UCLA research grants suspended after Trump administration faulted campus for antisemitism

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

The Trump administration is suspending hundreds of science research grants at UCLA in response to a Justice Department finding this week that the campus didn’t do enough to halt antisemitism during last year’s pro-Palestine protests.

“UCLA received a notice that the federal government, through its control of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other agencies, is suspending certain research funding to UCLA,” the university chancellor, Julio Frenk, wrote in a public letter Thursday evening.

Frenk, whose Jewish paternal grandparents and young father fled Nazi Germany, faulted the Trump administration for punishing science in its effort to combat “alleged discrimination.”

“With this decision, hundreds of grants may be lost, adversely affecting the lives and life-changing work of UCLA researchers, faculty and staff. In its notice to us, the federal government claims antisemitism and bias as the reasons. This far-reaching penalty of defunding life-saving research does nothing to address any alleged discrimination,” Frenk wrote.

The scale of the suspensions is unclear. At least 278 grants funded by the National Science Foundation are suspended in a move that affects about $212 million in research projects, some that have been ongoing since 2019 or earlier. That’s according to a CalMatters review of Grant Witness, a project by a team of scholars that began tracking the Trump administration’s research funding cuts.

Officials and spokespersons from the National Science Foundation didn’t respond to emails from CalMatters about why the grants were suspended.

“With the support of the UC Board of Regents and the UC Office of the President, we are actively evaluating our best course of action,” Frenk wrote. His letter outlined the various steps the campus has taken to combat antisemitism and anti-Israel bias on campus.

Trump’s DOJ alleges antisemitism

The suspensions are the first known consequence of the U.S. Department of Justice issuing UCLA a notice of violation this week for failing “to adequately respond to complaints of severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive harassment and abuse that Jewish and Israeli students faced on its campus from October 7, 2023, to the present,” a statement from the department said.

The findings largely concern the pro-Palestinian encampments that hundreds of students and faculty erected last spring to protest Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza as part of the majority-Jewish nation’s war with Hamas. Hamas, which dozens of countries — including the U.S. — call a terrorist group but that is also the ruling government of the Gaza Strip, attacked Israeli civilians and soldiers on Oct. 7, 2023, reigniting a decades-long conflict between the two powers.

The Justice Department’s investigation said that “Jewish and Israeli students at UCLA were subjected to severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive harassment that created a hostile environment by members of the encampment.” It also said that UCLA officials “had notice that Jewish and Israeli students were being assaulted and physically prevented from accessing parts of campus by demonstrators.”

The Justice Department letter indicated that UCLA’s leadership last year was “deliberately indifferent to the hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students caused by the encampment.” The letter also faulted UCLA officials for failing to disband the encampment even though its creation violated existing campus policies, as CalMatters reported.

The letter was signed by the U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Gregory W. Brown. They told UCLA it has until Aug. 5 to agree to a voluntary settlement to “ensure that the hostile environment is eliminated and reasonable steps are taken to prevent its recurrence.” Otherwise, the Department of Justice “is prepared” to file a complaint against UCLA in a federal court in September, the Department of Justice officials wrote.

UCLA agreed to a settlement with Jewish plaintiffs

In a related but separate matter, UCLA and the lawyers for the UC system agreed this week to a settlement with several Jewish students who sued UCLA over the encampments last spring.

Last year the federal judge in the case sided with the Jewish plaintiffs who said that the anti-Israel sentiment displayed by protestors in the encampment violated their religious liberties because of their spiritual ties to Israel. “Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith,” the judge, Mark C. Scarsi, wrote in his preliminary injunction

Various Jewish groups debate whether anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic. The UCLA encampment included Jewish participants.

In the settlement, UCLA agreed to pay the Jewish plaintiffs $50,000 each, for a total of $200,000. UCLA also agreed to donate more than $2 million to several Jewish organizations. Another $3.6 million is reserved for legal fees and other expenses, the settlement said.

UCLA denied any wrongdoing, the settlement stated. A judge must approve the deal.

But that deal was met with outrage by a lawyer representing five pro-Palestinian students and professors, two of whom are Jewish and took part in last year’s encampment. The lawyer, Thomas B. Harvey, filed a legal document in the case to argue that the encampment wasn’t antisemitic and that the settlement itself is flawed. A core theme in his filing is that Zionism is being wrongly conflated with antisemitism.

Harvey is one of several lawyers who sued the UC in March for the injuries pro-Palestinian protesters sustained during the encampment last spring when a mob attacked it.

The plaintiffs in the case that UCLA settled this week “never even alleged that members of the Palestine Solidarity Encampment excluded them, let alone because of their religion,” wrote Harvey in an email to CalMatters. “UCLA refused to meaningfully defend its students and faculty against unsupported allegations.”

He continued, writing that UC lawyers “conducted no depositions, interviewed no witness and engaged in no discovery. Judge Scarsi even notes this abject failure in his preliminary injunction.”

Harvey said UC’s interests “appear to be crushing dissent against genocide in Palestine, currying favor with the Trump administration, and generally capitulating when challenged.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.