On March 27, the Board of Trustees (BOT) held a meeting in the McLaren Center to continue an ongoing discussion of the University’s proposed budget cuts, which included a draft budget presentation by USF administrators. The budget cuts include the potential loss of jobs and benefits for workers around campus. Outside the building, faculty, staff and students gathered in solidarity and distributed flyers to passersby and board members making their way into the meeting. The flyers included three requested demands: No layoffs, protected benefits and a real seat at the table.
“We’re just putting some faces to the idea of faculty, staff and students, and we’re here to tell board members we’re here, we care about the University, we care about our students and we care about the long term future,” said Dr. Brandi Lawless, president of the University of San Francisco Faculty Association (USFFA) and a professor of communication studies. “Because we care about the long term future of the University, we need to have a real seat at the table in decision making, and we need to protect each other.”
Alongside members of the USFFA, the USF Part-time Faculty Association (PTFA) and the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) were present, all three of which make up Workers United, a coalition of unions that represent unionized and nonunionized employees across the University.
Speaking on the 3.25% tuition increase for the 2026-2027 school year, which was announced by President D. Aceves through email on Nov. 14, 2025, Lawless said, “Part of that email said that the University needed to raise tuition to recruit and retain excellent or outstanding faculty and staff, and we don’t see a solid effort to retain faculty or hire new faculty.”
She continued, “If you’re going to raise tuition, then you should use the raised tuition to make sure that our benefits are protected and that we’re getting raises for inflation, right? My union is about to go to the bargaining table and negotiate, and we’ve begun to hear messages about potential layoffs, potential increases to our teaching loads, potential cuts to our salary or salary freezes. Everything is on the table right now, so we don’t know what will shake out, but what we know is they’re looking to extract from us.”
In addition to potential layoffs and reduced benefits for current employees, the BOT have discussed reducing retirement benefits for retired employees. Rebecca Gordon, a retired member of the PTFA and a retired adjunct professor who taught ethics for nearly 20 years, said, “Having that cut, that just seems to me such an injustice, and it’s such a tiny, tiny portion of what the budget actually is, that it just seems unnecessarily cruel.”
Gordon explained that during negotiations, the BOT have asked the PTFA to accept a “me too” clause, instead of accepting the current retirement rate, which means that their union would get whatever the USFFA manages to negotiate for themselves. “So that means we’re basically rolling the dice and risking our retirement on what the full time faculty can negotiate,” Gordon said. “And it’s also not fair to the full time faculty because now they’re not just negotiating for themselves, they’re negotiating for us, so that puts extra pressure on them. And so we just think this is a very poor idea, and it’s not one that we’re going to go along with.”
Another organization present at the rally were the USFCA Students for Palestine. Jayden Joeckel, a senior politics major and a member of the organization said, “We hope to demonstrate to the [BOT] that the students’ demands and the faculty’s demands are not two separate things, but one thing. It’s important for students that we have an intact educational core of the University, because ultimately, the educational programs at USF are the main reason why many of these students came here.”
The day before the rally, demonstrator Professor Phil Chong spoke about what he hoped the rally could accomplish. “I think that’s a really scary thing for a lot of people, this kind of uncertainty,” Chong said. “This area is already so expensive to be living in… helping the board to think through what these impacts might look like on the ground level, I think is something that’s important for us tomorrow.”
