UCLA became the latest target of the Trump Administration. It lost more than $ 180 million from 300 NSF grants, along with additional grants from the NIH and Department of Energy. Chancellor Julio Frenk addressed the losses, while emphasizing everything UCLA has used to attempt “to extinguish antisemitism completely and definitively” including managing campus protests.
I hope to be wrong, but for several reasons, I expect UCLA to fold faster than any of the other schools.
First, there is this piece from the Science piece:
Judea Pearl, a UCLA computer scientist who has been publicly critical of campus protests, is the co–principal investigator of a $1.2 million suspended grant to apply genetics to large-scale electronic health records. Most of the funding has been spent, Pearl says, adding, “I’ve been a principal investigator for NSF for maybe 50 years, so I’ll be very upset if my grant gets cut.” Nearly one-quarter of the suspended NSF grants fund computer science. “It’s unfair,” Pearl says. “They should look into the [UCLA] departments that have been delinquent in antisemitism.”
This is the first time I have heard a faculty member at a targeted school applaud the government stripping funds from his institution but urge it to take the funds from other people at that school while leaving him alone. I predicted that the administration might divide federally funded researchers from other scholars and the broader university; here it is. (Update: Pearl is the father of Daniel Pearl, a journalist kidnapped and murdered by ISIS in 2002).
Second, I am curious (but not confident) in how Frenk will handle this. In spring 2024, while president at University of Miami, Frenk spoke on a panel discussing campus protests. Two points have stuck with me. First, he proudly announced how he had rejected “institutional neutrality” post-October 7. Second, he proudly announced that UM’s tough policies against antisemitism ensured there were few or no campus protests. Third, he said Nazi Germany destroyed its universities by driving away Jewish faculty and students and German universities have not recovered–no German university is among the top universities in the world.
I have wondered what Frenk would say now that the U.S. government is destroying its universities in the supposed name of protecting Jews. The Nazis destroyed their universities by attempting to control who teaches and learns at those universities and what can be taught and how; it was not about excluding Jews per se but a broader attempt to control the generation and dissemination of knowledge that uniquely targeted Jews as part of a broader project. Frenk’s basic response in his letter–” look at all we have done to protect Jews, we’re really, really trying, please don’t take our lunch money”–suggests he is likely to cave by agreeing to many things to (purportedly but not really) help Jews on campus and many other things to screw over other groups and to surrender control over basic pieces of the university mission.
Third, I wish people would stop talking about “extinguish[ing] antisemitism completely and definitively.” It has been with us for thousands of years; we are not going to magically get rid of it now. No one agrees about what it means, making everything potentially antisemitic. It smacks of thought and speech control–I do not want the government to have the power to define and stop some speech, however noxious I find that speech. And it fails (as Frenk did in his remarks at that 2024 panel) to even attempt to distinguish obnoxious-but-protected antisemitic speech–which must be part of any society (including an academic community)–from genuine antisemitic harassment (which should be punished but cannot be stopped in advance).*
[*] UCLA had one of the starkest examples of the latter: Students blocked certain library entrances, and asked students attempting to enter whether they were “Zionists,” and tried to force them to use other entrances.
Posted by Howard Wasserman on August 2, 2025 at 04:22 PM