Tag: deal

  • With Grant Cuts, Trump Pressures UCLA to Make Deal

    With Grant Cuts, Trump Pressures UCLA to Make Deal

    The Trump administration announced last week it was freezing federal grants for another prestigious research university. But this time, it wasn’t a private institution.

    It was the University of California, Los Angeles, and if the UC system doesn’t make a deal with the federal government, campuses across one of the nation’s largest public higher education systems might incur the administration’s further punishment. State leaders condemned the funding freeze, and faculty at UCLA are urging university administrators to fight. But the university has said little about how it plans to respond to the administration.

    The Department of Justice has been investigating the University of California system for months—looking into alleged antisemitism, alleged use of race in admissions and “potential race- and sex-based discrimination in university employment practices.” The agency’s investigations into the broader UC system are still ongoing, but last week, the DOJ told system officials it had made a finding regarding one campus and demanded a quick response.

    “The Department has concluded that UCLA’s response to the protest encampment on its campus in the spring of 2024 was deliberately indifferent to a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students in violation of the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI,” the letter said. (Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits universities that receive federal funding from discriminating based on shared ancestry, including antisemitism.)

    The letter didn’t specifically say what the Trump administration wants UC to do now about its alleged failure to handle a pro-Palestine encampment that ended more than a year ago, and that UCLA itself dismantled a week after its creation. The DOJ didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed further information Monday, but U.S. attorney general Pam Bondi’s news release accompanying the DOJ letter suggests the Trump administration wants significant concessions.

    “Our investigation into the University of California system has found concerning evidence of systemic anti-Semitism at UCLA that demands severe accountability from the institution,” Bondi said. “This disgusting breach of civil rights against students will not stand: DOJ will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system.”

    Just hours before the DOJ’s announcement, UCLA had announced that it was paying $6.45 million to settle a lawsuit from Jewish students over reported antisemitism associated with the encampment. But that wasn’t enough to assuage the federal government.

    The DOJ letter said the department “seeks to enter into a voluntary resolution agreement with the university to ensure that the hostile environment is eliminated and reasonable steps are taken to prevent its recurrence.” It asked the UC officials to contact a special counsel by today if they were “interested in resolving this matter along these lines,” providing an email address and a nonfunctional nine-digit phone number for them to contact. The agency is prepared to sue by Sept. 2 “unless there is reasonable certainty that we can reach an agreement.”

    That July 29 letter wasn’t the end of it. In the week between then and today’s deadline for UC to contact the DOJ, multiple federal agencies said they’re cutting off grants to UCLA. The total amount is unclear—other media have reported numbers exceeding $300 million.

    It’s reminiscent of what happened at Columbia and Harvard Universities. But unlike with those private institutions, the Trump administration hasn’t published an overarching demand letter for how it wants UCLA to change its ways, whether in admissions, student discipline or otherwise.

    A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the National Institutes of Health, responded to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for information on how much in NIH grant funding has been canceled and why with a two-line response attributed to an unnamed HHS official: “We will not fund institutions that promote antisemitism. We will use every tool we have to ensure institutions follow the law.”

    A National Science Foundation spokesperson wrote in an email that the NSF “informed the University of California, Los Angeles that the agency is suspending awards to UCLA because they are not in alignment with current NSF priorities and/or programmatic goals.” The spokesperson didn’t specify which priorities or which goals, and his email didn’t mention antisemitism.

    The Department of Energy went beyond allegations of antisemitism in its letter to UCLA, saying that “UCLA engages in racism, in the form of illegal affirmative action” and UCLA “endangers women by allowing men in women’s sports and private women-only spaces.”

    Mia McIver, executive director of the national American Association of University Professors, said what’s happening is the “Trump administration is extending its pattern of attacking higher education faculty, staff and students more broadly outward from the Ivy League universities into the public sector.” McIver, who taught at UCLA for a decade, said the administration intends to “exercise pervasive control over colleges and universities in every region of every different sort of institution.”

    “It is the federal government using levers of power that are completely unrelated to the underlying allegations,” McIver said. “Cutting off research for diabetes, cancer, heart disease will not improve the safety of Jewish faculty and students on campus and will not address antisemitism.”

    ‘Enough Is Enough’

    What does the UC system plan to do? A spokesperson deferred comment to UCLA, which also didn’t provide interviews Monday or answer written questions. The UC system spokesperson did forward a statement Friday from system president James B. Milliken, who started in his new job Aug. 1—just after the grant freezes. 

    Milliken called “the suspension this week of a large number of research grants and contracts” at UCLA “deeply troubling,” though “not unexpected.”

    “The research at UCLA and across UC more broadly saves lives, improves national security, helps feed the world, and drives the innovation economy in California and the nation,” he said. “It is central to who we are as a teaching and learning community. UC and campus leadership have been anticipating and preparing for the kind of federal action we saw this week, and that preparation helps support our decisions now.”

    He didn’t, however, say what the decisions would be.

    Also Friday, California governor Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential candidate and an ex officio member of the UC Board of Regents, released a statement calling it “a cruel manipulation to use Jewish students’ real concerns about antisemitism on campus as an excuse to cut millions of dollars in grants that were being used to make all Americans safer and healthier.”

    “This is the action of a president who doesn’t care about students, Californians, or Americans who don’t comply with his MAGA ways,” Newsom said.

    UCLA chancellor Julio Frenk said in a video on X Friday that “we share the goal of eradicating antisemitism. It has no place on our campus or in our society.” He said his wife is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and his paternal grandparents left Germany in the 1930s after being “driven out of their home by an intolerable climate of antisemitism and hate.”

    “These experiences inform my own commitment to combating bigotry in all its forms, but a sweeping penalty on lifesaving research doesn’t address any alleged discrimination,” Frenk said. He said, “We have contingency plans in place,” though he didn’t elaborate.

    In a petition, the UCLA Faculty Association’s Executive Board criticized UCLA administrators for their past “anticipatory obedience” to the federal government, which it said “has not prevented Trump administration attacks.”

    “UCLA’s anticipatory obedience has put itself in a place of weakness and we must instead choose to stand up,” the association wrote. “We do not have to bend to the Trump administration’s illegitimate and bad-faith demands. UCLA is a state university, with the financial backing and moral support of the fourth-largest economy in the world.”

    The association demanded that UC “demonstrate our strength as the world’s largest university system and reject the malicious demands of the Trump administration,” adding that “each university that falters legitimates the Trump administration’s attacks on all of our institutions.”

    It called for UC to fight the administration in court, to use unrestricted endowment funds to “help keep our university’s mission intact” and to work with Newsom and state lawmakers to get financial support. The petition ended with a call for university administrators to not “sacrifice our strengths and our community, deeply nurtured and protected for over 100 years, to a deeply callous and unfair federal administration that will only ask for more.”

    Meanwhile, Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UCLA said in a statement that “Israel continues to tighten its US-enabled siege of Gaza, where the calculated denial of humanitarian assistance is causing mass starvation amid ongoing aerial bombing. The theatrics of the Trump administration, echoed by UCLA, are part of a larger attempt to cover up this genocidal catastrophe in which all of us, and our university, are complicit.”

    McIver urged the UC system not to cut deals like Columbia and Brown Universities have.

    “There are always alternatives,” she said, “and every deal that is cut makes it harder for those who are downstream of the deal to continue resisting these attacks.”

    “The Trump administration is aiming to control colleges and universities at all levels in all states, and every settlement that is reached basically contributes to that goal,” she said. “And so there has to be a point at which everyone across the country stands up and says, ‘Enough is enough, we’re not going to tolerate this extortion, you can’t hold our campuses hostage and we’re not going to take it anymore.’”

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  • In Columbia’s Deal, More Gaslighting (opinion)

    In Columbia’s Deal, More Gaslighting (opinion)

    Columbia University president Claire Shipman would have us believe she snatched academic freedom from the flames of Trump’s higher education dumpster fire, but this is more of the same gaslighting we’ve endured for almost two years. Beginning with the first university administrator’s response to the first campus protest against the war in Gaza, university administrations everywhere repeatedly decried antisemitism while rarely naming what the students were actually calling for—namely, for the harm to the Palestinian people to stop, not for harm to come to the Jewish people.

    The words “Palestine” and “Gaza” almost never appeared in university administrators’ statements. That they also don’t appear in Shipman’s announcement of the agreement Columbia reached with the federal government to settle allegations of antisemitism is one tell that protections for academic freedom were not “carefully crafted” over the course of the negotiations but that they were abandoned instead. (For a thorough analysis of the settlement’s many failures that goes beyond the focus of this article, see “An Agreement That Settles Nothing,” by the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors.)

    On CNN, Shipman claimed that the resolution “protects our academic integrity,” calling that a “red line” for Columbia. In her announcement, Shipman offers as evidence of this integrity a sentence in the settlement that reads, “No provision of this agreement, individually or taken together, shall be construed as giving the United States authority to dictate faculty hiring.” She glosses this by adding, “The federal government will not dictate … who teaches.”

    When reading the official document, one is startled, then, to find that faculty hiring is dictated by its terms:

    “13. Columbia shall, consistent with its announcement on March 21, 2025, appoint new faculty members with joint positions in both the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the departments or fields of economics, political science, or SIPA [the School of International and Public Affairs].”

    The government should not be determining which programs Columbia chooses to invest in. I suspect that the slippage in Shipman’s statement from “faculty hiring” (the government cannot dictate faculty hiring) to “who teaches” (the government cannot dictate who teaches) is purposeful. She can always say that no member of the multiagency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism that had her by the throat will be personally reviewing candidate files, so Columbia retains control over the who of who teaches. But this is a distinction without substance when the ideological viewpoint of candidates is guaranteed in advance.

    The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies “is dedicated to the academic study and discussion of Israel and Jewish Studies,” we learn from its webpage. “The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies supports the State of Israel’s right to exist and to flourish,” its webpage also tells us. Can an academic department be a kind of lobbying organization at the same time? And can an academic department on Israel exclude some of the best thinking on its formation, that of anti-Zionist Jewish scholars? Isn’t this combination of the academic and the ideological a bit like the nonsensical liberal platitude calling Israel a Jewish and democratic state? The conjunction “and” does a heck of a lot of spackling work.

    By sharing the hires in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies as joint appointments with other departments, the work performed by phrases like “Israel’s right to exist” is amplified. In this way, the settlement seeks to multiply a particular, pro-Israel point of view in the university, potentially helping to shield Israel from criticism at the very moment it most needs to be criticized. This is not institutional neutrality. This is an intentional tilting of an already painfully tilted playing field.

    If anyone doubts that this tilt is precisely what the settlement seeks to secure, they need only consult No. 12 in the agreement, which stipulates that “the Senior Vice Provost, acting with the authority of the Office of the Provost, will conduct a thorough review of … the Center for Palestine Studies; the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies; Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies; the Middle East Institute; the Tel Aviv and Amman global hubs; the School of International and Public Affairs Middle East Policy major; and other University programs focused on the Middle East.”

    This person will “make recommendations to the President and Provost, in accordance with academic procedures, about any necessary changes, academic restructuring, or investments.” We already know which program on this list will find its fortunes soon improved. It’s not hard to imagine which ones might find themselves impoverished under the heading “necessary changes” or “academic restructuring.”

    Columbia did negotiate something wise. As Shipman wrote, “We have agreed on a robust dispute resolution process that includes a mutually agreed upon independent monitor and arbitrator as neutral third parties, rather than ceding authority to the government or a court.” Without this provision, Columbia would face a future of potentially endless arbitrary civil rights investigations.

    As more journalists report on the transformation of the federal civil service from a body of mostly nonpartisan experts into one evaluated on loyalty to the president, and as more stories expose the illegitimate tactics and methodologies used to levy accusations of antisemitism, this caveat providing for a third-party arbiter will be one that every institution will want to negotiate before discussing anything else. Columbia’s saga is, after all, only one of the first of many likely to come—last week, Brown University became the second institution to strike a deal with the Trump administration, and Harvard University is reportedly making progress toward one). After the Columbia settlement was announced, Trump posted on Truth Social, “Numerous other Higher Education Institutions that have hurt so many, and been so unfair and unjust, and have wrongly spent federal money, much of it from our government, are upcoming.”

    But this third-party provision holding out the hope that saner heads than those in the federal government will adjudicate going forward—a provision that will have to be negotiated individually by each institution—isn’t good enough, is it? Each institution, in this scenario, stanches its own bleeding, but not one of them directly challenges the federal administration’s use of antisemitism as a weapon of intimidation. It’s a rational calculation for each institution, I suppose, but a disastrous one taken as a whole.

    “For months,” Shipman says, “Columbia’s discussions with the federal government have been set up as a test of principle—a binary fight between courage and capitulation. But like most things in life, the reality is far more complex.” No doubt Shipman has in mind the real tragedies that would have resulted from a show of courage that might have cost Columbia its federal funding—critical research halted, jobs lost, students’ lives derailed, perhaps even the end of Columbia’s continued existence. The stakes were very high for Columbia, as they remain very high for all but the most financially insulated universities and colleges.

    And I suppose the compromises to academic freedom our institutions make, with no end in sight, in order to keep doors open and funds flowing might be forgivable, were it not for the 60,000 people and counting who are now dead—18,500 of them children. Were it not for the “worst-case scenario of famine” now unfolding. Were it not for the “war crimes in plain sight.”

    When the presidents of our universities and colleges compromise our academic freedom, they are doing so by playing along with a narrative of widespread antisemitism that they know is a pretext and a deflection. By going along with this narrative rather than challenging it, they co-create with the federal government a culture of fear that makes us scared to use our voices as professors to name and discuss a genocide. When we hesitate to openly address what is morally undeniable, the world begins to wobble. Yes, the reality is more complex than “a test of principle,” because we do not lose an abstract principle when we lose academic freedom; we slowly but surely lose our ability to tell right from wrong.

    Jennifer Ruth is a professor in the School of Film at Portland State University. She is co-author, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom (Johns Hopkins Press, 2022); coeditor, with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson, of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom (Beacon, 2024); and co-director, with Jan Haaken, of the film The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake in the Campus Protests?

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  • Brown Strikes Deal With Trump Administration

    Brown Strikes Deal With Trump Administration

    Brown agreed to donate $50 million to workforce development programs in Rhode Island.

    Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

    Brown University has struck a deal with the Trump administration to restore about $510 million in frozen federal research funds in exchange for various concessions but no payment, officials announced Wednesday.

    The federal government will restore millions in frozen research funding and settle investigations over allegations of campus antisemitism, according to the agreement. While Brown will not pay out a settlement to resolve the complaints like its Ivy League counterpart Columbia University did, the university pledged $50 million over the next decade to state workforce development efforts in Rhode Island.

    Brown is the second university to cut a deal with the Trump administration since Columbia reached a similar agreement last week. Trump officials said the Columbia settlement would be a template for their talks with other colleges, though other higher ed experts argued the deal was unlawful and represented a threat to the sector at large. (Harvard University, which has also been in the administration’s crosshairs over alleged antisemitism, has reportedly considered a settlement of up to $500 million to resolve its ongoing dispute.)

    Still, Brown agreed to multiple other changes. They include adopting the Trump administration’s definitions of male and female, not performing gender-affirming surgeries on minors or prescribing them puberty blockers, providing admissions data to the federal government, and conducting a campus climate survey and sharing the results with the federal government. Brown also agreed to codify prior changes officials announced to combat discrimination on campus.

    The deal does not include restrictions on campus curriculum or programs.

    “At its core, the agreement preserves the integrity of Brown’s academic foundation, and it enables us as a community to move forward after a period of considerable uncertainty in a way that ensures Brown will continue to be the Brown that our students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents and friends have known for generations,” President Christina Paxson said in a statement.

    Brown announced the agreement shortly after the university took out a $500 million loan, which could have helped plug research funding holes or fund a protracted legal battle. The university also borrowed $300 million in April after the Trump administration froze research funding over allegations of antisemitism connected to pro-Palestinian protests.

    The funding freeze, along with other changes in federal policy, has hit the university hard, and officials warned in June of the potential for “deep financial losses.”

    Education Secretary Linda McMahon celebrated the deal, asserting in a statement that the agreement would protect Jewish students from antisemitism as well as women’s sports.

    “Restoring our nation’s higher education institutions to places dedicated to truth-seeking, academic merit, and civil debate—where all students can learn free from discrimination and harassment—will be a lasting legacy of the Trump administration, one that will benefit students and American society for generations to come,” McMahon wrote in a social media post.

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  • UQ vaccine bought in billion-dollar deal – Campus Review

    UQ vaccine bought in billion-dollar deal – Campus Review

    Breakthrough vaccine technology invented by the University of Queensland is at the centre of a landmark deal worth up to $1.6bn struck with global pharmaceutical giant Sanofi.

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  • Federal judges deal major blow to Education Department’s anti-DEI guidance

    Federal judges deal major blow to Education Department’s anti-DEI guidance

    Two federal judges issued separate rulings Thursday that together dealt a major blow to the Trump administration’s recent guidance threatening to strip federal funding from colleges and K-12 schools that consider race in any of their policies, including scholarships and housing. 

    U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher ruled that the U.S. Department of Education did not follow proper procedures when issuing the Feb. 14 letter and postponed its effective date nationwide while the legal challenge against the guidance plays out. 

    The order came in response to a lawsuit from the American Federation of Teachers and other groups, which alleged that the guidance “radically upends” federal antidiscrimination law and is too vague for colleges and K-12 school officials to understand what conduct is prohibited. 

    The guidance interprets the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling against race-conscious college admissions to extend to every aspect of education, including financial aid, administrative support and graduation ceremonies. 

    According to AFT, the letter also implied that a wide variety of “core instruction, activities, and programs” used in teaching students — from diversity initiatives to instruction on systemic racism — could now be considered illegal discrimination. 

    The Feb. 14 letter asserted that colleges and K-12 schools had “toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’ and advanced discriminatory policies and practices.” 

    The Education Department appeared to walk back some of the strictest aspects of its guidance in a March Q&A document, but Gallagher wrote that the Q&A still lacked “sufficient clarity to override the express terms of the [Feb. 14] Letter.”

    Gallagher, a federal distict judge in Maryland, said the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in their arguments that the letter exceeds the Education Department’s authority by attempting to exercise control over curriculum. 

    “The government cannot proclaim entire categories of classroom content discriminatory to side-step the bounds of its statutory authority,” Gallagher wrote. 

    AFT Maryland President Kenya Campbell hailed the court’s order on Thursday. 

    “This preliminary injunction pauses the chaos caused by targeting and attacking vital communities and temporarily protects the critical funding schools, from our K-12 schools to our higher education institutions, rely on,” Campbell said. 

    The order came the same day as another federal judge made a similar ruling in a separate case brought against the Feb. 14 guidance. 

    The National Education Association, its New Hampshire affiliate and the Center for Black Educator Development sued the Education Department in early March, arguing the guidance undermines the free speech rights of educators. 

    Although the plaintiffs had sought a nationwide injunction, federal Judge Landya McCafferty, ruling for New Hampshire district court,  only blocked enforcement of the guidance for federally funded colleges and schools that employ or contract with the plaintiffs’ members. NEA alone has about 3 million members, including higher education workers.

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