The Trump administration’s offer to settle its probe of alleged Jew-hatred at the University of California system for $1 billion would “completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians,” James Milliken, president of UC, stated on Friday.
“The University of California just received a document from the Department of Justice and is reviewing it,” Milliken stated. “Earlier this week, we offered to engage in good faith dialogue with the department to protect the university and its critical research mission.”
“We are stewards of taxpayer resources,” he said. “Americans across this great nation rely on the vital work of UCLA and the UC system for technologies and medical therapies that save lives, grow the U.S. economy and protect our national security.”
Daniel Mariaschin, CEO of B’nai B’rith International, told JNS that Milliken’s “bureaucratic statement is insufficient.”
“Great harm has already been inflicted on UCLA’s Jewish students by the inattention and insensitivity of the university to their safety and security,” he said. “This is not only about money. It is also about Jewish students feeling unprotected and their interests considered expendable or being dismissed by university officials.”
“The judgment in this case should be a wakeup call to university administrators throughout the country that unbridled hatred simply cannot be tolerated,” Mariaschin told JNS.
Scott Wiener, a state senator who is a Democrat and co-chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, stated that U.S. President Donald Trump “is doing to UCLA what he’s been doing to so many major institutions in higher education, academia, the media and health care: threatening to illegally revoke funding—here, science funding—or take other punitive steps unless the university submits to his control, pays him off, and submits to his racist, transphobic, xenophobic dictates.”
“It’s classic mob boss behavior, and far too many major institutions are caving to this fascist,” he said.
Wiener stated that “there have “been serious antisemitism issues at UCLA,” but “we’re addressing the issue here in California and have made progress. We don’t need Trump to take advantage of the situation for his own political gain.”
Earlier in the week, Julio Frenk, the chancellor at University of California, Los Angeles, stated that the Trump administration had frozen about $584 million in grants to the school and “if these funds remain suspended, it will be devastating for UCLA and for Americans across the nation.”
That number had previously been reported to be $200 million.
Milliken stated earlier in the week that freezing the funds will “do nothing to address antisemitism” and would be a “death knell for innovative work that saves lives, grows our economy and fortifies our national security.”
“It is in our country’s best interest that funding be restored,” he said.
