Last fall, the University of California announced that it would sunset a key diversity-hiring initiative tied to its President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP). Less than two weeks later, the UC system reversed course, cowed by a backlash led by the very “scholar-activists” whom the program had spent four decades and more than $162 million cultivating. The episode offers a sobering lesson for reformers: when a university sustains an agenda long enough, that agenda becomes self-sustaining.
The PPFP functions as a social-justice career accelerator—and a kind of side-door to the faculty lounge. Through the program, UC hires postdoctoral fellows with a heavy emphasis on DEI, and the postdocs then get special favor for tenure-track faculty jobs.
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Backed by a $15 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the PPFP is regarded as extremely effective. Since 2003, more than 400 fellows have secured faculty positions within the UC system; since 2020, fellows have accounted for 5 percent of the system’s tenure-track hires. All of this is enabled by the system’s hiring incentive—a subsidy of $85,000 annually over five years for any campus that hires a scholar who went through the program.
Ending the hiring incentive would have effectively dismantled the pipeline, removing campuses’ motive for hiring former fellows. And doing so made sense. The UC system’s announcement came as the Trump administration moved to freeze billions in federal funding to colleges and universities nationwide, including UCLA, over diversity policies. In the preceding months, the UC system had already signaled some modest changes, ending mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring and scrubbing the PPFP’s website of explicit references to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Some of its campuses rebranded their DEI offices.
Within days of the announcement, however, fellows, alumni, and faculty launched a coordinated pressure campaign demanding that UC restore the hiring incentive. An anonymous advocacy group, StandUp4PPFP, issued an open letter condemning the university’s “pre-emptive concession to the federal attack on our institution and higher education more broadly.” The letter called on administrators to reaffirm UC’s “core values,” including “equity, diversity, and inclusion.”
A protest “toolkit” circulated online, complete with talking points, email templates, media guidance, and instructions for demonstrations at UC Regents meetings. Supporters were urged to flood the UC president’s inbox and “share this information widely.”
The campaign soon included a press conference with the graduate student union and a petition that gathered more than 1,000 signatures, promoted by the American Association of University Professors. After a few days, the university—which had resisted demands from the federal government for nearly a year—capitulated to its faculty activists.
The outcome was hardly surprising. Many PPFP scholars conceive of themselves as activists and devote their scholarly work to the study of activism, institutional power, and political mobilization. They simply applied their expertise to defending the program.
For example, UC Davis professor Michael V. Singh told the campus’s student newspaper that the PPFP was the “one program” attempting to address the “structural reasons” that women and racial minorities aren’t hired enough. Singh, a self-proclaimed scholar of “abolitionist pedagogy,” used his 2019 president’s postdoctoral fellowship to examine “the professional experiences and classroom practices of queer, trans, and feminist-allied Latino men who are teachers.”
Speaking at a press conference after the UC system reversed course, Lenora Renee Knowles praised administrators “for listening to our community” while warning that “our work is not yet done.” As a 2025 PPFP fellow, Knowles researches the “resistance strategies” of Black women and Latinas in “radical left organizing.”
When the system capitulated, jubilant faculty members took to social media in celebration. Many shared a common funder with the program: the Mellon Foundation. Sarah T. Roberts, a UCLA professor of gender studies who participated in a $5 million Mellon grant to develop a “social justice curriculum,” wrote on Bluesky that the system had “BACKED OFF murdering the PPFP program.” She added: “When we fight, we win!” Miriam Posner, a Mellon-funded digital-humanities scholar at UCLA, was even more exultant, posting: “WE JUST KEEP WINNING. (UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program RESTORED!!!!).”
The battle at UC offers a preview of what the struggle for higher education reform will look like moving forward. Many American universities now acknowledge that progressive bias has become a real problem, and some have taken tentative steps toward correcting it. So far, though, these efforts have remained largely symbolic. Administrators determined to pursue genuine change should expect resistance from the activists they spent decades empowering—and be prepared to stand up to it.