\n<\/p>\n
The Trump administration announced last week it was freezing federal grants for another prestigious research university. But this time, it wasn\u2019t a private institution. <\/p>\n
It was the University of California, Los Angeles, and if the UC system doesn\u2019t make a deal with the federal government, campuses across one of the nation\u2019s largest public higher education systems might incur the administration\u2019s further punishment. State leaders condemned the funding freeze, and faculty at UCLA are urging university administrators to fight. But the university has said little about how it plans to respond to the administration.<\/p>\n
The Department of Justice has been investigating the University of California system for months\u2014looking into alleged antisemitism, alleged use of race in admissions and \u201cpotential race- and sex-based discrimination in university employment practices.\u201d The agency\u2019s investigations into the broader UC system are still ongoing, but last week, the DOJ told system officials it had made a finding regarding one campus and demanded a quick response.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Department has concluded that UCLA\u2019s response to the protest encampment on its campus in the spring of 2024 was deliberately indifferent to a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students in violation of the Equal Protection Clause and Title\u00a0VI,\u201d the letter said. (Title\u00a0VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits universities that receive federal funding from discriminating based on shared ancestry, including antisemitism.)<\/p>\n
The letter didn\u2019t specifically say what the Trump administration wants UC to do now about its alleged failure to handle a pro-Palestine encampment that ended more than a year ago, and that UCLA itself dismantled a week after its creation. The DOJ didn\u2019t provide Inside Higher Ed<\/em> further information Monday, but U.S. attorney general Pam Bondi\u2019s news release accompanying the DOJ letter suggests the Trump administration wants significant concessions. <\/p>\n \u201cOur investigation into the University of California system has found concerning evidence of systemic anti-Semitism at UCLA that demands severe accountability from the institution,\u201d Bondi said. \u201cThis disgusting breach of civil rights against students will not stand: DOJ will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system.\u201d<\/p>\n Just hours before the DOJ\u2019s announcement, UCLA had announced that it was paying $6.45\u00a0million to settle a lawsuit from Jewish students over reported antisemitism associated with the encampment. But that wasn\u2019t enough to assuage the federal government. <\/p>\n The DOJ letter said the department \u201cseeks to enter into a voluntary resolution agreement with the university to ensure that the hostile environment is eliminated and reasonable steps are taken to prevent its recurrence.\u201d It asked the UC officials to contact a special counsel by today if they were \u201cinterested in resolving this matter along these lines,\u201d providing an email address and a nonfunctional nine-digit phone number for them to contact. The agency is prepared to sue by Sept.\u00a02 \u201cunless there is reasonable certainty that we can reach an agreement.\u201d <\/p>\n That July\u00a029 letter wasn\u2019t the end of it. In the week between then and today\u2019s deadline for UC to contact the DOJ, multiple federal agencies said they\u2019re cutting off grants to UCLA. The total amount is unclear\u2014other media have reported numbers exceeding $300\u00a0million. <\/p>\n It\u2019s reminiscent of what happened at Columbia and Harvard Universities. But unlike with those private institutions, the Trump administration hasn\u2019t published an overarching demand letter for how it wants UCLA to change its ways, whether in admissions, student discipline or otherwise.<\/p>\n A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the National Institutes of Health, responded to Inside Higher Ed<\/em>\u2019s requests for information on how much in NIH grant funding has been canceled and why with a two-line response attributed to an unnamed HHS official: \u201cWe will not fund institutions that promote antisemitism. We will use every tool we have to ensure institutions follow the law.\u201d <\/p>\n A National Science Foundation spokesperson wrote in an email that the NSF \u201cinformed the University of California, Los Angeles that the agency is suspending awards to UCLA because they are not in alignment with current NSF priorities and\/or programmatic goals.\u201d The spokesperson didn\u2019t specify which priorities or which goals, and his email didn\u2019t mention antisemitism. <\/p>\n The Department of Energy went beyond allegations of antisemitism in its letter to UCLA, saying that \u201cUCLA engages in racism, in the form of illegal affirmative action\u201d and UCLA \u201cendangers women by allowing men in women\u2019s sports and private women-only spaces.\u201d <\/p>\n Mia McIver, executive director of the national American Association of University Professors, said what\u2019s happening is the \u201cTrump administration is extending its pattern of attacking higher education faculty, staff and students more broadly outward from the Ivy League universities into the public sector.\u201d McIver, who taught at UCLA for a decade, said the administration intends to \u201cexercise pervasive control over colleges and universities in every region of every different sort of institution.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cIt is the federal government using levers of power that are completely unrelated to the underlying allegations,\u201d McIver said. \u201cCutting off research for diabetes, cancer, heart disease will not improve the safety of Jewish faculty and students on campus and will not address antisemitism.\u201d <\/p>\n What does the UC system plan to do? A spokesperson deferred comment to UCLA, which also didn\u2019t provide interviews Monday or answer written questions. The UC system spokesperson did forward a statement Friday from system president James B. Milliken, who started in his new job Aug.\u00a01\u2014just after the grant freezes.\u00a0<\/p>\n Milliken called \u201cthe suspension this week of a large number of research grants and contracts\u201d at UCLA \u201cdeeply troubling,\u201d though \u201cnot unexpected.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cThe research at UCLA and across UC more broadly saves lives, improves national security, helps feed the world, and drives the innovation economy in California and the nation,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is central to who we are as a teaching and learning community. UC and campus leadership have been anticipating and preparing for the kind of federal action we saw this week, and that preparation helps support our decisions now.\u201d<\/p>\n He didn\u2019t, however, say what the decisions would be. <\/p>\n Also Friday, California governor Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential candidate and an ex officio member of the UC Board of Regents, released a statement calling it \u201ca cruel manipulation to use Jewish students\u2019 real concerns about antisemitism on campus as an excuse to cut millions of dollars in grants that were being used to make all Americans safer and healthier.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the action of a president who doesn\u2019t care about students, Californians, or Americans who don\u2019t comply with his MAGA ways,\u201d Newsom said. <\/p>\n UCLA chancellor Julio Frenk said in a video on X Friday that \u201cwe share the goal of eradicating antisemitism. It has no place on our campus or in our society.\u201d He said his wife is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and his paternal grandparents left Germany in the 1930s after being \u201cdriven out of their home by an intolerable climate of antisemitism and hate.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cThese experiences inform my own commitment to combating bigotry in all its forms, but a sweeping penalty on lifesaving research doesn\u2019t address any alleged discrimination,\u201d Frenk said. He said, \u201cWe have contingency plans in place,\u201d though he didn\u2019t elaborate. <\/p>\n In a petition, the UCLA Faculty Association\u2019s Executive Board criticized UCLA administrators for their past \u201canticipatory obedience\u201d to the federal government, which it said \u201chas not prevented Trump administration attacks.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cUCLA\u2019s anticipatory obedience has put itself in a place of weakness and we must instead choose to stand up,\u201d the association wrote. \u201cWe do not have to bend to the Trump administration\u2019s illegitimate and bad-faith demands. UCLA is a state university, with the financial backing and moral support of the fourth-largest economy in the world.\u201d <\/p>\n The association demanded that UC \u201cdemonstrate our strength as the world\u2019s largest university system and reject the malicious demands of the Trump administration,\u201d adding that \u201ceach university that falters legitimates the Trump administration\u2019s attacks on all of our institutions.\u201d<\/p>\n It called for UC to fight the administration in court, to use unrestricted endowment funds to \u201chelp keep our university\u2019s mission intact\u201d and to work with Newsom and state lawmakers to get financial support. The petition ended with a call for university administrators to not \u201csacrifice our strengths and our community, deeply nurtured and protected for over 100 years, to a deeply callous and unfair federal administration that will only ask for more.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UCLA said in a statement that \u201cIsrael continues to tighten its US-enabled siege of Gaza, where the calculated denial of humanitarian assistance is causing mass starvation amid ongoing aerial bombing. The theatrics of the Trump administration, echoed by UCLA, are part of a larger attempt to cover up this genocidal catastrophe in which all of us, and our university, are complicit.\u201d<\/p>\n McIver urged the UC system not to cut deals like Columbia and Brown Universities have. <\/p>\n \u201cThere are always alternatives,\u201d she said, \u201cand every deal that is cut makes it harder for those who are downstream of the deal to continue resisting these attacks.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cThe Trump administration is aiming to control colleges and universities at all levels in all states, and every settlement that is reached basically contributes to that goal,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd so there has to be a point at which everyone across the country stands up and says, \u2018Enough is enough, we\u2019re not going to tolerate this extortion, you can\u2019t hold our campuses hostage and we\u2019re not going to take it anymore.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Trump administration announced last week it was freezing federal grants for another prestigious research university. But this time, it wasn\u2019t a private institution. It was the University of California, Los Angeles, and if the UC system doesn\u2019t make a deal with the federal government, campuses across one of the nation\u2019s largest public higher education<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14143,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[562,696,4639,1791,81,7499],"class_list":{"0":"post-14142","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-cuts","9":"tag-deal","10":"tag-grant","11":"tag-pressures","12":"tag-trump","13":"tag-ucla"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14142\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u2018Enough Is Enough\u2019<\/h2>\n