UC evaluating ‘every option’ amid Trump administration demands on UCLA

The University of California plans to “evaluate every option” to resolve charges of antisemitism brought by the Trump administration against UCLA, UC President James B. Milliken said in a statement Monday.

Calling the current situation “unchartered waters,” Milliken’s comments followed a report in the Los Angeles Times detailing the Trump administration’s settlement proposal to UCLA. The proposal, according to the Times, calls on the campus to make a number of concessions and changes. Those include:

• Publishing data annually for hires and student admissions broken down by  “race, color, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests”
• Making a statement saying the university does not recognize the identities of transgender people
• Not admitting foreign students who are “anti-Western”
• Ending gender-affirming care for minors at university medical centers
• Placing limits on where and how students can protest

The settlement proposal also includes a $1.2 billion fine. Under the agreement, it would be paid over five years, with annual payments of $200 million, in addition to setting aside a $172 million fund for individuals claiming civil rights violations, according to the Times.

“This represents one of the gravest threats to the University of California in our 157-year history. Losses of significant research and other federal funding would devastate UC and inflict real, long-term harm on our students, our faculty and staff, our patients, and all Californians,” Milliken said in his statement.

Milliken added that the university “must do all we can” to avoid those outcomes. “That’s why we are working with elected officials in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., to evaluate every option to resolve this conflict to continue serving communities across the state,” he said.

On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, UC’s board of regents will meet in San Francisco, where they will discuss the federal threats and negotiations with the Trump administration.

Ahead of that meeting, a group of more than 100 Jewish faculty across UC wrote to the regents and urged them to make “no concessions, compromises, bargains, or capitulation” to the Trump administration. They added that the administration is not targeting UC over antisemitism but instead because the university “is a powerhouse of independent thought, research, truth, dissent, and innovation,” which they said “poses a considerable obstacle to authoritarianism.”

“We urge you, the Regents of the world’s premier public university system, to recognize where the real risk of this moment lies,” the faculty wrote. “The University of California will survive federal funding cuts if it must. It will not survive the sacrifice of our institutional autonomy, academic freedom, or civil rights on the altar of a specious claim to be ‘combating antisemitism.’”