Extortion watch: Now UCLA has to go full bigot—or else
The Los Angeles Times got its hands on the 28-page letter that the Trump administration sent to the University of California, Los Angeles and it’s exactly as Y I K E S as you might have expected.
In order to settle whatever vague claims of antisemitism or racism the administration has ginned up as an excuse to withhold $500 million in funding, UCLA is supposed to pay the administration a fine of $1 billion, payable in five yearly installments of $200 million, and pay an additional $172,000 for alleged civil rights violations.
If you’re thinking that the math doesn’t quite add up here, wait until you hear the rest of it.
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Besides the absurd demand that UCLA pay over twice the amount that the government is illegally withholding, the administration also wants complete control over the school. That’s not an exaggeration. Here’s a smattering:
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No foreign students with “anti-Western” views can be admitted
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Demographic data for all hires and students broken down by race, color, GPA, and performance on standardized tests
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Declare publicly that transgender people’s identities are no longer recognized
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Stop all gender-affirming care for minors at UCLA medical facilities
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Give the government access to literally everything: “all UCLA staff, employees, facilities, documents, and data related to the agreement” unless it is covered by attorney-client privilege.
Have you seen enough? How about this: UCLA is also supposed to pay for all of this, including the outside monitor who gets to hover over the school and ensure that it remains in compliance with the administration’s bigoted worldview.
One of the things the Los Angeles Times report made clear is that the document was put together on the fly. It references the “president” of UCLA, which is not a thing, and one of the medical facilities referred to in the letter is actually at Northwestern University—which is in Illinois.
Much of the language appears to be the same as in the “settlements” with Columbia and Brown Universities, which kind of gives the game away about just how extortion-y this whole scheme is. If the administration is basically cutting and pasting the same terms into multiple school settlements, that’s not really reflective of an actual investigation of the individual schools.
So, UCLA gets the same bootstrapping that the administration is trying with all the schools it’s attacking. The initial issue is usually alleged antisemitism, though sometimes the administration spices things up and accuses schools of racism for having any diversity initiatives. But once these sham investigations get started, they also somehow always land on demanding that the school agree to Trump’s anti-trans agenda.
That completely worked at Brown, which agreed to strip transgender swimmer Lia Thomas of her titles and records so that cis swimmers could get participation trophies. It’s honestly absolutely unhinged that the president of the United States brought the full weight of the federal government to bear on a major American university because Riley Gaines became a full-time professional transphobe after tying with Thomas for fifth place at the 2022 NCAA Championships.
Meanwhile, UCLA isn’t the only California school the administration has in its sights. The University of California, Berkeley just turned over a list of 160 names of faculty, staff, and students to the administration as people with a “potential connection to reports of alleged antisemitism.” None of the people on the list were told what these allegations were, and the school didn’t inform those individuals until two weeks after giving the names to the government.
Related | Ivy League university caves to Trump's anti-trans agenda
So to recap: proposed “fines” that are double what the government is withholding in funding; demands to incorporate xenophobia into admissions; commands that the actual existence of transgender people be denied, which is a bit of a problem since California law explicitly protects transgender people from discrimination. This attack on higher education is never going to end unless the Supreme Court steps in and stops it, and let’s face it—it’s really unlikely they will be riding to the rescue any time soon.