Dec. 12, 2025 (Berkeleyside.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We work for you \u2014 and we\u2019re matching your donation 1:1! <\/strong>Our journalists attend city council and school board meetings, follow tips and make the calls to keep you informed on the important issues in Berkeley. Will you chip in today?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes, double my Berkeleyside donation with your matching gift!<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Editors\u2019 note: This story was originally published by ProPublica<\/a>. Sign up to receive their newsletter<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n On the morning of Thursday, July 31, James B. Milliken was enjoying a round of golf at the remote Sand Hills club in Western Nebraska when his cellphone buzzed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Milliken was still days away from taking the helm of the sprawling University of California system, but his new office was on the line with disturbing news: The Trump administration was freezing hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding at UCLA, UC\u2019s biggest campus. Milliken quickly packed up and made the five-hour drive to Denver to catch the next flight to California.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He landed on the front lines of one of the most confounding cultural battles waged by the Trump administration. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The grant freeze was the latest salvo in the administration\u2019s broader campaign against elite universities, which it has pilloried as purveyors of antisemitism and \u201cwoke\u201d indoctrination. Over the next four months, the Justice Department targeted UCLA with its full playbook for bringing colleges to heel, threatening it with multiple discrimination lawsuits, demanding more than $1 billion<\/a> in fines and pressing for a raft of changes on the conservative wish list<\/a> for overhauling higher education. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the months since Milliken\u2019s aborted golf game, much has been written about the Trump administration\u2019s efforts to impose its will on UCLA, part of the nation\u2019s largest and most prestigious public university system. But an investigation by ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education, <\/em>based on previously unreported documents and interviews with dozens of people involved, reveals <\/em>the extent to which the government violated legal and procedural norms to gin up its case against the school. It also surfaced something equally alarming: How the UC system\u2019s deep dependence on federal money inhibited its willingness to resist the legally shaky onslaught, a vulnerability the Trump administration\u2019s tactics brought into sharp focus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to former DOJ insiders, agency political appointees dispatched teams of career civil rights lawyers to California in March, pressuring them to rapidly \u201cfind\u201d evidence backing a preordained conclusion: that the UC system and four of its campuses had illegally tolerated antisemitism, which would violate federal civil rights statutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The career attorneys eventually recommended a lawsuit against only UCLA, which had been rocked by pro-Palestinian protests in the spring of 2024. But even that case was weak, the lawyers acknowledged in a previously unreported internal memo we obtained. It documented the extensive steps UCLA had already taken to address antisemitism, many resulting from a Biden administration investigation based on the same incidents. The memo also noted there was no evidence that the harassing behavior that peaked during the protests was still happening. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Nonetheless, investigators sketched out a convoluted legal strategy to justify a new civil rights complaint against UCLA that several former DOJ lawyers called problematic and ethically dubious. Multiple attorneys who worked on it told us they were relieved they\u2019d left the DOJ before they could be asked to sign it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n UCLA seemingly had every reason to push back aggressively. Yet UC system leaders have resisted calls from faculty and labor groups to file suit, fearing the many ways the government could retaliate against not only UCLA, but the entire university system, which relies on federal funds for a full one-third of its revenue. The government has opened probes into all 10 UC campuses, including at least seven that target UC Berkeley alone. \u201cThankfully, they\u2019ve only fucked with UCLA at this point,\u201d said one UC insider privy to the system\u2019s thinking. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To tell this story, ProPublica and the Chronicle reviewed public and internal records and interviewed more than 50 <\/strong>people, including DOJ attorneys who worked on the California investigations, UC officials and faculty, former government officials, Jewish leaders and legal experts. Some asked not to be identified, for fear the administration would retaliate or because they hadn\u2019t been authorized to discuss the conflict. The Justice Department and its top officials did not respond to detailed questions and interview requests. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Over three decades leading public colleges, Milliken, 68, a dapper onetime Wall Street lawyer who goes by \u201cJB,\u201d has built a reputation as a pragmatist able to work with politicians of all stripes and navigate the culture wars. In an interview, he called the challenges facing the entirety of UC, and UCLA in particular, unparalleled in his career. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing like this time,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is singular. It\u2019s the toughest.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Nov. 14, UC received a temporary reprieve. In response to a complaint brought by the American Association of University Professors, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin issued a scathing opinion<\/a> finding that the Trump administration\u2019s actions against UCLA had \u201cflouted\u201d legal requirements and ordered it to cease all \u201ccoercive and retaliatory conduct\u201d against the UC system. Lin had already ordered the release of UCLA\u2019s $584 million in frozen grant funding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But those orders are preliminary and subject to appeal, and many people at UC fear that more attacks are coming. \u201cEven if this holds, there will simply be another move from this administration,\u201d said Anna Markowitz, an associate professor of education at UCLA and a leader of the campus faculty association, which is among the lawsuit\u2019s plaintiffs. \u201cThey have not made it a secret what they wish to do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In interviews, UCLA researchers described the damage the school has absorbed so far. Even Jewish faculty members who endured antisemitism said they are aghast at the way the government has weaponized their complaints to justify cutting critical scientific research. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One of them is Ron Avi Astor, a professor of social welfare and education whose description of his treatment at the hands of pro-Palestinian protesters is a prominent part of the lawsuit President Donald Trump\u2019s DOJ recommended against UCLA. But he is dismayed at the cuts to research funds. \u201cThese are things that save people\u2019s lives. Why are we messing with that? It\u2019s a tool that anyone who\u2019s a scholar would abhor,\u201d he told us. \u201cIt looks like we\u2019re being used.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n ***<\/p>\n\n\n\n For Trump\u2019s Justice Department, the University of California was a juicy target from the start. <\/p>\n\n\n\n With its 10 campuses, nearly 300,000 students, six medical centers and three national labs, UC is a crown jewel of a blue state \u2014 one whose governor, Gavin Newsom, has become one of Trump\u2019s most prominent foes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Its scientists have won 75 Nobel Prizes, including four this year alone. But as a high-powered science hub, it\u2019s deeply dependent on federal funding, getting some $17.3 billion a year in research grants, student financial aid and reimbursements from government health programs. UC also has nothing like the endowment wealth of the Ivy League colleges, including Columbia and Brown, from which the Trump administration has extracted penalties in the tens or hundreds of millions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both sides said they consider the outcome a victory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some of Trump\u2019s DOJ appointees arrived with UC already in their crosshairs. Harmeet K. Dhillon, Trump\u2019s assistant attorney general for civil rights, had sued UC officials in 2017 on behalf of two conservative student groups, alleging unfair treatment of conservative speakers they wanted to bring to the Berkeley campus. (UC settled the case a year later<\/a>, agreeing to modify rules for speakers at Berkeley and pay $70,000 in legal costs.) And Trump had named Leo Terrell, the bombastic former Fox News commentator<\/a>, to a top DOJ civil rights post where he heads the president\u2019s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. A UCLA School of Law graduate, Terrell had publicly declared in mid-2024 that his alma mater was \u201ca national embarrassment\u201d over its handling of \u201ccriminal antisemitic conduct.\u201d Dhillon and Terrell didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In early February, just two weeks after Trump took office, his new attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued a series of directives<\/a> to the DOJ requiring \u201czealous advocacy\u201d for Trump\u2019s executive orders, attacks on all forms of \u201cillegal DEI\u201d and aggressive steps to combat antisemitism. Civil rights actions and investigations involving race and sex discrimination, historically the civil rights division\u2019s chief focus, were largely abandoned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Feb. 28, Terrell\u2019s task force announced plans<\/a> to visit 10 U.S. campuses, including UCLA and UC Berkeley, that were alleged to have illegally failed to protect Jewish students and faculty members, to assess \u201cwhether remedial action is warranted.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n But by then, the new Justice leadership had already decided<\/a> to investigate UC schools and already concluded that they were guilty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In early March, Terrell declared on Fox News<\/a> that students and employees in \u201cthe entire UC system\u201d were \u201cbeing harassed because of antisemitism.\u201d The administration planned to \u201csue,\u201d \u201cbankrupt,\u201d and \u201ctake away every single federal dollar\u201d from such schools, he said, and the DOJ would file hate crime charges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A team of about a dozen career DOJ lawyers had been assembled only days earlier to investigate the allegations of antisemitism against UC employees. Under the employment discrimination section of the Civil Rights Act, the occurrence of ugly antisemitic incidents or violence involving professors or staff wasn\u2019t, by itself, enough to merit federal intervention. The legal standard was whether the university had engaged in a \u201cpattern or practice\u201d of tolerating antisemitism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Before Trump took office, the civil rights division typically took more than a year to complete such a probe, according to DOJ veterans. Investigators would conduct interviews on campus, review reams of documents for compliance with various statutes and assess such complex matters as when hateful speech is protected by the First Amendment. Once a complaint was authorized, the civil rights division would seek voluntary compliance in a process that was meant to find solutions, not punish colleges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this case, the Justice Department\u2019s political appointees demanded that investigators wrap things up in far less time \u2014 initially, a single month. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Career supervisors say they told their new bosses that they couldn\u2019t, in one month, produce a case that could stand up in court. Still, \u201cNorth\u201d and \u201cSouth\u201d teams of lawyers were dispatched for multi-day trips to California to dig up facts and interview officials at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC San Francisco and UCLA. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe were told what the outcome will be: \u2018You have one month to find evidence to justify a lawsuit and draft a complaint against the UC system,\u2019\u201d said Ejaz Baluch, a senior trial attorney in the civil rights division who worked on the investigation before leaving the Justice Department in May.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe incredibly short timing of this investigation is just emblematic of the fact that the end goal was never to conduct a thorough, unbiased investigation,\u201d Jen Swedish, who was the deputy chief of Justice\u2019s employment litigation section until May, said in an interview. \u201cThe end goal was to file a damn complaint \u2014 or have something to threaten the university.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump\u2019s appointee as deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights was Michael Gates<\/a>, formerly the city attorney in Huntington Beach, California, who assumed the DOJ post vowing to help \u201cwin this country back<\/a>.\u201d \u201cYou guys have found a hostile work environment, right?\u201d lawyers on the UC team recall him asking, just three weeks into the investigation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe seemed upset we were spending so much time investigating,\u201d Dena Robinson, a senior trial attorney, told us. \u201cHe didn\u2019t know what the holdup was in getting back to them on which university could be sued.\u201d In an email about six weeks in, Gates suggested there was easily enough in the public record to bring a complaint against at least one of the UC campuses \u2014 a notion that horrified the career lawyers. \u201cWhy did we even go out there if you\u2019d already made up your mind?\u201d another member of the UC team recalled thinking. Gates, who left the DOJ in November after just 11 months, declined an interview request and offered no comment on detailed questions from ProPublica and the Chronicle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lawyers on the team say it soon became apparent that there wasn\u2019t nearly enough evidence to justify an employment discrimination case against UC Berkeley, UC Davis or UCSF, much less the entire UC system. Fearful for their jobs, they agreed on a strategy to \u201cfeed the beast,\u201d as one attorney put it: to focus on UCLA, which had experienced the most troubling, and publicly explosive, episodes of antisemitism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n ***<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like many colleges across the country, UCLA had seen a spike in antisemitism amid protests over Israel\u2019s military response in Gaza following the brutal Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The campus had experienced dozens of ugly incidents, including swastikas spray-painted on buildings and graffiti reading \u201cFree Palestine, Fuck Jews.\u201d Muslim and Arab students and faculty also complained of harassment and that any speech critical of Israel was being branded as antisemitic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Starting in late April 2024, hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters set up a barricaded encampment in the center of the campus. Reluctant to summon outside law enforcement, UCLA administrators allowed the encampment to remain for a week, disrupting classes and blocking access to certain buildings. Protesters berated and occasionally physically assaulted anyone who refused to disavow Zionism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On the night of April 30, masked counterprotesters, armed with poles and pepper spray and shooting fireworks, stormed the encampment, triggering a three-hour melee<\/a> before police were finally brought in. Dozens of people were injured. It took until 6 a.m. May 2 for Los Angeles police and sheriff\u2019s deputies<\/a> to empty the site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before Trump even took office, however, UCLA \u2014 and the federal government \u2014 had already taken action to combat antisemitism at the school. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Most significantly, in the waning days of the Biden administration, the UC system had reached a broad civil rights settlement<\/a> with the Department of Education resolving investigations<\/a> into student complaints that UC had tolerated both antisemitism and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim discrimination at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The settlement required UC to conduct more thorough investigations of alleged harassment and to submit reports on each campus\u2019 handling of discrimination complaints. Government monitoring was to continue until UC \u201cdemonstrated compliance\u201d with \u201call the terms of this agreement.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Trump administration disregarded all that. Even as the employee investigation was underway, it launched a new investigation of the same student complaints in early May. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On May 27 on Fox News<\/a>, Terrell, the head of the antisemitism task force, once again spoke publicly as if the DOJ\u2019s antisemitism inquiries had already been concluded. \u201cExpect massive lawsuits against the UC system,\u201d he declared. \u201cExpect hate crime charges filed by the federal government. \u2026 We are going to go after them where it hurts them financially.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the time, the lawyers working on the UC employment investigation were still racing to complete their recommendation. They were focused solely on UCLA, having determined there wasn\u2019t adequate evidence to pursue cases at Cal and other campuses. Many had distinctly mixed feelings even about bringing that case. \u201cThis was not something we would usually litigate,\u201d one lawyer on the team said in an interview. \u201cBut everyone understood the front office was demanding this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n By then, most of the remaining members of the UC team, amid a mass exodus from the civil rights division, were set to leave DOJ at the end of May after accepting the Trump administration\u2019s deferred-resignation offer. \u201cIt was comforting to know we were not going to be the ones signing any complaint,\u201d the lawyer said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the 47-page recommendation memo the UC team sent on May 29 to Dhillon, the assistant AG for civil rights, the lawyers spelled out their concerns. \u201cWe simply do not have strong evidence that the types of harassing acts that happened through spring 2024 are ongoing\u201d \u2014 typically a legal requirement for bringing a complaint, the memo acknowledged. Some of the harassment complaints also involved protected First Amendment speech. And because, \u201cas has been frequently noted,\u201d the investigation had been \u201ctruncated\u201d to three months, there hadn\u2019t even been time to review some of the documents UC produced, the memo said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To shore up potential weaknesses in the case, the memo suggested an unusual \u201chybrid complaint\u201d strategy that would rest partly on new allegations about the ineffectiveness of the university\u2019s complaint process (which was ongoing) and partly on three older faculty grievances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the grievances cited was that of Astor, the professor of social welfare, who describes himself as both a Zionist and a \u201cpro-peace researcher.\u201d His academic work, much of which takes place in Israel, involves studying ways to help students from different religious and ethnic backgrounds peacefully coexist. But after he signed an open letter<\/a> from Jewish faculty criticizing some pro-Palestinian protesters\u2019 calls for violence, they accused him, in a widely circulated letter of their own, of supporting genocide. When he tried to enter the encampment to talk to students, he told us, a masked protester asked whether he was a Zionist. After he said he believed in Israel\u2019s right to exist, he was blocked from entering or crossing through the central campus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Astor was targeted again last November, he said, when he and an Arab-Israeli researcher he\u2019d flown in from Hebrew University of Jerusalem tried to discuss their research on preventing school violence in class. \u201cA bunch of students got up and showed pictures of dead babies and chanted and didn\u2019t let us talk,\u201d he recalled. Later heckled on his way to his car, he said he felt threatened and depressed. He lost more than 60 pounds and was granted permission to work from home, but his repeated discrimination complaints to administrators went nowhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Astor\u2019s complaints, the employment-section attorneys believed, would support their proposal for a lawsuit against UCLA. Even so, they warned that their case might not hold up in court. In the memo, they recommended seeking a settlement before filing a complaint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With that message delivered, most of the lawyers who had investigated the University of California departed the Justice Department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ***<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the morning of July 29, two days before Milliken\u2019s interrupted golf game, the University of California resolved what it surely hoped was among the last of the headaches from the 2024 encampment debacle: It announced a $6.45 million settlement<\/a> of an antisemitism lawsuit brought by three Jewish students and a faculty member who said protesters blocked them from accessing the library and other campus buildings, creating a \u201cJew exclusion zone,\u201d and that the university did nothing to help them. UC agreed to an extensive list of new actions, and a chunk of the money went to eight organizations that combat antisemitism and support the UCLA Jewish community. The steps the university had taken, a joint statement declared, \u201cdemonstrate real progress in the fight against antisemitism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Trump administration had a different view. That afternoon, it announced that it had sent UC a notice letter<\/a> saying the Justice Department had found UCLA\u2019s response to the encampment had been \u201cdeliberately indifferent to a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students,\u201d in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Bondi warned in a press release<\/a> that UCLA would \u201cpay a heavy price\u201d for \u201cthis disgusting breach of civil rights.\u201d The antisemitism finding had been reached less than three months after the investigation had begun. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The letter, which acknowledged that it relied significantly on \u201cpublicly available reports and information,\u201d ignored all the previous actions meant to put the events of 2024 to rest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe violations they described all predate the December agreement,\u201d said Catherine E. Lhamon, who oversaw the Office of Civil Rights at the Education Department under the Obama and Biden administrations. \u201cThey\u2019ve made no showing for why the agreement was defective or why anything else was needed to ensure compliance going forward.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The July 29 letter ended with an invitation to negotiate a settlement but warned that the department was prepared to file a lawsuit if there was no \u201creasonable certainty\u201d of reaching an agreement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead, the next day, the Trump administration began freezing UCLA\u2019s research money from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and Defense Department. The agencies cited the campus\u2019 handling of antisemitism as well as \u201cillegal affirmative action\u201d and allowing transgender women in women\u2019s sports and bathrooms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n UCLA was one of at least nine universities to be hit with grant suspensions, but the first public institution. <\/p>\n\n\n\n David Shackelford, whose medical school lab develops personalized treatments for lung cancer, said his phone \u201cblew up\u201d when colleagues began receiving stop-spending orders. Three NIH grants, totaling $8 million over five years, had supported the lab\u2019s work. \u201cThese are experiments and animal models that take years to develop,\u201d Shackelford said. \u201cIt\u2019s not like you can go to your computer and click save and walk away.\u201d He scrounged together stopgap university funding and outside donations to keep the operation running \u201con fumes,\u201d vowing \u201cto go down swinging.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Elle Rathbun is not sure she\u2019s up for the fight. A 29-year-old sixth-year doctoral student in neuroscience, Rathbun was halfway through a three-year NIH grant to study how brains recover from strokes when she got the news: Her $160,000 award was on the long list of suspended UCLA grants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She found substitute funding for some of her work but now has doubts about whether a career in academic science is worth the stress. Like hundreds of her colleagues, she\u2019d gone through a monthslong competitive process to win the grant, only to have the Trump administration halt the taxpayer-funded research midstream, a move she called \u201cincredibly disappointing and wildly wasteful.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A group of UCLA researchers filed a lawsuit seeking to reverse the cuts and won two court orders largely restoring them. But even after those victories, the flow of new science grants had slowed to a trickle. In a July 30 email later introduced in court, the National Science Foundation\u2019s acting chief science officer wrote that, in addition to freezing existing grants, he had been ordered to not make any further awards to UCLA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In nearly 500 pages of personal statements to the court, some faculty members said they\u2019re censoring their speech and changing their courses to avoid topics that might trigger even more cuts to the university. Amander Clark, a professor who heads a reproductive sciences center, no longer talks about the ways her research on infertility and the effects of hormones on human bodies could help gay and transgender people. \u201cI am afraid that because UC is in the spotlight, 20 years of work could be dismantled at the stroke of a pen,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ***<\/p>\n\n\n\n In selecting Milliken as their new system president, the UC regents had picked a veteran at managing large public university systems with vastly different political climates, ranging from the City University of New York, which he ran from 2014 to early 2018, to the University of Texas system, which he led from late 2018 until May 2025. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At UT, Milliken had championed some progressive steps, including expanding free tuition and safeguarding tenure, but he had also quickly shut down the system\u2019s 21 offices related to diversity, equity and inclusion in response to a new Texas law. \u201cHe knows what is a winning hand and what is not,\u201d said Richard Benson, who worked with Milliken as president of UT Dallas. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On Aug. 1, his first day on the job at UC\u2019s system office in Oakland, Milliken issued a measured public statement<\/a> that addressed the \u201cdeeply troubling\u201d UCLA grant cuts and affirmed the critical importance of UC\u2019s \u201clife-saving and life-changing research.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n That same week, the Justice Department, days after Bondi\u2019s declaration blasting UCLA for antisemitism against students, delivered a second notice letter, declaring that UCLA had illegally tolerated antisemitism against its employees and threatening to bring the \u201chybrid\u201d lawsuit that the DOJ\u2019s UC team had recommended in May. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Eager to turn up the pressure on UC, political appointees at the Justice Department had planned to issue another press release assailing UCLA for the employee-related antisemitism findings, according to former agency officials. But Kacie Candela, a well-regarded employment-section lawyer and the last survivor from the dozen who had worked on the administration\u2019s UC investigations, warned that under federal law, it would be a criminal misdemeanor to publicly disclose details involving Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charges before filing a lawsuit. After a heated dispute, her argument prevailed and the UCLA letter went unannounced. She was terminated days later. (Candela, who is pursuing legal action to challenge her firing, declined to discuss the matter for this story. DOJ officials didn\u2019t respond to questions from ProPublica and the Chronicle about the episode.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n After receiving the two DOJ antisemitism notice letters, Milliken quickly affirmed<\/a> UC\u2019s willingness to \u201cengage in dialogue\u201d with the administration. But that did nothing to forestall the next blow two days later: the Justice Department\u2019s $1.2 billion settlement demand<\/a>, which also asked for policy changes in areas where there\u2019d been no findings of wrongdoing, including admissions practices, screening of foreign students and transgender students\u2019 access to bathrooms. Within hours of UC\u2019s receipt of the 27-page demand letter on Aug. 8 \u2014 which the DOJ had marked \u201cconfidential\u201d \u2014 CNN<\/a>, The New York Times<\/a> and Politico<\/a> had all posted stories saying they\u2019d obtained a copy from undisclosed sources. (A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment on whether the administration had leaked the letter, which UC spent weeks battling in court to keep private.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n All this was without precedent, due process or clear legal justification, civil rights experts noted. Agreeing to the DOJ\u2019s demands, the Aug. 8 letter said, would release UC from claims that it had violated laws banning discrimination against students, employees and women, and that its civil rights violations constituted fraud. \u201cThey were trying to overwhelm,\u201d said Swedish, the former civil rights deputy section chief. \u201cThey were spraying the fire hose at the university.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Strangely, Justice demanded another $172 million for employees who\u2019d complained of antisemitism discrimination, even though only a handful had filed such grievances with the EEOC and such awards are capped at $300,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Former U.S. Attorney Zachary A. Cunha said a possible rationale for such unprecedented financial demands is that, under Trump, the DOJ is experimenting with using the False Claims Act<\/a> in civil rights cases. This would permit triple damages and encourage complaints from whistleblowers, who would share in any financial recovery. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to know where these large and somewhat arbitrary numbers are coming from,\u201d Cunha said of the administration\u2019s settlement demands. But \u201cif there\u2019s a pattern that\u2019s emerged thus far, it\u2019s that every tool in the toolbox<\/a> is on the table.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kenneth L. Marcus, an antisemitism watchdog and a former assistant secretary of education for civil rights under Trump, acknowledged that the government has pursued \u201ceye-catching\u201d penalties \u201cwith a speed that suggested\u201d normal civil rights enforcement and due-process procedures \u201chave not been utilized.<\/a>\u201d But Marcus insisted the response was appropriate because of the \u201cnational crisis\u201d of antisemitism. \u201cWhen a situation is extraordinary and unprecedented,\u201d he said, \u201cthe response needs to be as well.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In media interviews, officials in the Trump administration acknowledge<\/a> that its \u201cwhole-of-government\u201d attacks on universities seek to bypass normal, slow-moving civil rights procedures by instead treating alleged discriminatory practices as contract disputes where the government is free to summarily cut off funding and demand headline-grabbing, seemingly arbitrary fines. \u201cHaving that dollar figure, it actually brings attention to the deals in ways people might not otherwise pay attention,\u201d former White House deputy May Mailman, a key architect of the administration\u2019s higher education strategy, told The New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This approach is \u201cflagrantly unlawful\u201d and \u201cincredibly dangerous,\u201d said Lhamon, the former assistant education secretary, who is now executive director of the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at the UC Berkeley law school. \u201cThere\u2019s a long set of steps that are written into statute that must occur first before funds can be terminated.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Lhamon said the Trump administration was operating \u201clike a mob boss.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat is not the federal government doing civil rights work,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n ***<\/p>\n\n\n\n Milliken has found himself caught between the Trump administration\u2019s demands and those of his new constituency in California, which vocally opposes any hint of capitulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Newsom, who serves on the UC Board of Regents, has threatened to sue the federal government, calling its demands \u201cextortion\u201d and vowing to \u201cfight like hell\u201d against any deal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The advocates of direct legal combat include Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley\u2019s law school. \u201cThe university should have immediately gone to court to challenge this because what was done was so blatantly illegal and unconstitutional,\u201d he told ProPublica and the Chronicle. \u201cI wanted the University of California to be Harvard in fighting back and filing suit. I didn\u2019t want them to be Columbia and Brown in capitulating.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Milliken, backed by the UC regents, resisted calls for confrontation, wary of provoking retaliation against the nine other system campuses also under investigation. The damage to date at UCLA is \u201cminor in comparison to the threat that looms,\u201d Milliken noted in a mid-September statement<\/a>. \u201cWe are in uncharted waters.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n So UC has pursued settlement discussions with the government. According to a person familiar with the matter, it has retained William Levi, who served in Trump\u2019s first administration as a special assistant to the president, counselor to the attorney general and chief of staff at the Justice Department, to lead the talks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If UC\u2019s leaders have preached restraint, its faculty has opted for open defiance. In addition to the suit that prompted the federal judge, Lin, to restore UCLA\u2019s frozen research grants, a complaint filed in September by the American Association of University Professors<\/a> and other faculty groups challenged the legality of the Trump administration\u2019s entire assault on UC. At a hearing on Nov. 6, the government\u2019s lawyer acknowledged that the administration\u2019s \u201chodgepodge\u201d of actions against the system hadn\u2019t followed established civil rights procedures but said the administration had the right to direct funding based on the Trump administration\u2019s \u201cpolicy priorities.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Lin didn\u2019t buy it. A week later, in an unusually sweeping preliminary injunction<\/a>, she barred all of the Trump administration\u2019s actual and threatened moves to punish UC, including the $1.2 billion payment demand. The Trump administration\u2019s \u201cplaybook,\u201d she wrote, citing comments by Terrell and others, illegally used civil rights investigations and funding cuts as a way of \u201cbringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although Lin ordered the Trump administration to lift the ban on new research grants to UC, approvals were slow to resume. In public remarks before the Board of Regents on Nov. 19, Milliken said that more than 400 grants across the system remained suspended or terminated, representing \u201cmore than $230 million in research activity on hold.\u201d He and others at UC have expressed concerns that the system\u2019s pathway to new grants will be blocked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In our interview, Milliken defended how UC has responded to the Trump administration, saying the university has held its ground on its governance, mission and academic freedom. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe recognize the differing opinions on how UC should engage with the federal government,\u201d he said. \u201cOur efforts remain focused on solutions that keep UC strong for Californians and Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Doris Burke<\/a> contributed research.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWe were told what the outcome will be: \u2018You have one month to find evidence to justify a lawsuit and draft a complaint against the UC system,\u2019\u201d said a civil rights lawyer who left the Justice Department in May. by\u00a0Peter Elkind, ProPublica, and Katherine Mangan, The Chronicle of Higher Education… Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/newspack-berkeleyside-cityside.s3.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/AP24123095366624.jpg?resize=780%2C520&ssl=1\")
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<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nUC Berkeley and College Republicans settle free-speech case<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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