Judge Rules Trump Can’t Cut UC Funding — but UC Leaders Are Still Negotiating a Settlement

In a landmark ruling last Friday, a federal judge indefinitely barred the Trump administration from fining or cutting funds to the University of California system over the government’s bogus claims of antisemitism and discrimination.

U.S. District Judge Rita Lin was unequivocal that the Trump administration, which has demanded over a $1.2 billion settlement from the UC system and already cut over $600 million in federal funding, was “engaged in a concerted campaign to purge ‘woke,’ ‘left,’ and ‘socialist’ viewpoints from our country’s leading universities.”

The “playbook,” she said, had been repeated by Trump nationwide, “with the goal of bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune.”

The decision, a preliminary injunction, is a win for speech on campus and academic freedom — and a rebuke to the vile weaponization of antisemitism claims to silence dissent.

The case was brought not by administrators, but by workers and students in the UC system, one of the most prestigious public university networks in the country. A coalition of faculty, staff, and student groups and unions from UC schools sued the administration for violating their First Amendment rights to free speech and Fifth Amendment rights to due process.

Not only did the University of California leadership have nothing to do with the case, but the school system leaders remain so cravenly wedded to capitulation that they’re still in settlement discussions with the administration.

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There are lessons to be learned from this victory — and from the absence of UC leadership in it.

We know who we need to support: Over the last two years, the struggle to keep universities and colleges alive as sites of intellectual interrogation and learning have been fought by faculty, staff, and students. And we know who to be wary of: Again and again, school administrators have been complicit in the dismantling and undermining of the communities they are supposed to serve.

These dynamics are present nationwide; UC administrations are not alone in their willingness to throw their faculty and students under the bus for speaking out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

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Schools including Columbia University, Brown University, and the University of Virginia, among others, have all made deals with Trump to pay tens of millions of dollars in cowardly settlements to restore federal funding. They have agreed to egregious conditions, like targeting anti-racist admissions efforts, entrenching pro-Israel alignments, harming trans students and faculty, and policing speech and programs disfavored by the Trumpian right.

Harvard University earned praise for suing rather than settling with the Trump administration. In that case, too, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s attempt to freeze more than $2 billion in federal research grants was illegal. The judge lambasted the government for using “antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”

Yet Harvard’s apparent resistance was belied by the school “quietly complying with Trump’s agenda” anyway, as two Harvard Ph.D. students noted. The university fired Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies director and associate director, among other attacks on scholars and programs with apparent Palestine solidarity connections. The university also renamed its Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging in alignment with Trump’s anti-DEI campaign.

Who Will Save Universities?

It would be nice if we could unreservedly celebrate Friday’s ruling as proof of the movement dictum that “when we fight, we win!” There’s little cause for optimism, though, about the future of higher education in the face of a government hellbent on its destruction, and universities led by people who have imperilled their institutions with four decades of neoliberal austerity, corporatization, and adjunctification.

Higher education today is a charnel house. Even the wealthiest schools are freezing Ph.D. admissions and cutting whole programs under unprecedented economic pressures, accelerated by Trump’s attacks.

Yet the political nature of American academia’s remaking cannot be reduced to fiscal necessity or Trumpian animus alone.

Top-heavy administrative offices are choosing their austerity measures in specific ways. In schools around the country, humanities and social research departments in particular face the chop, while bloated administrator salaries and other corporate overheads go untouched. Faculty governance has been reduced to a fig leaf.

“Simply put, universities have reached a point where executive power—the President, with the invisible hand of the Board above—is absolute, except where there are unions,” wrote Adam Rzepka, an English professor at New Jersey’s Montclair State University, in a recent American Association of University Professors blog post.

He added that even unions “are often unable to act beyond what is currently subject to negotiation,” such that department closures, academic oversight, and disciplinary issues are taken out of academic workers’ hands.

“Not that faculty here haven’t tried to steer the ship away from this iceberg, but faculty everywhere know how that goes these days,” Rzepka wrote.

It is a grim prospect indeed — and an extraordinary amount of bullshit work — to have to try to prove the value of intellectual education and research within the logic of a management consultant’s report.

Such is the nature of corporatized higher education, made starkly clear and worse under Trump.

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Friday’s ruling against the Trump administration is a reminder of who will lead the fight for higher education.

The only way to save universities in this country will be to end the unaccountable executive governance and corporate oversight, which has left schools of every size, both private and public, vulnerable to authoritarian attacks.

Decision-making should truly be in the hands of professors, workers, and students willing to fight for robust academic freedom, scholarly integrity, and an antifascist future for education.

If the UC schools, collectively the second largest employer in the state, are saved, it is thanks to the community of workers and scholars alone.