UC faculty, staff ask judge to halt Trump's coercive funding cuts

(CN) — A coalition of labor unions representing University of California professors, students and staff members on Thursday asked a federal judge to block the Trump administration from canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding in a bid to purge “woke” and “leftist” viewpoints from the university system.

U.S. District Judge Rita Lin didn’t issue a decision at the hearing in San Francisco on their bid for a preliminary injunction that would require the administration to go through all the regulatory required procedures before terminating funding based on purported civil rights violations.

However, the Joe Biden appointee noted that the administration has made no secret of its aim to use investigations into antisemitism and other civil rights violations in order to cut off funding for universities that don’t subscribe to the president’s ideological agenda.

“It’s undisputed that this exact playbook is now being executed at the University of California,” Lin said. “The head of the administration’s antisemitism task force went on the news to say that the UC has been ‘hijacked by the left’ and vowed to begin investigations.”

The same judge, in lawsuits brought by UC researchers, has already issued injunctions to prevent federal agencies from terminating grants to UC researchers without any specific explanations or for certain blacklisted topics such as diversity, equity and inclusion.

In July, the Justice Department said University of California, Los Angeles violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by failing to adequately respond to the harassment and abuse that Jewish and Israeli students said they endured on the campus during protests over the war in Gaza.

Almost immediately, the Trump administration froze $584 million in funding UCLA was receiving from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health without going through regulatory procedures that would have given the university an opportunity to address the Justice Department’s findings.

While Lin’s Sept. 22 injunction has restored that funding, it hasn’t ended the administration’s feud with the university.

A recently unsealed settlement proposal shows the Trump administration wants UCLA to pay almost $1.2 billion to resolve the Justice Department’s investigation, as well as, among other things, to discontinue race- and ethnicity-based scholarships and not admit foreign students who are “likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions.”

“The administration has been very clear that this is not ending with UCLA,” Lin said at Thursday’s hearing. “Their stated intention is to go after the entire UC system, which gets over $17 billion a year in federal funding.”

Deputy Associate Attorney General Abhishek Kambli told the judge that the UC faculty and staff’s First Amendment claim, based on the freezing of research grants and the settlement proposal, should be brought against the university system itself, which isn’t a party in the case, rather than against the federal government.

“The University of California system is a public institution, and the plaintiffs have the ability to bring a 1983 claim if they suppress their speech in violation of the First Amendment,” Kambli said, referring to the federal law that allows for lawsuits against state or local government officials for violation of civil rights.

“The easiest path for the plaintiffs to seek relief is to sue the university directly,” he added.

The judge, however, appeared puzzled by the idea that if someone has standing to sue one party for First Amendment violations, in this case the UC system, they would be prohibited from suing another defendant, here the Trump administration.

Connie Chan, an attorney for the labor organizations, argued that, if anything, the Trump administration’s constitutional violation is even more egregious if it uses its coercive power to force UC to violate its own, independent legal obligations.

“The fact of this case shows that the federal government is using the threat of legal and financial sanctions in order to coerce the University of California and to commandeer the University of California in imposing its own ideological and political agenda,” she said.

The plaintiffs include the American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of Teachers, American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, the Teamsters, United Auto Workers and several campus-specific faculty associations. They are represented by Democracy Forward and San Francisco-based law firm Altshuler Berzon.

In a September statement, AAUP President Todd Wolfson said they would not stand by as the Trump administration “bludgeons academic freedom.”

“In this historic lawsuit, faculty, students, and staff walk together to fight the authoritarian takeover of our universities. We stand hand in hand to protect not only our individual rights to free expression, debate, and association, but also to safeguard the health, safety, and economic mobility of our communities — all of which is at risk,” he said.

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