University of California students and staff accused the Trump administration of using civil rights law to combat the university system in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
The administration fined one of the system’s most elite schools, the University of California, Los Angeles, $1.2 billion and froze research funding after it accused the school of allowing antisemitism on campus and other civil rights violations.
President Donald Trump‘s administration has targeted many elite schools with rescinded or frozen federal funding for certain violations, but UCLA is the first public university to face consequences.
Staff and students’ lawsuit against the administration says they demanded access to faculty, staff, and student data, admissions and hiring data, wanted to end diversity scholarships, ban demonstrations on university property, and ordered cooperation with immigration enforcement.
Stett Holbrook, a spokesman for the University of California system, told the Associated Press that the university is not involved in the lawsuit but is taking part in legal and advocacy efforts to maintain and restore funding.
“Federal cuts to research funding threaten lifesaving biomedical research, hamper U.S. economic competitiveness and jeopardize the health of Americans who depend on the University’s cutting-edge medical science and innovation,” he said in a statement.
The American Association of University Professors union is leading the lawsuit, and the groups are represented by Democracy Forward, a left-leaning group that has filed other lawsuits against the administration.
“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 a San Francisco federal court says.
University of California President James Milliken said the administration has launched actions or other investigations against all of the system’s 10 campuses. “This represents one of the gravest threats to the University of California in our 157-year history,” he said, emphasizing the amount of federal support the system receives.
The administration has reached settlements with several schools, including Columbia University, which paid $200 million to the government to resolve an investigation and restore its research grants.
