The Justice Department this week accused UCLA of failing to protect its Jewish students.
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(This article has been updated with comment from UCLA.)
The National Science Foundation said Thursday that it’s suspending grant awards at the University of California, Los Angeles.
An NSF spokesperson said that the university’s awards “are not in alignment with current NSF priorities and/or programmatic goals,” though they didn’t offer more specifics. NSF changed its priorities in April and, as a result, cut off funding to programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion and those aimed at combating misinformation
Freelance journalist Dan Garisto wrote on BlueSky that nearly 300 grants at UCLA are now suspended. That includes a $25 million grant that supports the university’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. (In 2022, UCLA had about 450 grants from the NSF, totaling more than $350 million.)
UCLA chancellor Julio Frenk wrote in a letter to the campus community that the freeze extended beyond NSF to include grants from the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies.
“This is not only a loss to the researchers who rely on critical grants,” Frenk wrote. “It is a loss for Americans across the nation whose work, health, and future depend on the groundbreaking work we do.”
Frenk noted that UCLA was prepared for a grant freeze and has developed contingency plans. “We will do everything we can to protect the interests of faculty, students and staff—and to defend our values and principles,” he pledged.
The Associated Press reported that the freeze affected $339 million in federal grants.
The grant suspension comes as UCLA finds itself the Trump administration’s latest target in its growing war with higher education. Earlier this week, the university settled a lawsuit in which a group of Jewish students alleged that UCLA enabled pro-Palestinian activists to cut off Jewish students’ access to parts of campus. On the same day the settlement was announced, the Justice Department accused UCLA of violating the federal civil rights law that bars antisemitism and race-based discrimination.
Frenk said the government claimed “antisemitism and bias as the reasons” for the freeze. But he argued that Trump’s “far-reaching penalty of defunding life-saving research does nothing to address any alleged discrimination.”
He added that UCLA shares the goal of eradicating antisemitism, detailing the steps the university has taken in the last year to address the issue, including establishing new policies for campus protests.
UCLA has until Aug. 5 to respond to the DOJ’s notice of violation; DOJ officials threatened that the university would “pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk.” The Justice Department is also investigating the admissions practices at UCLA, but that inquiry hasn’t wrapped up yet.
