The Trump administration is seeking a $1bn settlement from the University of California, Los Angeles, a White House official said on Friday.
The person was not authorized to speak publicly about the request and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The Trump administration has suspended $584m in federal research funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and other agencies, the university’s chancellor, Julio Frenk, said in a message to UCLA staff and students this week.
Last week, the justice department notified the university that an investigation by the department’s civil right division had “concluded that UCLA’s response to the protest encampment on its campus in the spring of 2024 was deliberately indifferent to a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students” in violation of federal anti-discrimination law.
“This disgusting breach of civil rights against students will not stand: DOJ will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system”, the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, said in a statement.
UCLA is the first public university whose federal grants have been targeted by the administration over allegations of civil rights violations related to antisemitism and affirmative action. The Trump administration has frozen or paused federal funding over similar allegations against private colleges.
The new University of California president, James B Milliken, who oversees a university system of 10 campuses, six academic health centers and three affiliated national laboratories, confirmed on Friday that the university had received notice from the justice department and was reviewing it.
“Earlier this week, we offered to engage in good faith dialogue with the Department to protect the University and its critical research mission,” Milliken said. “As a public university, we are stewards of taxpayer resources and a payment of this scale would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians.
“Americans across this great nation rely on the vital work of UCLA and the UC system for technologies and medical therapies that save lives, grow the US economy, and protect our national security,” he added.
UCLA recently reached a $6m settlement with three Jewish students and a Jewish professor who sued the university, arguing it violated their civil rights by allowing pro-Palestinian protesters in 2024 to block their access to classes and other areas on campus.
The university has said it is committed to campus safety and inclusivity and will continue to implement recommendations.
California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, expressed outrage at the proposal he attributed directly to the president. “He has threatened us through extortion with a billion-dollar fine unless we do his bidding,” Newsom said at a news conference with Texas lawmakers in Sacramento on Friday.
“We will not be complicit in this kind of attack on academic freedom on this extraordinary public institution. We are not like some of those other institutions that have followed a different path,” Newsom added, apparently referring to two private universities, Columbia and Brown, which have agreed to pay large settlements to resolve investigations by the Trump administration in recent weeks.
California Senator Scott Wiener echoed that language, writing on Instagram: “In another mob boss fascist move, Trump is now trying to extort UCLA for $1B, force it to adopt his racist, transphobic, xenophobic policies & accept a monitor to control the university. Hard no. UCLA is a California public university subject to California law & built on California values. The answer is no.”
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