Dearest Friends and Colleagues:
¡Saludos! Hoping for a beautiful day here at UC San Diego. Excited to present to you Part II of "There are More of Us" (see my February letter for context). Part II of our saga is all about being in community and making a commitment to empathy and solidarity. I have received many inquiries asking about opportunities to make our voice heard and demonstrate our strong commitment to protecting academic scholarship. Our wonderful colleagues Kina Thackray and Lisa Eyler, together with faculty, students, postdocs and staff, are leading a rally to STAND UP FOR SCIENCE.
Let us join them and thousands more nationwide on Friday, March 7, at 12:00 p.m. at the UC San Diego Geisel Library / Silent Tree for a rally to make our voices heard and join together in community. Bring signs, your voices, and friends, students and colleagues! If you would like to wear scientific gear (lab coat / eye protection), please do so. Spread the word about the rally in your departments and labs regardless of discipline. All are welcome!
Let us stand up for ALL disciplines; stand up for science, stand up for humanities, stand up for the arts, stand up for social sciences, stand up for scholarship.
As faculty, we can show our nation and the world that we will not sit quietly–we will stand up together and without fear. We can show the world that we value justice, equity and inclusion, that there are more of us, that we are not afraid. Because, indeed, at UC San Diego we choose not to be afraid.
Other ways you can take action are described in the recent letter from Chancellor Khosla, where he also describes updates on recent federal and state budget actions, financial planning, and moving forward as a community. I appreciate the great efforts by him and the rest of our campus leadership in carefully thinking through and planning around very complicated issues.
The Budget
Interim Vice Chancellor and CFO Maureen Harrigan has been in communication and collaboration with our Senate's Committee on Planning and Budget as new budget developments unfold. It is not surprising that the federal landscape is complicating the fiscal year 2026 budget preparation. It will likely be several weeks before we have better insights into the extent of the budget reductions and how they can be allocated, in both percent and over what time frame. Let us keep an open mind on these issues and not fear uncertainty. We have been through difficult times before. We will overcome.
Media Communications
As we move through these difficult issues, there may be occasions in which we may be approached by the media. I would like to remind all of us that University Communications has media relations staff that can help us coordinate interviews and gather information about what to expect in an interview, including what types of questions might be asked. Media training can also be provided to help us navigate challenging questions. Additional resources are available for those of us that are unsure how to be effective advocates for our institution in the context of media interviews.
A Shared Goal
I come to work every day because I love my job, because I love working with you, my faculty colleagues, and because I love working with our students. I believe in the mission and goals of this institution, where we share a responsibility to model for our students universal truths of justice, empathy, and compassion. Our decisions as a faculty have to be anchored on these beautiful ideals. We are, after all, educating the future of humanity. We have an awesome and exquisite responsibility and a shared goal. We cannot, ever, forget this.
My own humanity is anchored on these ideals. They come from my mother. She, as well as my four siblings and I, were born and raised in Tijuana. As my brother calls it in jest, la misteriosa y gloriosa ciudad de Tijuana (the mysterious and glorious city of Tijuana). My mother almost always had two jobs, and we grew up with very little. But we never felt wanting. My mother taught us to find hope in the impossible—the impossibility, for example, of pursuing an education.
I completed my K-12 education in Tijuana and then came here to UC San Diego for my undergraduate degree (Structural Engineering, 1995). This was a huge risk for us, but my mother was fearless. She had to be. In my experience, many immigrants are fearless. We managed through the strength of will of my mother, who has always believed in us. She is a formidable woman, with only a ninth grade education.
I would like to propose we should keep doing beautiful, impossible things for our students, as a team. The fact is that we have great challenges ahead of us, but we can work through them, together. In building something extraordinary, the part that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming ourselves, as a team. Let's do this. Together.
My mother also taught me that the only way forward is in community. And that we can live, and work, and grow, as a community, while cultivating happiness in our hearts. At this point in my life, as a bi-national person, from Tijuana and from San Diego, I feel anchored to both sides. I love this region. And I love this institution. My heart tells me that I am a person who is here, in this region of the world, at this moment in time, for a reason. This comes from my mother and from my education at this great institution. Here I learned the confusing and devastating history of social injustice, and all about the people who are fighting for my human rights still to this day.
I discovered César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Three very different people, with huge differences in social experiences and upbringing. César and Dolores, two people that became great champions and advocates for farmworkers. There is no question that they lived their life achieving a series of impossible things. And Eleanor Roosevelt, a person that grew up in luxury and that from a young age was told that she was above the servants. How do you undergo a mental switch that moves you from a racist and classist upbringing to a person that became one of the greatest first ladies this country has ever seen? In her case, it came from a teacher. For those of you who may not know this aspect of Eleanor's life, she was sent to a boarding school in England as a teenager, led by a woman named Marie Souvestre. Souvestre was a formidable educator and Eleanor identified her many times as a major influence in her socio-educational development and emotional well-being. Could we be teachers like that? Yes, we can! Si se puede, as César Chávez used to say.
Here at UC San Diego, I also made great friendships. That's powerful. Because the friendships one makes at a young age are the most honest friendships one will have in life. I hope we can work on building something here based on that concept. We are establishing the framework so that our students build honest friendships. This is our responsibility as educators. I have this outlook, and I have this hope.
As always, I can be reached at senatechair@ucsd.edu if you need my support. I am here to listen, and I am here to serve.
In Truth and Hope,
