Viewpoints
‘How Berkeley Works’ explores different cuts into how Berkeley works as a public university, in the public interest. In our time of spiraling crises, as we imagine a braver, more compassionate and just world emerging from the pandemic, from racial justice struggles, and from ongoing challenges of climate change and decolonization: how and in whose interests does UC Berkeley work?
Important Changes To Your Pension Plan 2024
Dear Colleagues, We write to inform you of changes to our pension plans. Sadly, at a time when our salaries stagnate or decline in real terms, and our health benefit costs have sky-rocketed, our pension plans are now also being revised without consultation from 1 July...
An open letter to the new Chancellor of UC Berkeley from the Berkeley Faculty Association
Congratulations on your appointment as Chancellor. You have been selected by a process that affords little role to faculty, or any other group of employees on campus. The people hiring you have little experience of the campus you will lead. Here is what you need to...
Letter to Chancellor Christ on delayed merits and promotions
Dear Chancellor Christ, We write to express our dismay at the continued serious delays to merit and promotion cases for Senate faculty and our lack of confidence in the office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs. A decade ago, when the campus was dealing with a...
Council of UC Faculty Associations Letter on Academic Freedom and Palestine
Dear Members We wish to inform you that further to the earlier statement by the Board of the Berkeley Faculty Association on Academic Freedom and Palestine, CUCFA, the umbrella organization of Faculty Associations across the UC system, has written this letter to...
Berkeley Faculty Association on Academic Freedom and Palestine
Photo credit: Anita Liu/The Daily Californian Dear colleagues,The Berkeley Faculty Association is deeply alarmed at the chilling climate that undermines the academic freedom of instructional faculty, and the free speech rights of the rest of our campus community, to...
Faculty Association letter objecting to unreasonable increases in health benefit costs
Below is a letter the Council of UC Faculty Associations sent to UC President Michael Drake and the UC Regents objecting to healthcare benefit costs to employees increasing by 15% to 193%, depending on plan and coverage. After the original letter was sent, CUCFA...
Burnout at UC Berkeley
It's Spring Break, finally. And I am sick. Again. Being sick over Spring Break has become a regular feature of my working life at UC Berkeley over the past decade. It may be just that I am getting old and my body can no longer sustain the intensity of work it once...
Grading and faculty rights during the UAW strike
As we enter the examination period in the fifth week of the multi-unit UAW strike, uneven flows of information, with competing understandings of the law, have left many faculty unsure about their rights to withhold grades and the potential impact of doing so on...
Why we should all be grateful that the graduate students at UC are striking
For a week now 48,000 graduate students, postdocs, and student researchers across the University of California have been on the largest strike in the history of US higher education. It is part of a wave of protests that has swept through college campuses around the...
Please vote to refund the library at the Senate meeting on Oct.19
The Berkeley Faculty Association urges all Senate faculty to join our efforts to refund the university library. The library is the beating heart of the university’s research and teaching mission. Without its collections and professional staff, Senate and...
BFA’s Response to The Joint Senate-Administration Workgroup on the Role of the University and its Units in Political Action
Dear Colleagues, Given the particular importance of the traditions of free speech and academic freedom on this campus the Berkeley Faculty Association urges you to read and consider the draft report of the The Joint Senate-Administration Workgroup on the Role of the...
People’s Park and the Future of the Public University
The Berkeley Faculty Association on how the struggle over the People’s Park exposes the structural contradictions of privatization strategies at UC Berkeley.
Jan 10, 2022
Photo: Daniel Parks