Dear UC Regents’ Chair Leib,

We are alarmed that the Regents have recently chosen to ignore the recommendations of the Academic Council and its systemwide Senate committees on a number of key issues. The centrality of faculty governance to the University of California is critical to maintaining its international reputation for excellence and recruiting the best scholars and teachers. It is especially concerning that the Regents have overruled their own faculty in educational matters–like admission standards, curricula questions, and academic freedom–over which faculty have greater expertise. While we consider harmful all the examples of the Regents’ interference in Senate faculty’s delegated authority and the principles of shared governance, here we are writing to address the most recent instance of the Regents substituting their wishes for the expertise of the faculty.

At your recent meetings, the Regents rejected the Academic Council’s recommendations regarding online education and testing requirements for admission. At your upcoming meeting on 20 March, two items are on your agenda where Senate committees have decisively rejected the proposals under discussion—namely, banning political statements on websites and the mathematics requirement for admission. As we have already written to you about the former, we focus here on the latter.

Academic Senate Regulations for at least the last 40 years have required freshman applicants for undergraduate admission to learn the contents of Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II to be eligible. Those regulations are still in effect to this day. Senate Regulation 428.C allows students to skip a required course for admission if they take a more advanced one that “assumes knowledge acquired” from the skipped course. Under this exception clause, several curricula self-labeled as “data science” were approved by the UCOP High School Articulation Unit as substituting for the Algebra II requirement in senate regulations.

However, it has become abundantly clear that several of these “data science,” and even some statistics, courses do not actually satisfy Senate Regulation 428.C since they do not “assume knowledge acquired” from Algebra II. This has been repeatedly examined and concluded by multiple parties, including by the majority of Black senate faculty across the University of California system in a letter from May 2022 concerned with equity issues (of students from underrepresented groups being funneled into courses that underprepare them), by the Systemwide Academic Preparation and Education Programs Committee of California State University in this resolution approved in March 2023 by BOARS in a unanimous July 2023 vote, and most recently in a report released by a systemwide Area C workgroup that spent an entire semester researching the matter and stated in February 2024 it “strongly supports the July 2023 BOARS decision that the three courses above do not validate Algebra II according to current Senate Regulations.” The workgroup even went further to state, “We find these current courses labeled as ‘data science’ are more akin to data literacy courses. While they may be suitable college preparatory courses for some students, they are not appropriate as recommended 4th year Mathematics courses per SR 424.” Lastly, even beyond the CSU and UC systems, industry leaders from companies such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and many others have applauded the recommendation of the workgroup, affirming the importance of strong mathematical foundations for future jobs in artificial intelligence.

Regents Policy 2102 and Regents Bylaw 40.1 state that the Academic Senate is responsible for determining conditions for admission, subject to approval by the Board of Regents. Though the Board has the ultimate authority to approve or disapprove Senate recommendations, it is difficult to understand why they would do so on this question of admission standards, on which they have little expertise.

We urge the Board to listen to its world-class faculty and adopt BOARS’ recommendation regarding the validation of Algebra II based on the work of the Area C workgroup.

Sincerely,

Constance Penley, CUCFA President and Professor of Film and Media Studies UC Santa Barbara

On behalf of the Council of UC Faculty Associations