\n<\/p>\n
The Trump administration began targeting UCLA last year through research funding cuts.<\/p>\n
Juliana Yamada\/Los Angeles Times\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
The Justice Department sued the University of California system Tuesday, alleging it has tolerated antisemitism to such an extent that it\u2019s created a hostile work environment for Jewish and Israeli employees at UCLA, violating federal law banning employment discrimination. <\/p>\n
The case continues the Trump administration\u2019s targeting of the campus through allegations that it failed to properly respond to pro-Palestinian protests that followed Hamas\u2019s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which sparked the recent Israel\u2013Hamas war. The administration previously cut off research funding for UCLA, but lost in court. <\/p>\n
\u201cSwastikas, calls for the extermination of Jews and the Jewish state of Israel, antisemitic violence, and open harassment of Jewish students, faculty, and staff: this was the grim scene at the University of California Los Angeles,\u201d the new lawsuit begins. It says, \u201cThe general atmosphere of antisemitism was, and remains, so severe and pervasive that UCLA\u2019s own official Task Force on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias concluded that the University\u2019s failures to protect Jewish staff and faculty constituted a hostile work environment.\u201d<\/p>\n
The DOJ already concluded, last July, that UCLA violated other laws\u2014the 14th Amendment\u2019s equal protection clause and Title\u00a0VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964\u2014in its response to alleged antisemitism at a spring 2024 pro-Palestinian protest encampment. Multiple federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, promptly began freezing funding; UC estimated it lost $584 million. <\/p>\n
The Trump administration further demanded that UCLA pay $1.2\u00a0billion and make other concessions, including that it stop enrolling \u201cforeign students likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment\u201d and cease \u201cperforming hormonal interventions and \u2018transgender\u2019 surgeries\u201d on anyone under 18 at its medical school and affiliated hospitals.<\/p>\n
But after UC researchers sued, U.S. District Court Judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District of California ordered almost all of the frozen funding be restored. In November, Lin further ordered federal agencies to end their \u201cblanket policy of denying any future grants\u201d to UCLA and ruled that the administration can\u2019t seek payouts from any UC campus \u201cin connection with any civil rights investigation\u201d under Titles VI or IX. Lin also prohibited the DOJ and federal funding agencies from withholding funds, \u201cor threatening to do so, to coerce the UC in violation of the First Amendment or Tenth Amendment.\u201d <\/p>\n
Now, the DOJ has sued in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California under Title\u00a0VII, a different law that bans employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Among other things, it\u2019s asking a judge to force the UC system to pay damages to Jewish and Israeli employees and \u201cmodify and enforce its anti-discrimination and anti-retaliation policies and procedures to effectively prevent and correct antisemitic discrimination and retaliation at UCLA.\u201d <\/p>\n
Mary Osako, UCLA\u2019s vice chancellor for strategic communications, noted in a statement that the university has taken \u201cconcrete and significant steps to strengthen campus safety, enforce policies, and combat antisemitism,\u201d including hiring a dedicated Title\u00a0VI\/Title\u00a0VII officer within the Office of Civil Rights.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe stand firmly by the decisive actions we have taken to combat antisemitism in all its forms, and we will vigorously defend our efforts and our unwavering commitment to providing a safe, inclusive environment for all members of our community,\u201d she wrote. <\/p>\n
In a statement, Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, wrote that \u201callegations of antisemitism must be taken seriously, but this lawsuit comes amid a broader pattern in which the federal government has increasingly weaponized antisemitism to pressure and reshape higher education institutions towards a far right agenda, including through prior federal attacks on UCLA. Civil-rights enforcement should protect people from discrimination without becoming a vehicle for political overreach that undermines academic freedom, shared governance, and the independence of universities.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Trump administration began targeting UCLA last year through research funding cuts. Juliana Yamada\/Los Angeles Times\/Getty Images The Justice Department sued the University of California system Tuesday, alleging it has tolerated antisemitism to such an extent that it\u2019s created a hostile work environment for Jewish and Israeli employees at UCLA, violating federal law banning employment<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45182,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[11618,1414,872,6829,5437,1983,514],"class_list":{"0":"post-45181","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-alleging","9":"tag-doj","10":"tag-environment","11":"tag-hostile","12":"tag-jews","13":"tag-sues","14":"tag-work"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45181","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=45181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/45182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}