The youngest campuses in the UC system, especially Riverside and Merced, are also the most poorly resourced in the University system. Their youth means they have the greatest difficulty in attracting support from donors. Their newness also means less reputation and so less out-of-state student tuition dollars. They also suffer from the distribution of university funds heavily weighted toward PhD students. The “rebenching” system, which was designed to rectify unequal distribution of state funding, only operates when there is a surplus funding for UC; so, in other words, almost never. These campuses are also the campuses where the percentage of students of color is the greatest.
The Davis Faculty Association, along with other UC campus Faculty Associations, has endorsed a petition that calls on UC to bring its funding of UCR up to the level UC supplies to other UC campuses. The UC Faculty Associations further called on UC to not “treat campus funding as a zero-sum game, pitting campuses against each other,” rather calling on UC “to work with the legislature to secure appropriate funding levels.”