The Trump administration is using civil rights laws to wage a campaign against the University of California in an attempt to curtail academic freedom and undermine free speech, according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday by faculty, staff, student organizations and every labor union representing UC workers.
The lawsuit comes weeks after the Trump administration fined the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) $1.2bn and froze research funding after accusing the school of allowing antisemitism on campus and other civil rights violations. It was the first public university to be targeted by a widespread funding freeze. The administration has frozen or paused federal funding over similar allegations against elite private colleges, including Harvard, Brown and Columbia.
According to the lawsuit, the Trump administration has made several demands in its proposed settlement offer to UCLA, including giving government access to faculty, student and staff data; releasing admissions and hiring data; ending diversity scholarships; banning overnight demonstrations on university property and cooperating with immigration enforcement.
The Department of Justice didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did the office of the UC system’s president.
The coalition is led by the American Association of University Professors union, or AAUP, and represented by Democracy Forward, a legal group that has brought other lawsuits against the Trump administration over frozen federal funds.
“The blunt cudgel the Trump administration has repeatedly employed in this attack on the independence of institutions of higher education has been the abrupt, unilateral, and unlawful termination of federal research funding on which those institutions and the public interest rely,” the lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco said.
The US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has launched dozens of federal investigations also targeting K-12 school districts.
University of California president, James Milliken, said the federal government has also launched investigations and other actions against all of the UC’s 10 campuses but offered no details in a statement on Monday.
“This represents one of the gravest threats to the University of California in our 157-year history,” he said, adding that the university system receives more than $17bn each year in federal support, including nearly $10bn in Medicare and Medicaid funding, and funding that goes toward research and student financial aid.
The Trump administration has used its control of federal funding to push for reforms at elite colleges that Trump decries as overrun by liberalism and antisemitism. The administration also has launched investigations into diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, saying they discriminate against white and Asian American students.
This summer, Columbia University agreed to pay more than $200m as part of a settlement to resolve investigations into the government’s allegations that the school violated federal anti-discrimination laws. The agreement also restored more than $400m in research grants.
The Trump administration is using its deal with Columbia as a template for other universities, with financial penalties that are now seen as an expectation.
