


The Trump administration wants UCLA to pay more than $1 billion to settle allegations that it violated the rights of Jewish and Israeli students, according to a new report.
The university would be required to pay the federal government $1 billion in installments and establish a $172 million claims fund for people affected by the university system’s alleged civil rights violations, CNN reported.
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It would also require the appointment of a monitor to oversee the university’s operations and the establishment of a senior administrator focused on compliance with antidiscrimination laws.
In addition, the proposed agreement would force sweeping policy changes that include banning overnight demonstrations, overhauling protest policies, ending race- and ethnicity-based scholarships, and granting the resolution monitor access to admissions data. UCLA would also be required to guarantee single-sex housing for women, provide equal athletic recognition for female athletes, and halt “gender-affirming care” at its hospital and medical school, according to CNN.
The move is the latest effort by the Trump administration to cement its hold on higher education.
The University of California’s president, James Milliken, acknowledged Friday afternoon the school had received “a document from the Department of Justice and is reviewing it.”
“As a public university, we are stewards of taxpayer resources, and a payment of this scale would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians,” he added.
Last week, the administration started freezing $584 million in federal funding to the California university system, Chancellor Julio Frenk said Wednesday. He added that if the funds remained suspended, “it will be devastating for UCLA and for Americans across the nation.”
UCLA is the first public university to have had federal grants targeted by the White House over alleged civil rights violations related to affirmative action and antisemitism. The Trump administration has frozen or paused federal funding over similar allegations against a host private colleges including Brown ($510 million), Columbia ($400 million), Duke ($108 million), Cornell ($1 billion), Harvard ($2.3 billion), Northwestern ($790 million), and the University of Pennsylvania ($175 million).
If UCLA agrees to settle, it would be the largest payout of any university that has so far reached a deal with the White House. Columbia agreed to pay $221 million in connection with its settlement with the government, and Brown pledged to spend $50 million on state workforce programs.
In the case of UCLA, the Trump administration claimed that the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division found that the university violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “by acting with deliberate indifference in creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students.”
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a member of the UC Board of Regents, urged the school not to bend “on their knees” to the Trump administration’s demands.
“We’re not Brown, we’re not Columbia, and I’m not going to be governor if we act like that, period, full stop,” Newsom said Thursday. “I will fight like hell to make sure that doesn’t happen. There’s principles, there’s right and wrong, and we’ll do the right thing. And what President Trump is doing is wrong, and everybody knows it.”
Newsom did not indicate whether he was involved in any conversations the school had about negotiating with Trump, but added he was confident “they’ll do the right thing.”
DOJ FINDS UCLA VIOLATED JEWISH STUDENTS’ CIVIL RIGHTS
“And I’ll do everything in my power to encourage them to do the right thing and not to become another law firm that bends on their knees, another company that sells their soul, or another institution that takes a shortcut, takes the easy wrong versus the hard right,” he added.