The Lower Frequencies
A podcast from the Ethnic Studies Council at the University of California.
The Lower Frequencies
Episode 5: The UC v. Trump
When the UC Regents and administration failed to stand up to the demands of the Trump administration, faculty and workers stepped up to join the fight. In this episode, Zoé Hamstead (Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning, UCB, co-chair of Berkeley Faculty Association, CUCFA Chair of Legal Affairs), Annie McClanahan, (Associate Professor of English, UCI, Co-President of the Council of UC Faculty Associations), and Anna Markowitz (Associate Professor of Education, UCLA, President of the executive board of the UCLA Faculty Association) join The Lower Frequencies to discuss the role of faculty and the faculty associations (in partnership with UC unions, the AAUP, and other organizations) in waging a successful series of legal challenges that forced the Regents to disclose the federal demand letter and won a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration.
Links:
CUCFA amicus brief in AAUP v. Rubio
Welcome to the Lower Frequencies, a podcast brought to you by the UC Ethnic Studies Council.
I'm Darlene Lee, former K 12 teacher in Los Angeles, and currently a teacher educator at UCLA, working with ethnic studies educators, and most relevant to this episode of the Lower frequencies part of the Executive Committee of the UCLA, chapter of U-C-A-F-T. I'm also a member of the UC Ethnic Cities Council. In this episode, we'll be learning from three uc, faculty organizers who have been mobilizing the response to the attacks on the uc from the Trump administration, Annie McClannahan, Zoe Hamstead, and Anna Markowitz. Thanks so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about how you got involved in the legal battle against the Trump administration and its attacks on the uc? Sure. My name's Annie McClanahan. I'm an associate professor of English at uc, Irvine. I've been a member of the uc Irvine Faculty Association Board for a number of years, as well as a member of the UCI chapter of FSJP faculty and staff for Justice in Palestine. And then just this year I've become. The co-president of kfa, the Council of uc, faculty Associations. We basically coordinate all the faculty associations on all 10 uc campuses. And we've been behind a number of the lawsuits involved in the Trump administration's attacks on the uc. Both the Public Records Act request lawsuit that required the uc to make public the demand letter from the Trump administration so that faculty could be involved and the citizens of California could be involved in the process of discussing those demands. And then we also coordinated the A A UP versus Trump lawsuit with the support of all the uc unions. One of the things that I think is really important to understand about the demands is that they're a way of using federal funding and the threat of terminating federal funding to exert like an immense amount of ideological control over the nature and content of speech. Other forms of political expression on campuses, and that ranges from research to teaching to other forms of protected political speech and protest on campuses. I think that the demands around time, place, and manner restrictions on campus protests, the demands around requiring ideological tests for the admission of international students, the termination of programs supporting diversity, equity, inclusion in the uc system. All of those demands had the potential to really transform the uc system and transform the nature of higher education, of academic freedom and patient care, such as the demands around ending the ability of doctors to provide gender affirming care for minors. The administration claims that they're trying to depoliticize universities, but in fact, if implemented these demands would have essentially exerted. The administration's ideological control over the functioning of the university from the classroom to the clinic. Thank you so much for having us. My name is Zoe Hamstead. I'm an associate professor in city and regional planning at uc, Berkeley. And how did I get involved? So at the time that Trump was elected into office, I had recently become one of the co-chairs of our faculty association at Berkeley. And when the administration launched one of its investigations against our campus, along with UCLA's campus last February and then began to cut federal grants, I felt that our organization was well positioned to support faculty who were experiencing farm or experiencing uncertainty about losing their research resources and potentially needing to lay off student workers or postdoctoral fellows. The impacts on students and others who are dependent upon research grants for their basic salary was really top of mind for a lot of faculty at that time. And so we began to work with our legal counsel at Leonard Carter to design a survey about the harms to research funds. I met with many principal investigators to think through how we could support them. Particularly I wanted to know how they felt about the idea of an organizational lawsuit. Or how they may want us to advocate on their behalf before campus. And the university other faculty association organizers expressed an interest in doing similar outreach with principal investigators on other uc campuses. And so we shared our survey and launched a system-wide data collection and organizing effort around the federal grant cuts. Meanwhile, in April, the Department of Homeland Security began terminating students' sebus records. And CVS is the tracking system for international student visas. So those terminations began to put student status at risk even though they had done nothing to violate the terms of their visas. So then I began working with colleagues to understand what was happening to these students, what kinds of resources they needed, which turned out to be a lot in some cases. And at that point I was in regular conversation with our legal counsel about federal threats to our university when the opportunity to support A UPV Rubio, so that's American Association of University Professors v Rubio arose. This was. The case about ideological deportation policies that resulted in arrest and deportation of students and other university community members. We didn't have the financial resources to become plaintiffs in that lawsuit, but our lawyers offered to prepare an amicus brief in support of it. And so. I invited them to a town hall at Berkeley where we did outreach to gather testimony. I reached out to the other campuses to find testimony from across the EC and our legal team worked pro bono around the clock to put together an amicus that showed the harms that these ideological deportation policies were already having on faculty in the EC system. And that was really our first major filing in a federal case. All the while we anticipated that the University of California could receive a demand letter, like the ones that Columbia and Harvard, brown and Penn had received. So we continued to do outreach on campus. We continued strategy sessions with the legal team, and at some point I was asked to move into an official officer position at the Council of uc, faculty associations, which was created as. The Chair of Legal Affairs and the role of that position is to coordinate system-wide legal actions. My name is Anna Markowitz. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Education at UCLA and I'm also the president of UCLA's, faculty Association's executive Board. And I think at UCLA, the need for legal action, uh, became clear as early back as spring of 2024. Following those events, we realized that faculty had. Little say in what was happening on our campus. The way that we woke up one day and police were everywhere. We saw police brutalize our students for engaging in First amendment productive activity, and we had no way to be in the conversation from the get go. When we reconstituted a faculty association, it was a little bit about how do we get our voice in some of these conversations and how do we assert the value of free dialogue, free speech, academic freedom in a space where. So much of our decision making is about what keeps an institution safe. And so when we reconstituted, one of the first things we did was file an unfair labor practice suit to try to assert to the uc that these are essential labor conditions for faculty and when they. Engage in this repressive behavior that they were engaging in. It shapes our ability to do our work really well. So I think in some ways for U-C-L-A-F-A, the legal route was very clear from the get go because we had just been dealing with a very different campus context when Donald Trump was elected. It also became clear that the law was gonna be one of the ways that we would have to leverage to fight back against an administration that was just throwing everything it could at free speech, at due process, at exactly the sorts of values that make universities great. And many of us had read Project 2025. We knew. What was coming down the line, and especially in the early days of the administration, it was really heartening to see the way that the courts were holding up and saying, no, you can't do this. Actually, this executive order is illegal. And so we had been planning a legal team from the get go in that way, just frankly waiting for the federal target to come to uc. We're the largest public school system of higher education in the country. We are. Well known internationally, and we were in the news a lot in spring of 2024, so we knew it was coming and we started talking pretty early on about what it would look like to push back against what we knew was coming down the line, particularly after we saw what happened at Columbia and what happened at Harvard. I think we had a strategy that was how could we get the money back immediately, and we knew that would have to be legal. And then how could we prevent this sort of strategy from being used again? And we knew that would have to be legal, and we just realized this is our strongest and best course of action. And so we set ourselves up to be prepared to do that. Thank you so much. I wanna appreciate all the ways that you have been advocating and mobilizing to create these solidarity movements so that we can take action to protect our university and ourselves and our students. What about the Trump demands did you find particularly concerning? And why do you think you see leadership has been so reluctant to publicly fight back? Everything about the demand letter is deeply concerning. It uses extortion. It holds funding hostage to coerce the university into relinquishing control. A payment of$1.2 billion could cripple many really fundamental programs and the adoption of the federal administration's political viewpoints and our hiring, our firing, our funding, our admissions decisions just completely undermines academic freedom and faculty shared governance. But I guess some of the demands that particularly disturb me are those with attack people's identities such as gender enforcement, and this requirement to identify which international student applicants are, quote unquote, anti-Western or anti-American. I think the latter in particular, is not only a violation of the First Amendment, which A UPV Rubio found applies to both. Citizens and non-citizens alike. It's also sufficiently vague that the administration could deny a admission to anyone for any reason. And so just that uncertainty of what this could mean and how it could impact individuals without warning, I think is perhaps one of the most concerning and disturbing things. I would agree with everything Zoe said. And I think just to add for me, the very use of extortion and the sort of central strategy that we're seeing the Trump administration use signals a value of specific beliefs over inquiry and dialogue. We are going to use a cudgel to make you believe the things we want you to believe rather than let those beliefs be tested, discussed, debated, explored empirically, and that gets at not just the heart of the American institution, but at the heart of the Constitution of the United States of America. So I think for me, watching this sort of thought policing was really disturbing from an. Unraveling of the fabric of society perspective, not just the uc perspective. And the other thing I would add to Zoe's points, which again I completely agree with, especially around the identity based stuff, was just how open-ended it was. This wasn't a letter that was a one and done deal because uc had violated Title six. It was a setup for federal interference and for federal judgment in all of uc decision making down the line. The presence of the resolution monitor was deeply troubling, and the extent of the power that was given to that monitor was deeply troubling. I looked at it and I thought, this is designed to erode what this institution is and can be, and it's designed to. Turn us backwards, not just 50 years, which people often say, oh, it's gonna take us to the fifties, this one's to take us back 200 years. And with all of the damage that will go to specific individuals in specific groups based on that. And it was just unacceptable to me. I'm wondering if you have thoughts about this second part of that question around why do you see leadership was so reluctant to fight back to even publish and to let us see the demand letter. I think that there's probably a number of factors there. I think that. The main thing is that they were experiencing an extraordinary amount of coercion on the part of the Trump administration. There was the sense that the Trump administration essentially had the capacity to effectively destroy the uc system financially, and that the uc system was responding to that coercion with a great deal of fear. At the same time, they also were reluctant to release the demands because they didn't necessarily want the public and uc faculty to know what they were potentially willing to negotiate on to save and preserve the uc system. So I think that they, there was a resistance to exposing to the public demands, like for instance, the demands around trans-affirming healthcare and to make that a part of public debate when they knew that it was possible that they might end up succumbing to the coercion of the administration. I think for me, obviously there is the reality that the University of California receives$17 billion in federal funding each year. I don't disagree with the fact that this is an existential threat, which I think is what we heard from senior uc leadership. Uh. I think when I heard that I was a little bit like, I bet there were faculty that 30 years ago said, Hey, I, I see that we're shifting the funding model away from public dollars for university operations to this sort of federal grant funding model, and that's a problem and now we're observing it. So I, that was sort of ironic to me. But I do think this letter was designed to be an existential threat. The open-endedness was about we're going to prevent you from operating in the future. So our leadership was not. Wrong to see it that way. I think probably the difference of opinion I have is I don't believe that federal money is coming back. I've read Project 2025, I've listened to the statements of the federal government in the news about what they're trying to do to higher education. They have not been cagey or subtle about it. The Federal tap is turned off. We're not gonna save our$17 billion by selling out our values. And I think the release of the letter was about. Putting the specifics out there that would make it real to not just faculty, but to students, to Californians broadly, just exactly what's at stake. You can make an argument that it prevents unnecessary fear, but it also prevents people rising up, and that was a huge thing that we wanted to make sure was possible, that everybody could have a voice in this situation. And that we could have a public conversation about what it means to save an institution if we just save its shell. Thank you so much. I'm just thinking that faculty like yourselves have stepped into this vacuum that have been left by uc, leaders in the midst of this unprecedented assault on a higher education. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of the efforts that you have undertaken to fight these battles? Maybe in addition to this lawsuit, we are very concerned about other federal investigation related. Threats to free speech and academic freedom. So I think one of the most important examples of this, Lee, is the Department of Education, office of Civil Rights. In their investigations, they have demanded a release of names that are part of Title six investigations, and those Title six complaint files include unredacted names, even though named individuals are not supposed to be the subject of such investigations. It's the Title Six offices themselves, which are on our campuses that are under investigation. So we have worked with partners at the American Association of University Professors to advocate for the protection of personally identifying information, and we'll continue to work on that campaign even though it is only members of the Berkeley campus community who were notified that their names were revealed. We know that this problem could affect people on all 10 campuses, and we also worry that there are going to be. Connections drawn between these files and the individuals named and the negotiations that had been ongoing behind closed doors. And I wanna really honor the leadership that NBFA and KVE has taken there. I think on our end, aside from what we've already talked about, I'd just add that it's been really important for us to build community and collaboration with other stakeholders. We've said from the beginning that obviously this is a faculty concern, but it's not just a faculty concern. It's a student concern. It's a patient's concern. It's a California concern, and it's a labor concern for the many, many other workers who make the uc run. And so. One of our goals from the get go has been how do we start to build some relationships? And then when the Trump administration took power in January, it was sort of like, can we dial it up? Can we go a little faster and make sure that we are coming together with the United Voice? And if we're gonna say that we're the people that are trying to save the institution. We need to understand what the institution is to lots of other people beside ourselves. And so that sort of community building work has been really essential. And then also just building community with individuals, whether students, faculty, workers, whatever, who. They feel the fear that the Trump administration is trying to make them feel it's effective by building a community that gives them strength and courage, and also makes them feel hope and a hard time has been very important for us. I would also really highlight the fact that this was a wall to wall, uc, union effort. Every single union in the uc system, including A FT afscme, the California Nurses Association, C-I-R-S-I-U, which is for interns and residents in the healthcare system, the Teamsters, the UAW upd, and then the communication workers. Every single union in the uc system was involved in this effort, and it really required that full participation. And it was a way also of saying this attempt at ideological coercion by the Trump administration isn't just affecting faculty, it's also affecting students. It's affecting uc workers. I think that's particularly obvious in the context of, for instance, the impact on graduate student workers of the science funding cuts, the impact on lecturers and contingent faculty of budget cuts, both those that were implemented and those that were threatened. As well as the restrictions on academic freedom and free speech, the impact on healthcare workers across the uc system of some of the administration's demands around healthcare. It really required all of those groups coming together in a wall to wall solidarity effort to make this possible. And it would not have been possible. Faculty would not have been able either to fund or to support and sustain a lawsuit of this scale without the participation of all of those groups. And then besides all of that, thinking really specifically about how we can leverage what power we do have as faculty and to reassert the importance of that power. So for example. We've been thinking about how we can leverage established faculty mechanisms to do this kind of work. The academic Senate and other powers that have been given to us. I've seen colleagues writing for their professional organizations and things like that. We have a certain set of skills and how else can we leverage those, not just do this legal resistance, which was much newer to us. You know, the American Association of University Professors has been really invaluable, in part because they have had their eye. On the national dynamics that have been played out across universities across the country, and the lawsuit would not have happened without them. In particular, Vina Dall, the head legal counsel of A A UP. Is the person who was very instrumental in bringing together the Union Coalition. So the process of understanding what was at stake for all kinds of workers on uc, campuses that Anna was describing was really important in the process of laying. Together, that coalition. I'd just add to that, that I feel that I've learned so much from just getting to be in more a regular conversation with these other unions and, and learning from their leadership. The faculty associations are relatively new to the game in some ways. Many have been established for a long time, but speaking just for our own chapter, we were basically in remission until 2024. So it's been wonderful to learn from those folks. And then in terms of other coalition members, something we've been really excited about. Is we're starting to hear more from a maritime faculty who say, wait a minute, I gave my career to this institution, what can I do? And we're starting to see alumni movements as well. And then of course, student movements and students obviously are unionized through UAW, but also undergraduate students who maybe are not, but have this beautiful capacity, not just to look at what's gonna happen for them over their four years they spent here, but what's gonna happen to the next set of kids that come through the institution? This is not something that just impacts people who happen to be professors, but everyone who works and lives and studies at the uc. We talk a lot about how this attack from the Trump administration is unprecedented, but I also think the level of solidarity and unity that we've been able to experience by mobilizing along all of these different lines is also unprecedented in many ways. And so that is exciting. I feel like we've been able to take up so many different causes in this battle, and I'm so much more aware of what different stakeholders have been experiencing at the uc. Can you walk us through some of the different legal battles that you have engaged in around the Trump demands and what some of those results have been? The UCLA Faculty Association first reached out to Kfa because we wanted to file a Public Records Act request. We had heard from many of our colleagues in these networks that we'd been building that it would be really helpful to understand what's in the letter. We understood that reading a summary of the demands is not the same thing as reading the demands, and often the devil is in the details. And so we filed a Public Records Act request in August, arguing. That this was a policy document about the University of California and that the public had a right to see it, that a request was rather quickly rejected, and we showed the rejection letter to a few of our law colleagues who immediately said, we think you can fight this. Most of this is not actually applicable. And it's not clear that this is pending litigation because what the federal government is trying to do is blend this idea of we might sue you Extortionary with, we need you to change all of these policies. And then there was this catchall argument that basically said, well, this isn't of the public interest, which we all felt was absurd. This is patently of the public interest. And so thanks to leadership from Kfa and the other 10 faculty associations, we were able to. Fundraise enough to file a Public Records Act lawsuit, so basically going to court specifically designed for these sorts of requests to argue that we should in fact be able to access the letter, and we argued that we needed to have this occur expediently, that we couldn't see the letter post hoc that it needed to happen. ASAP. Fortunately, the judge, Rebecca Evanson agreed with that. One, the initial ruling in the middle of October, which was really exciting. Um, uc immediately appealed this ruling, arguing that it was a confidential document and that for the public to know would materially harm negotiations That appeal was not granted. And then they ultimately appealed again to the State Supreme Court to try to get a stay on the order to release the letter. That stay was also denied. And so ultimately they did release the letter on their website at the end of October, which for us was both very depressing because we then got to read the letter and see the full extent of what happened. But we also felt like it was extremely valuable for many of our colleagues. Seeing the presence of the resolution monitor that I talked about earlier was really clarifying about how a deal is just the beginning of federal interference and federal overreach, not the end of it. And I think for many folks. They could read the letter and say, wait a minute, that's my life. Those are my students. Those are people I care about. And so we were honored to be part of bringing that forward. This all happened in the same week that the A A UP, the uc Unions, the 10 Faculty associations and kfa filed. The lawsuit that explicitly argued that what the Trump administration was doing was a violation of our constitutional rights. So what this lawsuit says essentially is that what they're doing is they're using coercive tactics to repress our speech and expression and their. Sort a variety of ways of doing it. We got declarations from almost 75 folks across the system. Undergraduate students also supported us via an amicus brief saying this is what's happening to them based on this extortion. The initial ruling came through from Judge Ritalin who basically argued this is textbook extortion and it is designed specifically to curb speech and expressive activity. I mean, there is a real danger of capitulation to some of these demands happening in ways that are like less visible. So, uh, one really good example of that is the recent threats to end the hiring incentive for the presidential. Postdoctoral fellowship program that, uh, attempt was unsuccessful and I think it was unsuccessful in large part due to the hundreds and hundreds of. Faculty and citizens of California and former students in the PPFP program who wrote letters to the uc office of the president protesting the end of the hiring incentive. But I think it was also a result of this lawsuit, which reminds the uc that they do not have to submit to this ideological co coercion by the administration, neither preemptively nor in response to the funding cuts. Yes. What are some next steps following this preliminary injunction? I think if people haven't read the preliminary injunction themselves, they really should. It's an incredibly strong statement. I'll just read my favorite line. The judge said numerous uc. Faculty and staff have submitted declarations describing how the Trump administration's actions have already chilled speech throughout the uc system. They describe how they have stopped teaching or researching topics. They are afraid of two or two left or woke in order to avoid triggering further funding cancellations. They also give examples of projects the uc has stopped due to the fear of same reprisals. These are classic, predictable First Amendment harms and exactly what defendants publicly said that they intended. So one of the points of this is to say that the Trump administration, even though in court they were claiming that this was not coercive, this was not retaliatory, this did not violate the first and the 10th amendment. One of the things that the judge points out in the ruling is that in fact, they did intend to. Compromise First Amendment rights, and they were very explicit about that. And also that they had canceled this funding in a totally arbitrary manner. And again, with the intention of chilling speech on campuses. And so I think that the judge's injunction, the temporary injunction, the ruling itself is incredibly strong and sends an incredibly strong message not only to the Trump administration and not only to the uc system itself, but also to campuses across the country that need to be. Taking a similar playbook and standing up against these kinds of retaliatory and coercive threats and not capitulating and signing agreements with the administration, without trying to fight back in court. So the district court will be working towards a final ruling. We're gonna keep an eye on that, and we're prepared to support any further discovery or hearing that might be part of that process. So there's certainly gonna be continuing opportunities for folks to get engaged as the court works towards a final ruling. The defendants may also decide to appeal the decision, and we are prepared to mobilize around such an appeal. And we're also gonna be keeping an eye on things to make sure that the university is not capitulating because the university does not need to capitulate after this preliminary injunction order, and we wanna make sure that they don't do so voluntarily. So it's really important to keep an eye on any sort of policy changes that are related to those demands and to mobilize if we notice anything problematic that the university might be doing. Thanks so much for your work. What are some of the other initiatives that you all are organizing to support and ensure free speech, academic freedom, and the protection of the dignity, civil liberties, and livelihoods of all people who work and study at the ucs. A lot of what we're trying to do is just talk to our members, talk to our community members what it is that they find particularly threatening about these demands, and to try to organize and mobilize support for individuals who are able to clearly articulate this will happen to this community. If this letter goes through. A huge part of it is sharing knowledge and information. In the academy we're often very siloed. We're told to keep our head down, publish our papers, and do our work, and we'd like to change that. The culture of fear is working. How can we stand up and say we're not afraid and push back? And so a lot of it is just get some information and then see what we can do next, and then also connect what might feel insular and academic and ivory tower to what actually really matters for the public. So for that end, we're really focused on. Some of the gender affirming care provisions, which of course obviously matters for trans folks, but it also matters for the sanctity of healthcare in general. Inserting the federal government and their preferences into a room that should be all about the patient, the parent, and the provider is egregious, and it sets the stage for further interference into what should be your. Decision making about your health. It's a violation of human rights to let the federal government make those decisions. And so how can we make those connections for folks and how can we keep that as part of the conversation has also been a huge area for us. One issue that we've become pretty concerned about are proposed. Opposed to changes to the faculty disciplinary policy and particularly the policy on extramural speech. So extramural speech would be like political speech that you undertake outside of the classroom and outside of your research, for instance, on social media or at a rally or protest. And we're concerned that there are some efforts probably due in no small part to these efforts that coercion by the federal administration. For the, to reduce faculty's free speech and freedom of expression rights, particularly with respect to extramural speech, which has been such a big issue nationally, particularly over the last eight months or so since the Trump administration took office. And so we're really about trying to educate faculty politically on those changes and get faculty involved in reaching out both through their campus leadership and to the uc office of the Presidents, and particularly to the Board of Regents. About those changes. And then we're also just trying to get faculty more aware of the risk of increasing centralization of leadership in the uc system. Increasing control being vested in the uc office of the president, often in direct violation of principles of faculty governance. So a good example of that is the UCS attempts to implement cyber surveillance software. T TRX across the uc system, which has been something that both the faculty associations and the faculty senates have pushed back against. And so just continuing those efforts to reveal the ways in which, particularly centralization of campus power marks a threat to the principles of shared governance that have been so vital to the uc system. Thank you. Yes. Something else that's troubling about that is the ways that they couch those efforts stating that this is for our protection or somehow mm-hmm. The greater good when it's really about surveilling us and, and controlling us and often. Unstated, but important motivation behind the Trump's administration's attacks on higher education has been to target students, faculty, and staff who are organizing around solidarity for Palestine and an end to the genocide. What do you see as a relationship between your legal efforts and the struggle for Palestine within the uc? I think this is really important in part because a lot of the framing of the, the Trump extortion in the letter to UCLA was framed around the claims around antisemitism, which baseless has been demonstrated by multiple legal and scholarly experts, as well as multiple coalitions of Jewish faculty across the uc system, that the claims of antisemitism are baseless and that they're being used as a. Again, as an alibi to exert all kinds of ideological control over the uc system, as well as the, for instance, the decision by multiple uc campuses to submit the names of student, faculty, and staffs involved in protests to the Trump administration when those documents were requested. We think that's a very concerning violation of privacy and free speech rights of multiple constituencies on uc campuses. So I think that a lot of this emerges out of an attempt to repress political speech around this one particular issue. It's a really strong example of the kind of Palestine exception that has long shaped the differential treatment of pro-Palestine. anti-Zionist protest across the United States, and particularly in higher education. So I think there's a really deep link. I also think that there's a link between that history and these efforts to curtail faculty's expressive activities and extra moral speech. In the A PM, which is the manual that determines the shape of faculty disciplinary proceedings, we've seen the ways that. Those disciplinary policies have been meted out differentially based on the particular content of the speech. So that speech around Palestine is subject to significantly stronger repression and restrictions than speech on other political issues. So I think there's a deep and abiding connection between the continued movement for justice in Palestine and against genocide and Scholastic side and these efforts to defend. Faculty and student and staff speech in the face of the Trump administration's coercion. I'm deeply concerned about the ways in which people at the uc are censoring their speech, changing their classroom curriculum, and their research to avoid topics like the ongoing genocide and Palestine, because it doesn't align with the government's politics towards the state of Israel. We filed this lawsuit so that decisions about teaching and research can be based on what topics have been deemed appropriate by a community of scholars, not by an authoritarian government. And so that people's jobs or their, OR students right to learn at the uc do not get put in jeopardy for simply exercising academic freedom and free speech. Our priority. Is to support worker rights of Senate faculty as a faculty association. And the politics around Israel Palestine are really center stage when it comes to academic freedom that impacts how we do our jobs every day. And so there's a very tight connection at this moment between that struggle and these legal efforts. For sure. Yeah, people talk a lot about how this is the issue that the federal government is using to drive its stake into what's happening in higher education. And frankly, I couldn't agree. I think I've shared this in other places, but I was a postdoc at the University of Virginia in 2017, and I helped organized against the Unite the Rightness rally that came to Charlottesville and what we, who lived it called the Summer of Hate because of the constant attacks that happened in our community. And I heard people chant horrible things that I will not repeat that specifically targeted Jewish folks. I watched them. Uh, March down the street doing a Nazi salute. I saw horrible t-shirts. And the federal government's response to that was that there were fine people on both sides and that we couldn't judge. And of course, many of those folks went on to participate in January 6th and have been summarily lauded by the same administration. So the idea that this is about antisemitism or about Judaism. It really troubles me from a variety of perspectives because it's clearly not, it's clearly about state politics, and it's about finding a way to fracture a community and to have an excuse to make attacks. The other thing that was disturbing about the letter, which I know we've already talked about, was the way it tried to. Argue that this was all about protecting students and protected groups, and at the same time it was absolutely trying to render the fabric that makes that possible. So I do think that they're leveraging Palestine speech in a despicable way that is harming not just Palestine activists, but will harm Jewish students, faculty, and colleagues, and ultimately will harm us all. Thank you so much. Lastly, how can people support and join these ongoing efforts to protect the uc from attacks by the federal government? So in the case of tenure line and Senate faculty, the best way to support these efforts is to join your local faculty association and more than that, to actively get involved in your local faculty association. So we have now on all 10 campuses, we have organizing committees. That are working both to increase the E extent and the density of membership in faculty associations, but also to begin having conversations with faculty across the uc system about what issues really most significantly impact their working conditions and their working lives. Anything from concern over these cybersecurity measures to increased faculty workload to increased class sizes and reduce. Staffing support and support for TAs and other sort of forms of support in the classroom. We're really trying to have those conversations across the uc system with faculty and get a sense of what faculty's concerns and most pressing priorities are for those not who are not Senate faculty or involved in the uc system in other ways. There are, again, all of these different groups on campuses. From unions to faculty and staff for justice in Palestine, or students for justice in Palestine. All of these different groups that are in different ways taking on different aspects of this fight and also increasingly working together, which I think is part of what's so inspiring about these lawsuits, is that they reflect a real coalition between faculty and unions. That still, unfortunately, has been pretty rare in the uc system. That's great. I also would add a pitch for folks, even if they are not working for directly involved in the uc, but they are concerned about what's happening in the uc to get involved in things like making public comment at the uc Regents meetings, right. Where and, and writing to, yeah. State legislature and just really making their voices heard and in order to stand up for all of these issues. Absolutely. I mean, it's really important to remember that the uc system is a significant driver of the California economy and creates an immense amount of jobs, not just inside the campuses, but also around them and outside them, and so the continued. Sort of like health and vitality of this institution, including everything from economic conditions to academic freedom is really a concern of everybody in the state, whether they're directly employed by the uc or not. While the Regents were negotiating with the Trump administration behind closed doors, we took them both to court. As Anna laid out first, we took the uc to court for denying our public records Act requests to disclose the demand letter to us, and then we sued the Trump administration over the demands themselves. And so Senate faculty can support these organizing efforts. And they can also get involved in the work directly. Other campus workers can join their union, whether it be afscme, A FT, the Teamsters, upd. I would say find out what you can do to support and get involved in the campaigns of these associations and unions. We all have more power against rising authoritarianism when we stand together as a unified workers' front in defensive higher education end. I think we also all need to find ways to remind the University of California administration that these workers stood up to save the university, not only over a billion dollars, but also to save them from making drastic sacrifices to the very pillars of what it means to be a public university in a democracy. Absolutely agree with all of that. I think a huge. Piece of it is staying informed and raising your voice. You know what the federal government is doing is trying to make us afraid and to make us say, oh no, if we just stay quiet, if we just ignore this, if we don't say we want more or better, then we can have our status quo. We can at least save what we already have. And I think one that's fundamentally not true, as we've seen with this administration so far, but also two, that's not right. And we should not let fear take us. And so build community, talk to people. Voice your opinion in your local newspaper, in your local community meetings. Feel free to reach out to me if you wanna help. There's now an alumni network called UCN, bowed Alumni have started it, but they're interested in the broader California community. This is our public institution. It's one of many great public institutions in California. But I think it's also the concept of protecting a public institution, and it's the concept of the public itself. What does it mean to choose people over ideology, over profits, over the status quo, and having these conversations is essential both to resistance right now and to rebuilding something that will be loving and supportive in the future. I mean, maybe that's a little cheesy, but I think. Overcoming this culture of fear is such an important task, and that's in every individual's journey because they're trying to make us afraid every day. I absolutely do not think it's cheesy. I think that the decisions, the actions that we make right now are going to create a future that we may not even be around to experience, but we get to choose right now. Are we gonna create a future where education and learning and free speech and protest are things that are still our protected rights? Or are we creating a future where fascism and oppression are. Part of our education system. Any last comments or things that you wanna leave us with? I mean, I guess just to say that for me, the experience of coming together in a worker coalition to file a lawsuit like this has been an exercise and a kind of realization in the power that. I don't think I would've quite realized we had a year or so ago. It wasn't necessarily entirely obvious to me. And now I think there's just so much to work with in this coalition and, and the, just like the practice of this has made it so much more apparent what untapped potential of power there is, like across our campus communities. We have those like chance that are like people power. And this process I think has really made that real and the unique skills and talents and knowledge that people hold, right? Our legal team and all of the folks that are leaders in the union have come with their unique set of skills that people are able to leverage in this movement, and that's a really powerful thing. I think this is also right, something I've learned is that everybody has the capacity to be a powerful voice, and I am. Inspired daily by everybody that is using their voice. And I think as much as I just was like, they're trying to make us afraid, I think what's been inspiring is the ways that they haven't been succeeding and the ways that we have come together, which would've seemed wild two years ago. But now I think we're just in a place where people are responding to a threat with courage, and I think that is beautiful and will keep getting me up every day.