The Trump administration has attacked the University of California system’s research funding, launched a swarm of investigations and demanded that it pay more than $1 billion.

But people across the 10-campus system are at odds over how to fight back, stirring a war within about countering President Trump’s tactics. In many ways, the conflicts reflect academia at large, which has not mustered a consensus about how to fend off the White House’s campaign to remake American campuses.

California administrators have tried to negotiate with the same government that professors have sued. The university system’s regents have huddled behind closed doors while one, Gov. Gavin Newsom, has publicly called for defiance. And system leaders have clashed with campus-level officials over giving the Trump administration the names of scores of students and employees connected to complaints about antisemitism.

“This has nothing to do with antisemitism, and everything to do with capitulating,” Peyrin Kao, a Berkeley lecturer who was included in the files that went to the federal government, told regents last week.

The White House’s barrage against top schools has sometimes proven a rallying cry for higher education, especially after Harvard University rejected the Trump administration’s demands and sued. But as the federal government has challenged schools, it has often faced a fractured response among campus leaders, workers, students, donors and sympathetic elected officials, even in places where there is far-reaching opposition to Mr. Trump.

The tensions stem from the question of what universities should prioritize. Should battling incursions into academic freedom take precedence? Or protecting students and cherished values like diversity? Or should retaining federal research funds come first?