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To: Faculty and Staff
June 5, 2025
Dear Colleagues,
This year the university achieved our long-sought goal of being an R1 institution. We were also ranked #1 in the nation for social mobility by the Wall Street Journal and received Carnegie’s recognition as an “opportunity university” based on its inaugural Access and Earnings classification. These unprecedented achievements reflect your hard work and dedication to your research, scholarly and creative activities. Congratulations and thank you for helping propel UC Merced’s continued success.
In recent months, the dramatic shift in federal funding has affected all research universities, including ours. Budgets for federal agencies are being cut, entire programmatic areas are being defunded and the agencies themselves are working to reduce the F&A (aka IDC) rates that support our research infrastructure.
Many of you have had one or more of your federally funded projects paused or terminated. UC Merced’s leadership hears and shares your distress about funding your scholarly activities, and, in many cases, supporting your Ph.D. students, researchers and staff. We are also fully aware that the challenges we face today may be with us for the next couple of years.
To support your and our collective work as a research university, the Chancellor has approved an initial one-time allocation, from an institutional line of credit, of $1.5M in Research Sustainability Funds to help ease our adjustment to the new funding climate over the next year or two.
We are working with a joint Senate-Administration working group to define the principles that will guide the allocation of resources to affected federal projects and hope to implement it over the summer. We appreciate the Senate’s engagement with campus leadership on this critical matter and will provide updates to the faculty as they are available.
In the meantime, please know that the Chancellor and collective leadership of the university stands in firm support of academic freedom and a shared admiration of your research, scholarly and creative activities. We hope the Research Sustainability Fund will provide the flexibility required to navigate the developing funding landscape and are confident that UC Merced will remain a thriving research institution because of your outstanding research, scholarly and creative endeavors.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth R. Dumont, Ph.D.
Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost
Kurt Schnier, Ph.D.
Vice Chancellor for Planning and Budget and Chief Financial Officer
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