President Donald Trump’s administration appears to be demanding full capitulation to a bevy of far-right demands as part of a proposed settlement with the University of California, Los Angeles over claims involving antisemitism and civil rights.
The Los Angeles Times reported Monday that the proposal, which has not yet been made public, was laid out in a 28-page letter to the university and aims to “drastically overhaul campus practices on hiring, admissions, sports, scholarships, discrimination and gender identity.” The Times reported that the Trump administration would release roughly $500 million that it has withheld in federal aid for research grants if the conditions are met. (The letter’s existence or contents have not been independently confirmed by MSNBC.)
The report suggests that the federal government is seeking to impose right-wing demands on yet another university, similar to what it has done through agreements with Columbia University and Brown University, which were ostensibly over antisemitism claims but reached into other areas completely unrelated to the matter. Those deals validated concerns from many observers — including a number of Jewish people — who have sounded the alarm on the Trump administration’s claims of systemic antisemitism — and its withholding of crucial federal funding — to try to force universities to acquiesce.
In addition to a $1 billion fine, which California Gov. Gavin Newsom has previously called “extortion,” the proposed deal reportedly would require UCLA to issue a public statement vowing not to recognize transgender people’s identities. The Times also reported that the administration is demanding that UCLA should:
Ensure that “anti-Western” or “anti-American” students aren’t admitted.
End any race- or ethnicity-based scholarships.
Release annual demographic data on hires as well as prospective and admitted students, broken down by “race, color, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests.”
And then there’s the reported requirement that the government be granted access to “all UCLA staff, employees, facilities, documents, and data related to the agreement” that’s not protected by attorney-client privilege. That could be an opening for the Trump administration — which has frequently conflated pro-Palestinian activism with antisemitism — to target staff as it has elsewhere in the University of California system.
UC Berkeley, which is also under investigation, has faced backlash this week after it gave the federal government 160 names of students and faculty and staff members as part of the administration’s supposed antisemitism probe. UC Berkeley professor Judith Butler — a member of the progressive group Jewish Voice for Peace — was included on that list, and recently denounced the university’s actions in an interview with Democracy Now.
It seems the administration wants similar access to information on staff at UCLA — as well as a bunch of other things that seem to be about little more than waging war on colleges, the institutions that Trump and his movement have framed as centers of liberal disorder and decay.