The University of California system will negotiate to restore the more than $300 million in federal research funding the Trump administration suspended last week, the latest step in a closely watched back-and-forth after the White House accused the University of California, Los Angeles of failing to crack down on campus antisemitism.
UC president James Milliken said in a statement on Wednesday that leaders would work to protect access to $584 million in suspended and threatened funds, calling the loss of these federal dollars the “death knell for innovative work that saves lives, grows our economy, and fortifies our national security,” while arguing the Trump administration’s cuts “do nothing to address antisemitism.”
Some on campus criticized the move to negotiate with the administration over the allegations.
“We have to fight for what we believe in,” UCLA political science professor Michael Chwe, a board member of the UCLA Faculty Association, told The Wall Street Journal. “Negotiating with such a malicious, bad-faith actor only legitimizes what they’re asking for.”
In a July 29 letter to the UC president’s office, the Justice Department its ongoing investigation of the UC system had revealed UCLA had been “deliberately indifferent to a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students” during 2024 campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war.
The DOJ cited examples of students who said they faced violent harassment or were kept from crossing areas on campus for being Jewish. The letter had given the school until Tuesday to seek voluntary resolution, or UCLA would face a federal lawsuit in early September.
The letter did not mention perhaps the single most violent event of those protests, in which a group of masked pro-Israel vigilantes attacked encampment protesters with blunt objects as campus and Los Angeles police stood by for hours, only intervening once many of the assailants had fled.
Last month, UCLA announced it had settled a lawsuit over campus antisemitism claims in part by donating over $2 million to campus and community Jewish organizations. The school, like many universities engaged by Trump, reformed campus discipline and anti-hate training in the wake of the 2024 protests.
Leaders across the state and country are holding their breath over the UC case, which marks the first time the Trump administration is suspending hundreds of millions of dollars from after a large, non-Ivy public university.
Previously, its efforts have concentrated mostly on private Ivy League schools like Columbia and Brown, both of which eventually agreed to multi-million dollar payments and various campus reforms to restore their funding. Harvard, meanwhile, has challenged the administration in court over the suspended funds.
All told, the administration has blocked more than $5 billion in funds to at least eight elite universities, according to a San Francisco Chronicle analysis.
