The University of California at Los Angeles is caught in the middle of a political battle.
On one side is the Trump administration, seeking to secure a $1-billion fine and concessions from the larger university system over claims of antisemitism at UCLA. On the other is Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, who styles himself as an aggressive foil to Trump and is pushing the system to fight back.
In the line of fire are rank-and-file academics at UCLA and across the UC system whose work has been hamstrung by a freeze of over $500 million in federal research funding — and who sense that the fight isn’t really about them.
The clash is “something that’s happening on a larger scale that doesn’t really involve us or what we do,” said Rachelle H. Crosbie, a professor of neurology and chair of the department of integrative biology and physiology at UCLA. “We’re being affected by battles that are taking place well beyond the scope of our focus on training the best scientists, having interactions with graduate students and postdocs that help them achieve their goals, their desire to give back to society.”
Crosbie has felt the effects firsthand. She said every federal grant across her department has been frozen. She helps direct a fellowship dedicated to postgrad research on neuromuscular medicine that has also lost funding, leaving her and her co-director scrambling to find ways to support the last cohort of trainees.
“There are eight trainees who are the best of the best who are without funding,” Crosbie said. “And what that means is that they are not receiving a stipend, and the stipend is basically what they receive to pay their rent and their groceries and what they use to live while they are doing research to contribute to skeletal-muscle-dystrophy research and to deepen their knowledge.”
The neuromuscular-medicine fellowship program was funded entirely through a National Institutes of Health T-32 training grant, a competitive grant dedicated to multidisciplinary research across the sciences. Crosbie said freezing such a program does a lot more than leave stranded eight students who were set up to do innovative postdoctoral work; it has implications for the future of medicine at large.
We think this is a matter of public concern. The entire state is affected by what the regents might choose to do here and the president’s office might choose to do here, and Californians aren’t allowed to be part of that conversation.
“These folks are making a huge sacrifice and huge commitment over decades to see a payout,” said Crosbie of the students who receive the grants, “and we as a society benefit from this sacrifice that our next generation of scientists is making for the greater good.”
Scientists and other academics are wrestling with this combination of professional uncertainty and deep concern about what the Trump administration’s aggressive tack will mean for higher education in the long term.
They’ve been stuck in that place for a while. UCLA became a target of Trump’s recent attack on research institutions months ago. In July, the university announced that several federal agencies were withholding research dollars — just days after the university said it would put $2.65 million toward combating antisemitism to settle a lawsuit alleging it had not protected Jewish students during protests over the war in Gaza in the spring of 2024.
The U.S. Department of Justice opened an investigation into the university this year, and determined that UCLA had acted “with deliberate indifference in creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students.” The department proposed that UCLA pay $1 billion to resolve the claim, wrote James B. Milliken, the system’s president, in early August.
Soon after receiving the proposed fine, the UC Board of Regents called an emergency meeting, and state legislators began speaking up to slam it. Milliken said the fine, which is significantly higher than amounts that Brown and Columbia Universities agreed to, would “devastate our country’s greatest public-university system.” Recently, he wrote a letter stressing the impact the fine would have on all 10 UC system campuses.
The regents have since provided little information on what the path forward will be. Newsom has been vocal about the possibility of a lawsuit against Trump to challeng the fine and the funding freezes; on X, he called on Harvard University’s president, Alan M. Garber, to resign over reports that Harvard was preparing to reach a deal with the White House. The UC board has yet to issue a formal statement announcing an intention to sue, or to meet certain demands as other universities have done. While Newsom makes loud statements, professors like Anna Markowitz, president of the UCLA Faculty Association, said people on the ground are still in the dark about what happens next.
Markowitz pointed out that the Board of Regents has not released the Trump administration’s list of demands, and worries that deals will be made without faculty or community impact.
“We think this is a matter of public concern. The entire state is affected by what the regents might choose to do here and the president’s office might choose to do here, and Californians aren’t allowed to be part of that conversation, even though it’s Californians that will suffer and that will, frankly, foot the bill if any financial settlement is reached.”
Terence Tao, a UCLA professor of mathematics who works at the Institute of Pure Mathematics, funded by the National Science Foundation, said he was notified that his own research funding was frozen when a journalist reached out to him asking for comment. In the past month he has been crowdfunding and taking pay cuts to keep his graduate students “taken care of” for their work over the summer.
Tao said he doesn’t think the UC system or the UCLA administration has made any missteps in their response to the demands, but he articulated concern about the right way to respond to this sort of pressure.
“There are other universities who tried to compromise and appease the administration, and we’re finding that this is not something that can be solved by a rational win-win situation. This is unprecedented. This is not sort of good faith, trying to uphold some mutual interests of a country. This is pursuing their game at the expense of everyone.”
Along with Newsom, other California politicians have been vocal in their support of the state’s universities, and the system has created a campaign highlighting the importance of its research.
But Markowitz said she is concerned about colleges practicing anticipatory obedience. The system ditched its use of diversity statements in faculty hiring in March, a step that upset some professors.
“The UC administration has taken the perspective of trying to fly under the radar and sort of, you know, not poke the bear or something. But we’re the UC. We are the bear. We should have been prepared.”
