning." That battle never ended. In early 2026, UT Austin announced the consolidation of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, along with African and African Diaspora Studies, Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies, into a single new department. "It's important to realize that in joining these communities together, especially by force, you're creating a system in which they have to fight, sometimes with each other, for funding, and that is ridiculous and unfair," said one scholar at the national rally held in protest on UT's own campus. At the University of North Texas, facing a $45 million budget shortfall, the university cut its Mexican American Studies minor, along with Africana Studies, LGBTQ Studies, Asian Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies.

The fallback position of college and university administrations has always been the same: Chicano/a Studies simply isn't needed, and there is simply no funding. It has been a struggle and a test of wills for Chicano/a Studies to survive.

The Students Are There. The Resources Are Not.

What makes this institutional abandonment most indefensible is that student demand is not in question. The data are unambiguous.

Research shows that Ethnic Studies coursework benefits students through better school attendance, higher standardized test scores, higher GPAs, higher graduation rates, and even a reduction in interpersonal prejudice. A peer-reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that assignment to Ethnic Studies substantially increased high school graduation, attendance, and the probability of enrolling in college (Dee & Penner, 2017). A longitudinal University of Michigan study involving 459 ninth-grade students, the majority Mexican or Mexican American, attending high-poverty schools, found that students enrolled in Ethnic Studies experience significant growth in critical reflection, which is linked to academic success, civic engagement, improved well-being, and support for equity-promoting policies (Cabrera et al., 2014).

In Texas, a 2024 youth-led research project found that students not enrolled in MAS courses wanted to learn more and enroll, but because school districts aren’t required to offer them, students may miss out on all the benefits (Valenzuela, 2023). In El Paso, only five schools across the two largest districts offer MAS, and teachers are sounding alarms that students are being cut off from their own history. Surveys of schools offering the MAS course found that a significant number could not run the class because no teacher could be found to teach it, or because students didn’t enroll due to lack of awareness or scheduling conflicts. Educators piece together curriculum without textbooks, relying on crowdsourced materials and digital resources.

Meanwhile, the majority of Mexican American and Ethnic Studies programs, most established after the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s, are dramatically underfunded and understaffed, with many having one or no core tenure-track faculty. Nationally, only 5% of four-year institutions offer an Ethnic Studies major, figures researchers have called alarming given decades of Latino enrollment growth and demographic change across the Southwest.

A Choice, Not a Coincidence

Centers for Mexican American Studies were built on sacrifice: walkouts, riots, arrests, hunger strikes, and decades of community organizing. They were won fight by fight, campus by campus. Today they serve as the connective tissue between universities and the communities that bled to create them, preserving oral histories, training educators, conducting policy research, mentoring first-generation students, and anchoring cultural identity for millions of Americans.

The question is not whether students want this education. They do, and the research proves it. The question is not whether these Centers serve communities. They do, visibly and measurably. The question is whether the institutions entrusted with public education will finally make the choice to fund what has always been funded last, if at all.

Fifty years of hunger strikes, arrests, and advocacy should be enough to earn more than a footnote in a budget that gets cut the moment the economy tightens. The discipline that required the most sacrifice to establish has received the least institutional investment to sustain.

The Pattern Repeats: What Is Happening at UC Berkeley

The story of Ethnic Studies under siege is not only a Texas story or a historical one. It is unfolding right now on one of the most storied campuses in the country. In September 2025, UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons disclosed the personal information of roughly 160 students, faculty, and staff to the Trump administration as part of a federal investigation into alleged antisemitism on campus, without notifying those affected until weeks after the disclosure had already occurred. Among those named was renowned Jewish feminist scholar Judith Butler, whose family lost members in the Holocaust. As Dr. César A. Cruz, a Cal alum and parent of a first-year student there, has written: the university that birthed the Free Speech Movement chose federal favor over the safety of its own community (Cruz, 2026).

That same year, Berkeley indefinitely closed the Multicultural Community Center, a student-built, student-run hub of multiracial organizing located in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union building, won by students in 1999 after a hunger strike. When the administration eventually announced it would reopen the center, political art reflecting the movements that created it had been stripped from the walls. Administrators justified the erasure by saying they wanted to make the space “more welcoming,” using the same language used to neutralize Ethnic Studies programs across the country. As doctoral student Sarah Halabe noted plainly: “The administration is saying, ‘Oh no, you’re not being inclusive,’ when the Multicultural Community Center was founded to be inclusive of marginalized students” (Cruz, 2026).

Then, in April 2026, Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies department announced it would not renew two lecturer positions for the coming academic year, citing “financial deficits,” eliminating ten percent of courses taught by lecturers in the department. Lecturer Diana Negrín discovered her fall course had been dropped when she checked the course catalog herself; neither the department nor the dean’s office had told her. Lecturer Jesus Barraza, who teaches more than 250 students a year, put it starkly: “The University treats Ethnic Studies as an academic ghetto. From the Department’s inception, the University has looked for ways to starve the Department” (Cruz, 2026). Meanwhile, construction workers building a new beach volleyball complex on campus unearthed the skeletal remains of at least one Native American person, on the ancestral land of the Ohlone people, the Confederated Villages of Lisjan. The university had funding for a five-court sand facility, but not for the lecturers who teach the history of the very communities whose bones were found in the ground beneath it.

Source: Department of Mexican American and 
Latino Studies

Berkeley is not an outlier. It is a mirror. What is happening there: the disclosure of student names to federal investigators, the gutting of a student-won multicultural center, the defunding of Ethnic Studies under cover of budget language. It is the same pattern this op-ed traces across decades of Texas and national history. 

The tactics change; the goal does not. Continuing lecturer Pablo Gonzalez, despite 14 years at Berkeley and a Distinguished Teaching Award, says his “suitcase is always packed” (Cruz, 2026). That sentence could have been spoken by a lecturer at UT Austin, Cal State Northridge, or UCLA in any decade since 1968. When the institutions that claim to champion free inquiry are the first to comply with repression, it is community, not administration, that must hold the line.

That is not a coincidence. It is a policy. And it is one we have the power to change.

Christopher Carmona focuses on government affairs, nonprofit strategy, and education policy. He has consulted on Texas ethnic studies legislation, co-authored official Texas State Board of Education reports on Mexican American Studies implementation and served as Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies and Research at Our Lady of the Lake University. 

References

Cruz, César A. “What Cal Is This? A Year of Repression at UC Berkeley, and the Call to Take It Back.” Medium.com, May 1, 2026. Republished by Angela Valenzuela, Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas, May 5, 2026. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/05/what-cal-is-this-year-of-repression-at.html

Dr. Cruz, a Cal alum and parent of a UC Berkeley first-year student, chronicles a pattern of institutional capitulation at UC Berkeley during the 2025–26 academic year: the university’s disclosure of roughly 160 students, faculty, and staff to federal investigators; the indefinite closure and subsequent depoliticization of the student-built Multicultural Community Center; the nonrenewal of two Ethnic Studies lecturers citing budget deficits; and the discovery of Ohlone ancestral remains beneath a construction site for a new beach volleyball facility. Cruz frames these events as interconnected signs of a university abandoning its legacy of free speech, ethnic studies, public accountability, and resistance to state repression. The essay calls on students, faculty, alumni, and community members to organize collectively in defense of Ethnic Studies and the democratic mission of public higher education. Published on the blog of Dr. Angela Valenzuela, Professor of Education at UT Austin and a leading scholar of Mexican American education and equity policy.

Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education. El Plan de Santa Bárbara: A Chicano Plan for Higher Education. La Causa Publications, 1969.

Dee, Thomas S., and Emily K. Penner. "The causal effects of cultural relevance: Evidence from an ethnic studies curriculum." American Educational Research Journal 54.1 (2017): 127-166 [pdf].

Cabrera, Nolan L., Jeffrey F. Milem, Oiyan Pong, and Ronald W. Marx. “Missing the (Student Achievement) Forest for All the (Political) Trees: Empiricism and the Mexican American Studies Controversy in Tucson.” American Educational Research Journal 51, no. 6 (2014): 1084–1118. (University of Michigan longitudinal study referenced in op-ed.)

Valenzuela, Angela. Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. State University of New York Press, 1999.

Valenzuela, Angela. “Struggles For/With/Through Ethnic Studies in Texas: Third Spaces as Anchors for Collective Action.” Teachers College Record 125, no. 3 (2023). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01614681231181793

Acuña, Rodolfo. The Making of Chicana/o Studies: In the Trenches of Academe. Rutgers University Press, 2011. (Source for CSUN founding history and 1967–1971 campus activism.)

UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. Hunger Strike for Chicano Studies Department Collection, 1993. UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt0b69p9s1

UCLA Newsroom. “Hail to the Hills: Starving for Justice.” UCLA Magazine, March 28, 2021. https://newsroom.ucla.edu/magazine/hunger-strike-chicana-chicano-studies

University of Texas at Austin, Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. “About: History of MALS.” Liberal Arts, UT Austin, 2024. https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/mals/about/

What Cal Is This? A Year of Repression at UC Berkeley, and the Call to Take It Back, by Dr. Cesar A. Cruz

Friends:

In a powerful and deeply personal essay, Dr. César A. Cruz sounds the alarm over what he describes as the accelerating dismantling of the historic mission of University of California, Berkeley. Writing not only as an alum but as the parent of a first-year student, Cruz chronicles what he sees as a devastating pattern of institutional capitulation: the university’s disclosure of student and faculty information to federal investigators, the closure and depoliticization of the Multicultural Community Center, the nonrenewal of Ethnic Studies lecturers amid claims of budget deficits, and the construction of athletic facilities on Ohlone ancestral remains. 

For Dr. Cruz, these are not isolated incidents but interconnected signs of a university abandoning its legacy of free speech, ethnic studies, public accountability, and resistance to state repression. His essay frames these developments as part of a broader political project of neutralizing dissent, defunding critical scholarship, and erasing historically marginalized communities under the language of “inclusion,” “safety,” and administrative “reform.” 

Ultimately, Dr. Cruz calls on students, faculty, alumni, and community members to reject silence and organize collectively to defend Ethnic Studies, public higher education, and the democratic purposes the university once claimed to embody.

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

What Cal Is This?

A Year of Repression at UC Berkeley, and the Call to Take It Back

Illustration by Masha Noar

By Dr. César A. Cruz | May 1, 2026 | Medium.com

Roll on you Bears has a different ring these days.

I am a Cal alum. My wife Jazmin is a Cal alum. And this past fall, we sent our son to UC Berkeley as a first-year student, proud, hopeful, carrying with him everything we believed this university to be, the Free Speech Movement, the Third World Liberation Front, the hunger strikers who built ethnic studies with their bodies, the tradition of a public university that dared to tell the truth about power.

He arrived in August. Within weeks, the chancellor turned in 160 students to the federal government.

That is the welcome Chancellor Rich Lyons extended to my son’s class.

The university that birthed the Free Speech Movement, that has long claimed itself a sanctuary of intellectual courage and public purpose, is finishing a year that should make every alumna, every donor, every student of conscience, every staff person ask the question clearly and out loud: What Cal is this? Who is running it? And who is it running for?

I am not asking as an outsider. I am asking as someone who loved this institution, who sent his family to this institution, who is watching this institution betray everything it claimed to stand for, in real time, in the first year of my son’s education.

I am asking because the evidence is undeniable, the pattern is unmistakable, and the silence of the administration has become its own answer.

Let us go through it, month by month, like a wound that keeps opening.

Fall 2025: The Chancellor Turns In His Own Students

The year began with a betrayal. In September 2025, UC Berkeley provided the personal information of roughly 160 students, faculty, and staff to the Trump administration, complying with a federal investigation into alleged antisemitism on campus. The university’s Office of Legal Affairs sent letters to affected individuals on September 4, notifying them that their names and information had already been disclosed, over two weeks earlier, without their knowledge.

Among those named was Judith Butler, one of the most celebrated Jewish feminist scholars in the world, whose family lost members in the Holocaust, and who has since described the experience as being trapped in “Kafka-land.” As reported in The Guardian, Butler said: “We have a right to know the charges against us, to know who has made the charges and to review them and defend ourselves. But none of that has happened.”

A campus graduate student told the Daily Cal that the disclosure appeared to target anyone who had ever been accused of antisemitism, which, as they put it plainly, “includes a lot of Palestinians.” The same student added that whenever they taught about Palestine, it usually led to an investigation, and they believed those files were what got turned over.

This is not compliance. This is capitulation. This is a chancellor choosing federal favor over the safety of his own students, his own faculty, his own community.

Who is this Cal? Not the one I was taught to revere.

November 2025: The Right Wing Comes to Sproul, and the Administration Rolls Out the Welcome Mat

Two months after Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was killed at a Utah university, his organization concluded its American Comeback Tour at UC Berkeley on November 10. According to CalMatters, administrators would not disclose their security plans but confirmed they were prepared to host the event. Outside, students, most of them far younger than the attendees inside, faced police in riot gear, with physical fights and arrests. One man was taken to the hospital with a head wound.

Inside, speakers told the crowd that the left were not their friends and would mock and dehumanize them. Comedian Rob Schneider told the audience that God said Trump is his guy, and that if you do not assimilate, it is an invasion.

The day after, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon announced a DOJ Civil Rights Division investigation into the event, adding another federal layer of pressure onto a campus administration already on its knees.

The right wing can fund a bus tour to Berkeley, bring riot police, and walk away with a federal press conference. Students of color organizing for Palestinian lives get their names handed to the government. That is the double standard. That is the definition of whose lives this administration is protecting.

Late 2025: The Multicultural Community Center Is Silently Shuttered

Then came the closure, sudden and unexplained, of the Multicultural Community Center, the beloved, student-built, student-run heart of multiracial organizing on campus.

The Daily Californian reported that UC Berkeley indefinitely closed the MCC, a space that offers cross-cultural community building, due to, in administration’s words, “criticism received from a number of campus stakeholders.” The MCC, located in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union building, had been a hub for generations of students of color, a space where LaNada War Jack launched her book, where Alicia Garza spoke, where community was held and futures were imagined.

Interns at the center were initially not even told it was closing. When they found out, they were told the closure was connected to conversations with the chancellor’s office about “operating procedures.” The explicit concerns mentioned by administrators, as the Daily Cal reported, pertained to art and signage on their windows and walls, including anything that related to student activism, international relations, or ethnic studies.

One junior MCC intern, speaking anonymously out of fear of retaliation, connected the closure directly to federal investigations, saying, “We’re caught up in this antisemitism debate that’s going across all university campuses. Because of the signage that was on our walls, they decided to not have the space basically be open for any group.”

A second-year graduate student, Anya Kushwaha, described it as “really devastating, particularly for the student organizing community on campus, but also just for students at large, especially students of color, who’ve been in need of resources.”

Students won this space in 1999, after a hunger strike, after sitting in front of the chancellor’s office with tombstones erected for every class that had disappeared. Now the administration closed it without a word. Not even a phone call.

April 2026: Political Art Stripped from the MCC

After months of community pressure, the university announced it would reopen the MCC, with Chancellor Rich Lyons stating he wanted to make it “more welcoming, not less.” But what reopened was not what the community built.

As reported by Open Campus and Berkeleyside, by April 2026 all political art had been stripped from the center, the same art that reflected the movement from which the MCC was born. The center’s six-point founding mission, student-led, anti-oppression, cross-cultural understanding, sustainability and wellness, popular education, and social justice, has been quietly gutted by administrators who call the erasure “welcoming.”

Doctoral student Sarah Halabe, studying ethnic studies, named the contradiction plainly: “The administration is saying, ‘Oh no, you’re not being inclusive,’ when the Multicultural Community Center was founded to be inclusive of marginalized students.”

At a time, as Open Campus documented, when Trump officials and Congressional Republicans have initiated at least seven separate investigations into UC Berkeley since 2024, and when campuses across the country are banning the teaching of race and gender under federal pressure, what is happening at the MCC is not neutral reform. It is a whitewashing under duress, carried out by an administration that has chosen compliance over covenant.

They stripped the walls. They thought no one would notice. We noticed.

This Month: They Build a Volleyball Court Over Ohlone Remains

And then, last week, this. Construction workers building a new beach volleyball complex at Bancroft Way and Fulton Street unearthed the skeletal remains of at least one Native American person. The remains were found two feet underground, covered by concrete.

As Berkeleyside reported, the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, the Ohlone group with ancestral ties to this land, are now working with the university to care for the remains. Their chair, Corinna Gould, said her community would be involved in determining next steps. California law requires all construction to stop immediately when human remains are found outside a cemetery, and UC Berkeley paused work at the site.

The beach volleyball complex, by the university’s own materials, is a five-court sand facility with berm seating for approximately 500 spectators. It is described by the contractor as a “state-of-the-art home for Cal Athletics beach volleyball” and “a welcoming gateway to the campus park.” Imagine we have money for beach volleyball, but not our collective histories? Chancellor, what priorities do you have? Who do you serve?

A welcoming gateway. Built on Ohlone bones.

This is the same institution that cannot fund the ethnic studies lecturers who teach the history of these very communities. The same institution that stripped the murals from a space named after Martin Luther King Jr. The same institution that handed over the names of 160 people exercising their First Amendment rights to a federal government that has made no secret of its agenda.

They can build a volleyball court. They cannot protect the people who teach us why this land is sacred.

Today: Ethnic Studies Lecturers Are Let Go

And today, April 30th, we learn that UC Berkeley’s ethnic studies department will not renew two lecturer positions for the 2026–27 academic year due to “financial deficits.” The Daily Californian reported that this represents an elimination of ten percent of courses taught by lecturers in the department, and that the affected lecturers, pre-six faculty who have not yet earned continuing status, received no direct communication from the department or the dean’s office.

Lecturer Diana Negrín found out her fall course had been dropped when she checked the course catalog herself. “Neither the Dean’s office nor the department have actually said a thing to us as professors, nor to the students,” she said.

Lecturer Juan Berumen believes he may also be cut. Lecturer Jesus Barraza, who teaches more than 250 students a year, described the university’s relationship to ethnic studies as clear: “The University treats Ethnic Studies as an academic ghetto. From the Department’s inception, the University has looked for ways to starve the Department.”

Continuing lecturer Pablo Gonzalez, despite 14 years at Berkeley and a Distinguished Teaching Award, says his “suitcase is always packed.”

David Skolnick, co-chair of the Bay Area chapter of UC-AFT, said the budget process is “intentionally opaque so that we can’t really hold the administration accountable for these kinds of decisions.”

We have seen this before. In 1999, students put tombstones in front of the chancellor’s office for every ethnic studies class that disappeared. The tombstones are back. The graves are multiplying.

To the Ethnic Studies Department: You Teach This Moment. Now Live It.

I want to speak directly to the faculty, the lecturers, the graduate students, and the staff of the UC Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies, because this moment requires more than a statement and more than a meeting.

You are the department that was born from a hunger strike. You are the discipline that exists because students in 1969 refused to accept a university that erased them, and because they were willing to put their bodies on the line to say so. Your syllabi include Fanon and Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde and Rodolfo Acuña, James Baldwin and Gloria Anzaldúa. You assign bell hooks on love and Paulo Freire on pedagogy. You teach your students that neutrality in the face of oppression is not neutrality, it is complicity.

And now the institution you have served, many of you for decades, is firing your colleagues without notice. It is building a volleyball court on the bones of the people whose stories you teach. It is stripping the walls of the center your students won through hunger. It is handing the names of students, many of them yours, to a federal government that has declared war on the very communities ethnic studies was created to center.

This is not abstract. This is not a case study. This is your department. This is your moment.

Ethnic studies was never meant to be a safe academic harbor. It was meant to be a site of transformation, a place where the knowledge produced by communities in struggle became power, became praxis, became movement. Lecturer Jesus Barraza already named it: you are in an “academic ghetto,” underfunded and undervalued by design. You have always known this. The question is what you are going to do about it now, when the stakes are highest and the administration is most exposed.

We are calling on the ethnic studies department to hold emergency town halls with students and community. To refuse the opacity of budget decisions made without consultation. To stand publicly and loudly against the firing of Diana Negrín and Juan Berumen. To demand that every retired or departing faculty line be replaced. To partner with the MCC and refuse to let the administration neutralize either institution in isolation. To use your scholarship as testimony, your classrooms as organizing spaces, your collective voice as the instrument it was always meant to be.

You teach Ella Baker, who said the strength of the movement is in the people, not in the charisma of a leader. You teach the Combahee River Collective, who knew that their liberation was bound up with everyone else’s. You teach Larry Itliong and Dolores Huerta, who built power not through permission but through presence and sacrifice.

The administration is counting on your exhaustion. It is counting on the precarity of your lecturers to keep everyone too afraid to speak. It is counting on the siloing of departments, programs, and communities to prevent a unified response.

Prove them wrong.

Your students are watching. Your ancestors are watching. The Ohlone, whose remains were found beneath the ground where the university builds its athletics complex, are watching. History is watching.

You did not choose ethnic studies as a career. You chose it as a calling. Answer it.

The Pattern Is the Message

Let me be clear about what this is. This is not a series of coincidences. This is not budget math. This is not a neutral response to federal pressure.

This is an administration that has, over the course of one academic year, handed students to the federal government, welcomed a right-wing organization with riot police escort, closed and gutted a student-built multicultural center, built a volleyball court on sacred ancestral ground, and fired the professors who teach the history of the people whose bones they found in the dirt.

This is an administration doing the work of those who have always wanted to erase us, bury us, neutralize us, and call it welcoming.

And the funders who bankroll this institution, many of whom profess to care about justice, about equity, about the university’s public mission, need to ask themselves: Is this the institution I am funding? Is this the legacy I am building? Can you write a check to this chancellor and sleep well?

We are calling for the resignation of Chancellor Rich Lyons.

We are calling on the UC Regents to do what they were appointed to do and govern.

We are calling on alumni, and I count myself and my wife Jazmin among you, to withhold donations until this administration demonstrates through action, not press releases, that it serves all of its students and not just those whose politics make the federal government comfortable.

As alumni, we did not give our years and our tuition and our love to this institution so that a chancellor could hand our children’s classmates to the federal government in the first month of school. Jazmin and I sent our son to Cal because we believed in what Cal said it was. We are still here. We are still watching. And we are not writing another check until this administration remembers who built it and who it was built to serve.

We are calling on students to keep organizing, keep documenting, keep showing up to Sproul Plaza the way those who came before you did when they put tombstones outside the chancellor’s office. My son is among you now. You are not alone.

We are calling on ethnic studies faculty, emeriti, allies in every department, to refuse to let the department be starved in silence.

We are calling on the Ohlone community, the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, to be centered in every conversation about this land, because it is their land first, and whatever is built here should honor that truth, not pave over it.

This is Cal. It always has been. And as alumni, as parents, as community, as people who have not forgotten what this place promised, we are taking it back.

Do Not Let Business as Usual Continue. Contact Them. Now.

If you have read this far and you are feeling something, good. Now do something with it. Because the people who came before you did not just feel things. They acted. They fasted. They occupied buildings. They put their bodies and their futures on the line. They did not wait for the right moment or the polite channel or permission from the very institution they were challenging. They moved.

And what are you doing?

If you are an alum writing a check every year and telling yourself that your donation supports students, ask yourself which students it is supporting right now, because it is not the ones who got turned in to the federal government. It is not the ones losing ethnic studies courses. It is not the ones who walked into the MCC and found the walls stripped bare.

If you are a faculty or staff member watching colleagues lose their positions and telling yourself this is not the right time to speak, ask yourself when that time will come, because the people who built this department did not have a right time either. They had a hunger strike.

If you are a student who has been told to keep your head down and focus on your degree, ask yourself what that degree is worth if the institution granting it does not believe your life matters enough to protect.

Stop cowering. That is not what people before you did, and it is not what this moment asks of you.

Contact Chancellor Rich Lyons directly. Tell him you see what he has done. Tell him a chancellor who hands students to a hostile federal government, strips student-won spaces, and defunds ethnic studies does not deserve to lead UC Berkeley.

Chancellor Rich Lyons

Office of the Chancellor, UC Berkeley

200 California Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720

chancellor@berkeley.edu

(510) 642–7464

Contact the UC Regents. They govern this system. They are accountable to the people of California, not to the Trump administration or to donors who want the campus made safe for their politics.

UC Board of Regents

1111 Franklin Street, 12th Floor, Oakland, CA 94607

regents@ucop.edu

(510) 987–9200

Contact the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Department. Let them know you are watching, that you stand with the lecturers being let go, and that you expect the department to fight openly and without apology for its survival and its mission.

Department of Ethnic Studies

506 Barrows Hall, UC Berkeley

ethstd@berkeley.edu

(510) 642–1508

Contact your UC Regents representative. Contact state legislators who fund this university. Contact the UC Office of the President. Write emails, make calls, show up to public meetings, flood their inboxes, and refuse to let any of them pretend this is normal, because it is not normal, and normalizing it is how they win.

The Free Speech Movement was not started by people who sent a politely worded letter and waited. It was started by people who sat down in front of a police car and did not move. You do not have to block a car today (at least not yet). But you do have to do something. Pick up the phone. Send the email. Show up. Bring your friends. Bring your rage. Bring your love for what this place was supposed to be.

The people who hunger-struck for ethnic studies, who occupied Alcatraz, who marched down Telegraph, who built the MCC from nothing, they are not asking you to be perfect. They are asking you to be present. They are asking you to be counted.

Do not let them down. Do not let your silence be mistaken for consent.

Asé. Amen. Así sea. Mexica Tiahui. In Lak’ech. Ubuntu. Ameen.

Dr. César A. Cruz is Co-Founder of Homies Empowerment in East Oakland, a doctoral candidate at Pacific School of Religion and the Graduate Theological Union, and a longtime educator, poet, and organizer rooted in the traditions of liberation. He is a (proud) Cal Alum.