Tag: coercion

  • UC employees, unions sue Trump administration over ‘financial coercion’

    UC employees, unions sue Trump administration over ‘financial coercion’

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    A coalition of University of California faculty groups and employee unions sued the Trump administration Tuesday over the federal government’s efforts to “exert ideological control” over the system and its 10 institutions. 

    Over the past three months, the federal government has cut off at least $584 million in grants to the University of California, Los Angeles, sought $1 billion from the system to restore that funding and delivered a wide-ranging list of ultimatums that would dramatically reshape the state’s university system through political interference. 

    In their lawsuit, the coalition — which represented tens of thousands of faculty, staff and students within the university system — called the cuts unconstitutional and an “arbitrary, ideologically driven, and unlawful use of financial coercion” that threatened U.S. higher education and advancement.

    “The administration has made clear its intention to commandeer this public university system and to purge from its campuses viewpoints with which the President and his administration disagree,” the lawsuit said.

    “Campaign to control universities”

    President Donald Trump began laying the groundwork for “his administration’s coordinated attack on academic freedom and free speech and campaign to control universities” shortly after retaking office in January, the lawsuit alleged.

    Since then, Trump has put dozens of colleges on notice at once via civil rights investigations and targeted specific, often well-known institutions — such as Harvard University and Columbia University — that have invoked his ire.

    “Rather than acknowledging educational institutions like the UC as the assets to this nation that they are, the Trump administration views them as barriers to the President’s agenda of ideological dominance,” the lawsuit said.

    At the end of July, the U.S. Department of Justice ruled that UCLA had violated civil rights law by failing to adequately protect Jewish and Israeli students from harassment. A week later, the federal government suspended $584 million in grants to UCLA over the allegations.

    Tuesday’s lawsuit alleged DOJ picked and chose from university documents to make the argument it had wanted to from the start. For example, the agency relied heavily on an October report from UCLA that found antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias on its campus. But DOJ entirely failed to address the improvements UCLA had undertaken since — a factor similar to one cited by a federal judge when she struck down the Trump administration’s $2.2 billion funding freeze at Harvard earlier this month.

    DOJ also did not explain what connection the specific research funding cuts had to alleged antisemitism, forcing all university employees to prepare “for the possibility of significant and immediate termination of funding,” the lawsuit said.

    The University of California, one of the largest research systems in the country, derives a third of its annual operating budget — $17 billion — from federal funding, according to the lawsuit.

    The Trump administration has also unlawfully disregarded the process by which the government can terminate or withhold federal funds, the lawsuit argued.

    Addressing the cuts on Aug. 6, system President James Milliken said they did “nothing to address antisemitism,” but said the University of California would enter into negotiations with the Trump administration to have the funding restored.

    In the event of a major loss of federal funding, the system would need, at minimum, between $4 million and $5 billion just to survive, Milliken told state lawmakers this month.

    Dramatic and expensive ultimatums

    On Aug. 8, two days after Milliken announced the forthcoming negotiations, the system received an unprecedented list of wide-ranging demands from the Trump administration tying its federal funding to total compliance, according to the lawsuit. The plaintiffs cited a copy of the list, obtained by the Los Angeles Times, which the University of California has not made public.

    The letter would require UCLA to install a “resolution monitor” — appointed with final approval by the Trump administration — who would hold significant authority over campus affairs.

    UCLA would also be forced to provide the federal government regular access to “a wide variety of records” on faculty, staff and students, “as deemed necessary by the resolution monitor.”

    “The only exception is for attorney-client privilege, not for speech, association, or privacy purposes,” the lawsuit said.

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  • Trump administration’s coercion at Columbia is unlawful and unconstitutional

    Trump administration’s coercion at Columbia is unlawful and unconstitutional

    FIRE today filed a “friend of the court” brief in support of the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers in their lawsuit against the Department of Justice and other federal agencies. FIRE argues that the Trump administration’s actions against Columbia University are unlawful and unconstitutional attacks on freedom of expression, freedom of association, and academic freedom. The brief’s summary of argument follows.

    The federal government characterizes its abrupt revocation of $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University — and the government’s threat to revoke billions more if its demands are not met — as necessary to address anti-Semitism on campus in the wake of pro-Palestinian protests that sometimes veered into unlawful activity. Addressing discrimination is a worthy end. But it cannot justify the government’s flatly unconstitutional means here. While Columbia’s response to campus misconduct may raise questions about the university’s obligations under federal anti-discrimination law, there is no question about the government’s failure to meet its obligations under the First Amendment. The administration’s coercion is a blatant end-run around statutory safeguards and a flagrant attempt to jawbone the university into surrendering its institutional autonomy to federal officials. For the sake of Columbia’s students, faculty, and our free society, this government intimidation cannot stand unanswered.

    The same federal statute that governs institutional responses to allegations of anti-Semitism — Title VI — requires funding recipients like Columbia to receive notice, a hearing, and an opportunity to come into compliance voluntarily before the government can terminate funding. These provisions protect students, faculty, and institutions from precisely the kind of repressive, capricious government overreach that now harms Plaintiffs. Yet despite its professed interest in addressing campus anti-Semitism, the administration chose to ignore entirely the lawful statutory means by which it may do so. Instead, it has instituted rule by fiat: arbitrarily declaring Columbia subject to punishment, cancelling hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and threatening worse to come, and leaving Columbia faculty and students at the mercy of unchecked federal authority under the specter of a hostile takeover.

    This is unlawful. Just last year, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the government cannot jawbone private actors into punishing speech that the First Amendment protects from state intrusion. Nat’l Rifle Ass’n of Am. v. Vullo, 2024). But jawboning is exactly what the administration is doing to Columbia — except here, the government’s bullying is so extreme it might more accurately be called extortion. Wielding the threat of crippling financial consequences like a mobster gripping a baseball bat, the government forced Columbia to adopt a restrictive speech code that punishes disfavored or dissenting viewpoints. Not only would it be unconstitutional at a public university, the speech code also violates Columbia’s free speech promises and its right as a private entity to set its own rules regarding speech. The government further forced Columbia to surrender control of an entire academic department and to relinquish its right to make independent decisions about discipline and admissions — all of which violate longstanding precepts of academic freedom, institutional independence, and university self-governance.

    These demands are unconstitutional. Again, just last year, the Supreme Court reemphasized the limits the Constitution places on the government in its interactions with private institutions. “On the spectrum of dangers to free expression,” the Court wrote, “there are few greater than allowing the government to change the speech of private actors in order to achieve its own conception of speech nirvana.” (Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, 2024). As Defendants trample constitutional barriers in seeking to effectively outlaw certain political views on campus, this grave danger that the Court identified is fully realized.

    The government’s gambit is not permissible simply because federal funding is involved. The Supreme Court long ago established that “even in the provision of subsidies, the Government may not ‘ai[m] at the suppression of dangerous ideas’” — and that the First Amendment demands judicial intervention if funding is “‘manipulated’ to have a ‘coercive effect.’” (Nat’l Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, 1998) (quoting Regan v. Tax’n With Representation of Wash., 1983). Few things could be more manipulative or coercive than revoking grants in an explicit attempt to override the expressive and associational rights of a private institution of higher education, its students, and its faculty.

    This case illustrates the grave threat to core First Amendment freedoms posed by expansive — and here, extralegal and unbounded — conceptions of governmental power to address discrimination. For more than a quarter century, amicus FIRE has advocated against overly broad and impossibly vague campus speech codes promulgated under federal anti-discrimination law. To that end, FIRE successfully led the charge against the Obama administration’s attempt to pressure institutions to adopt a federal definition of “sexual harassment” — advanced as a national “blueprint” — that subjected wide swaths of protected speech to investigation and punishment. And yet as misguided as that initiative was, those pressure tactics pale in comparison to the scope and intensity of the unlawful shakedown Defendants mount here.

    The government’s aggression against Columbia is alarming not just because it is unlawful and unconstitutional, but because its plain aim is “suppression of free speech and creative inquiry in one of the vital centers for the Nation’s intellectual life, its college and university campuses.” Rosenberger v. Rector & Visitors of the Univ. of Va., 1995). While Columbia was the first institution targeted by the administration, it has not been the last — the list of colleges facing coercive funding cuts and chilling demands is growing.

    Addressing anti-Semitism does not and cannot require violating the First Amendment. Left unchecked, the administration will continue to deploy its distorted conception of federal anti-discrimination law as a battering ram against institutional autonomy and to seize for itself power to control permissible speech and instruction on our campuses. The stakes are high: “Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die.” Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 1957). This Court must act now to protect freedom of expression, academic freedom, and our institutions of higher education from a hostile federal takeover.

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