The Trump administration engaged in a ‘concerted campaign to purge’ left-wing views from top universities, judge says in UCLA funding case

U.S. District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco issued a preliminary injunction barring the administration from canceling funding to UCLA based on alleged discrimination without providing notice to affected faculty and conducting a hearing, among other requirements.

Over the summer, the administration demanded that UCLA pay $1.2 billion to restore frozen research funding and ensure eligibility for future funding after the university was accused of allowing anti-Semitism on campus. UCLA was the first public university to be targeted by the administration over allegations of civil rights violations.

It has also frozen or temporarily halted federal funding over similar claims against private colleges, including Columbia University.

Labor unions and other groups representing UCLA faculty, students and staff provided “compelling evidence” that the Trump administration “engaged in a concerted campaign to purge ‘leftist’ and ‘socialist’ views from our nation’s leading universities,” Lynn said in her ruling.

“Agency officials, as well as the president and vice president, have repeatedly declared a playbook for launching civil rights investigations of prominent universities to justify cutting federal funding, with the goal of bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tone,” Lane wrote.

“It is indisputable that this precise evidence is now being implemented at UCLA,” she added.

And at the University of California, which is facing a series of civil rights investigations, it found that the administration engaged in “coercive and retaliatory conduct in violation of the First Amendment and the Tenth Amendment.”

Messages sent to the White House and the US Department of Justice after hours on Friday were not immediately responded to. Lane’s order will remain in effect indefinitely.

University of California President James B. Milliken said the size of the UCLA fine would devastate the UC system, whose campuses are viewed as some of the best public colleges in the country.

The University of California is in settlement talks with the administration and is not a party to the lawsuit against Lin, who was nominated to the bench by President Joe Biden, a Democrat. The university system said in a statement that it “remains committed to protecting the university’s mission, governance, and academic freedom.”

The administration required UC to comply with its views on gender identity and create a process to ensure foreign students are not admitted if they are likely to engage in anti-American, anti-Western or anti-Semitic “disturbances or harassment,” among other requirements outlined in a settlement proposal announced in October.

The administration had previously concluded deals with Brown University for $50 million and Columbia University for $221 million.

Lin cited statements by UCLA faculty and staff that the administration’s moves were causing them to stop teaching or researching topics that they “feared were ‘abandoned’ or ‘woke’.”

Its injunction also prohibits the administration from “tying the award or continuation of federal funding to UC approval to any actions that would violate the First Amendment rights of plaintiff members.”

She cited efforts to force California universities to screen international students based on “anti-Western” or “anti-American” views, restrict research and teaching, or adopt specific definitions of “male” and “female” as examples of such measures.

President Donald Trump has criticized elite colleges as overpowered by liberalism and anti-Semitism.

His administration launched investigations into dozens of universities, claiming they had failed to end the use of racial preferences in violation of civil rights law. The Republican administration says diversity, equity and inclusion efforts discriminate against white and Asian American students.