President Donald Trump spent a good part of the year trying to bend elite universities to his will, cutting off federal funds as leverage. The assault left schools with a choice: Surrender or fight.
But since the president put the University of California in his cross hairs, school officials have charted a decidedly different course. They have neither conceded defeat nor mounted a vigorous defense. Instead, they are watching as UC faculty members wage their own legal challenges against Trump, scoring early wins that so far have restored more than $580 million in scientific research funding the Trump administration stripped from UCLA.
With UC officials taking little overt action to resolve the crisis, the fight over UCLA funding has not progressed much in the months since it kicked off in July. While other high profile schools around the U.S. have either hammered out deals with the government to get Trump off their backs or dug in for protracted legal battles, UCLA goes into the new year with its future stuck in a seemingly open-ended limbo state.
“There's no evidence that any type of deal with the United States is going to be happening in the immediate future,” Abhishek Kambli, a Justice Department lawyer, said during a November court hearing in San Francisco.
Complicating matters is the scrutiny UCLA’s predicament is receiving. As a public institution in a Democratic stronghold that has taken the lead in opposing Trump on many fronts, the school’s leaders have had to take into consideration the opinions of Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers, who believe UCLA should not give in to the president’s demands.
UCLA’s troubles began when Atty. Gen. Pamela Bondi accused the school of showing “deliberate indifference” to the rights and safety of Jewish students and faculty during prolonged, tumultuous campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.
Federal science and health agencies quickly followed through on Bondi’s threat that UCLA would pay a “heavy price” for its alleged misdeeds, announcing they were withholding $584 million in research grants – more than half of the total researchers were slated to receive to fund their work.
Days later, Justice officials proposed a deal to settle its case and restore the funding: UCLA would have to pay $1 billion in fines, $200 million more in legal payouts, and make sweeping reforms to limit campus protests, end scholarships based on race or ethnicity, and screen prospective international students for “anti-American” activity, among other changes.
The size of the proposed penalty dwarfed those the Trump administration had demanded of other high profile schools facing similar accusations of antisemitism. Several of those universities had opted to follow a path of acquiescence charted by Columbia University, which had negotiated with the administration and ultimately agreed to pay $220 million and make some reforms.
Harvard University has stood out for its defiance, choosing to sue the administration, while simultaneously entering into negotiations. No resolution has been reached.
James Milliken, the recently installed president of the UC system, talked publicly about the devastating impact the cuts would have on UCLA’s ability to function and its role as one of the world’s leading research institutions in medicine and other fields. Beyond those comments, however, he and members of the Board of Regents, which oversees the university, have remained tight-lipped about how they planned to respond. A group of 10 regents, including Milliken and Board Chair Janet Reilly, has met several times since August behind closed doors to discuss the funding cuts.
There has been little movement in negotiations since August, according to a UC official granted anonymity to discuss the deliberations.
The realization that faculty had to stand up for themselves spurred Claudia Polsky, director of the environmental law clinic at UC Berkeley, into action even before the sweeping cuts to UCLA research. In June, Polsky led a first-of-its-kind class action lawsuit against the Trump administration, featuring researchers who had already seen their grant funding slashed.
It wasn’t easy. Doubters saw her quest as a “rogue operation,” believing that the university would have stepped up if a legal challenge was viable. Others were afraid of repercussions to their personal or professional lives given the “vindictiveness” of the Trump administration, she recalled.
“Academics are not a highly risk-embracing group,” said Polsky, who said she spoke to dozens of researchers in search of those who would make the strongest plaintiffs.
Then, in September, a coalition of faculty, staff, students and labor unions filed a second lawsuit over funding cuts hitting UCLA and other UC schools. In both cases, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin granted preliminary injunctions, temporarily restoring the funding and restricting how the administration can suspend funding from the university. Last week, a federal appeals court allowed the Trump administration to move forward with some grant suspensions that were made prior to the sweeping UCLA research cuts.
Attorneys representing the plaintiffs in both lawsuits say they have had minimal contact with the university. In November, around 200 faculty members joined a Zoom call held by the Council of UC Faculty Associations, lamenting what they see as an increasingly centralized and isolated leadership that has refused to join in their fight against the administration.
Veena Dubal, general counsel for the American Association of University Professors and a law professor at UC Irvine who is working on the second lawsuit, said the university is missing an opportunity to show that they value faculty input. By comparison, Dubal said, Harvard officials opted to join AAUP in a lawsuit against the Trump administration and have been far more communicative with faculty.
“To make this a negotiation between the Trump administration and regents and lawyers,” Dubal said, “as opposed to an open conversation and debate between faculty and a government that's essentially acting like an authoritarian regime, I think is a mistake.”
In a statement, UC spokesperson Stett Holbrook pushed back on the idea it had taken a path of inaction. He pointed to lawsuits UC joined this year challenging new limits the administration imposed on how much universities are reimbursed for facilities and administrative costs associated with research.
“Unprecedented financial threats to UC ground the University’s commitment to protect its mission, governance, and academic freedom,” Holbrook said. “We will engage in good faith dialogue, but we will not accept any outcome that cripples UC’s core mission or undermines taxpayer investments in one of the nation’s most important public institutions.”
Holbrook added that “while not always visible, these efforts are conducted with consultation with Faculty Senate leadership, an essential partner in this challenging moment for the University.”
Researchers scoff at such talk of partnership. They point to the fact that faculty groups had to sue the university to force it to make public the demand letter Trump officials sent to UCLA. University attorneys had resisted doing so, arguing it would impact confidential settlement negotiations, but the California Supreme Court in October declined to reverse a lower court ruling in which a judge found that the public interest in disclosing the proposal “clearly outweighs” the university’s concerns.
“The bottom line is that if faculty thought that university leadership was doing an adequate job in protecting academic freedom, scholarship and the autonomy of the university, they wouldn't have needed to file the lawsuits,” said Michael Meranze, a former chair of the UCLA Academic Senate who recently retired after teaching in the UC system since 1989.
Some education experts think the university’s reticence is wise.
Pedro Noguera, dean of the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California, said that combativeness is best left to politicians.
“Let Gavin Newsom do that,” Noguera said. “I think university officials need to be discreet, need to be thoughtful, need to stay focused on what are the interests of these institutions — and that doesn't mean engaging in public debate.”
Jetaun Stevens, deputy director of higher education and senior staff attorney at the civil rights law firm Public Advocates, said the preliminary injunctions give the UCs some breathing room and leverage in negotiations, leaving little upside for the university in exposing itself further by joining in a lawsuit.
“If (faculty) keep continuing to see success, then you might see the UC join,” Stevens said. “But I think it's probably just not yet clear to them if that would heighten tensions in a way that could make the UC more vulnerable than it already is.”
The two approaches don’t have to be mutually exclusive, said Dan Schnur, a political science professor at UC Berkeley and USC. A “guns ablazing” approach might be cathartic and come with a public relations benefit, but Schnur said it could result in more punitive actions that could hurt current students.
The UC, which has 10 campuses, nearly 300,000 students and receives close to a tenth of all federal research funding, is significantly different from the smaller private schools that have struck deals. The UCs face much greater public scrutiny, amplified by being in a deep blue state where Democratic politicians are eager to be seen as resisting Trump.
Any deal would likely require the blessing of Newsom, who has made clear that the UC should not give in. A settlement could negatively impact Newsom’s potential 2028 presidential bid that has gained traction as the governor – who is also a member of the regents – continues to cast himself as an antagonist to Trump. While Newsom has been kept in the loop, he is not involved in day-to-day talks and has not recently directly engaged with the rest of the regents, according to a person briefed on the discussions.
“If they were taking marching orders from Newsom, they'd probably be more likely to be vocally supporting the lawsuits,” Schnur said, adding that Newsom’s presidential prospects would benefit from more aggressive push back by the UCs.
Newsom spokesperson Marissa Saldivar said in a statement that the governor “welcomes efforts” from faculty to “safeguard academic freedom and protect our world-class university system from Trump's extortion.”
Several Democratic state lawmakers expressed support for faculty and some took a hard line opposing any settlement.
Corey Jackson, an assemblymember who chairs the budget subcommittee on human services, said he would be “furious” if the UC settled. “If you cut a deal with the administration,” he added, “don’t come to us for help.”
Assemblymember Patrick Ahrens, a member of the budget committee and a UCLA alum, said that he would not be comfortable with any deal, saying, “We're not going to capitulate to this shit.”
Anna Markowitz, president of the UCLA Faculty Association, said that while it “haunts” her that she doesn’t know if the risk her colleagues took in joining the lawsuits will pay off, they did it “for the good of UC and the good of California.”
“I like to think we bought them a year,” Markowitz said, “and I'm proud of that.”
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