Trump administration proposes $1 billion settlement with UCLA
The Trump administration has proposed a $1 billion settlement with UCLA amid a larger battle over federal funding.
The payment of such a sum would have disastrous effects on the university, school officials said on Friday.
James B. Milliken, the president of the University of California school system, said in a statement that the Department of Justice sent along a document on the settlement that the UC system is in the process of reviewing.
The news comes after the administration announced on Wednesday that it had suspended $584 million in federal grants for UCLA. It’s an amount that is nearly double what the school had previously believed it would be.
But the payment proposed by the Trump administration in the settlement to restore the funds is untenable, 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,” he said.
The funding freeze followed a Department of Justice investigation that found that UCLA violated federal civil rights law by acting with “deliberate indifference in creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students,” the agency said last month.
The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division said the university had failed to “adequately” respond to complaints of harassment and abuse toward its Jewish and Israeli students on campus since Oct. 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas-led terrorist attack on Israel.
“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,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a news release following the July announcement.
Days later, UCLA announced that it had been notified that it would be losing federal research funding over alleged antisemitism. UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk said in a statement on Wednesday that the school hoped to work toward restoring the funding, warning that such a freeze would have adverse consequences.
“The suspension of these funds is not only a loss to the researchers who rely on critical grants,” Frenk said. “It is a loss for Americans across the nation whose work, health and future depend on our groundbreaking research and scholarship.”
