faculty

Sept. 13 (UPI) — Officials at the University of California-Berkeley have shared personal information on 160 students, faculty and staff with the federal government amid an anti-Semitism investigation.

The Department of Education and Office of Civil Rights is investigating claims of anti-Semitism at the university and requested the information, which the U.C. Office of the President ordered staff to provide, The Daily Californian reported this week.

The Daily Californian is an independent student publication at the university and reported that the university shared the information in August and informed those affected in an email from the university’s Office of Legal Affairs on Sept. 4.

“As part of its investigation, OCR required production of comprehensive documents, including files and reports related to alleged anti-Semitic incidents,” the email read, as reported by The Daily Californian.

The email told respective individuals that the university included their names in reports provided by the University of California system’s Office of General Counsel, as required by law.

Those whose names were provided are among some who have been accused of anti-Semitic activities at the university, affected by such activities or complained about them, SFGate, The New York Times and The Guardian reported.

Many of those accused of anti-Semitism at the university are Muslims and Palestinians, but an unnamed graduate student said such claims often arise from classroom discussions regarding Israel and the Middle East, according to The Daily Californian.

Faculty member Judith Butler is among those named and is described by The Guardian as a “feminist philosopher and queer theorist.”

Butler also is a Jewish scholar who has criticized Israel’s actions in its war against Hamas and asked university administrators about the information disclosed.

“We have a right to know the charges against us, to know who has made the charges and to review them and defend ourselves,” Butler told The Guardian.

“But none of that has happened, which is why we’re in Kafka-land,” she said, while referencing German writer Franz Kafka and his published works.

“It is an enormous breach of trust,” Butler added.

The Trump administration has targeted many elite universities for alleged anti-Semitism, including encampments, protests and building takeovers, and has withheld federal funding from those accused of enabling campus anti-Semitism.

The Education Department began investigating U.C.-Berkeley in February, and Republican lawmakers in July accused university Chancellor Rich Lyons those at two other universities of not effectively stopping anti-Semitism on their respective campuses, according to The New York Times.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Administrators at the state university’s campus in Colorado Springs thought they stood a solid chance of dodging the Trump administration’s offensive on higher education.

Located on a picturesque bluff with a stunning view of Pikes Peak, the school is far removed from the Ivy League colleges that have drawn President Trump’s ire. Most of its students are commuters, getting degrees while holding down full-time jobs. Students and faculty alike describe the university, which is in a conservative part of the blue state of Colorado, as politically subdued, if not apolitical.

That optimism was misplaced.

An Associated Press review of thousands of pages of emails from school officials, as well as interviews with students and professors, reveals that school leaders, teachers and students soon found themselves in the Republican administration’s crosshairs, forcing them to navigate what they described as an unprecedented and haphazard degree of change.

Whether Washington has downsized government departments, rescinded funding or launched investigations into diversity programs or campus antisemitism, the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs has confronted many of the same challenges as elite universities across the nation.

The school lost three major federal grants and found itself under investigation by the Trump Education Department. In the hopes of avoiding that scrutiny, the university renamed websites and job titles, all while dealing with pressure from students, faculty and staff who wanted the school to take a more combative stance.

“Uncertainty is compounding,” the school’s chancellor told faculty at a February meeting, according to minutes of the session. “And the speed of which orders are coming has been a bit of a shock.”

The college declined to make any administrators available to be interviewed. A spokesman asked the AP to make clear that any professors or students interviewed for this story were speaking for themselves and not the institution. Several faculty members also asked for anonymity, either because they did not have tenure or they did not want to call unnecessary attention to themselves and their scholarship in the current political environment.

“Like our colleagues across higher education, we’ve spent considerable time working to understand the new directives from the federal government,” the chancellor, Jennifer Sobanet, said in a statement provided to the AP.

Students said they have been able to sense the stress being felt by school administrators and professors.

“We have administrators that are feeling pressure, because we want to maintain our funding here. It’s been tense,” said Ava Knox, a rising junior who covers the university administration for the school newspaper.

Faculty, she added, “want to be very careful about how they’re conducting their research and about how they’re addressing the student population. They are also beholden to this new set of kind of ever-changing guidelines and stipulations by the federal government.”

A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Misplaced optimism

Shortly after Trump won a second term in November, University of Colorado-Colorado Springs leaders were trying to gather information on the incoming president’s plans. In December, Sobanet met the newly elected Republican congressman who represented the school’s district, a conservative area that Trump won with 53% of the vote. In her meeting notes obtained by the AP, the chancellor sketched out a scenario in which the college might avoid the drastic cuts and havoc under the incoming administration.

“Research dollars — hard to pull back grant dollars but Trump tried to pull back some last time. The money goes through Congress,” Sobanet wrote in notes prepared for the meeting. “Grant money will likely stay but just change how they are worded and what it will fund.”

Sobanet also observed that dismantling the federal Education Department would require congressional authorization. That was unlikely, she suggested, given the U.S. Senate’s composition.

Like many others, she did not fully anticipate how aggressively Trump would seek to transform the federal government.

Conservatives’ desire to revamp higher education began well before Trump took office.

They have long complained that universities have become bastions of liberal indoctrination and raucous protests. In 2023, Republicans in Congress had a contentious hearing with several Ivy League university leaders. Shortly after, the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania resigned. During the presidential campaign last fall, Trump criticized campus protests against the war in Gaza, as well as what he said was a liberal bias in classrooms.

His new administration opened investigations into alleged antisemitism at several universities. It froze more than $400 million in research grants and contracts at Columbia, along with more than $2.6 billion at Harvard. Columbia reached an agreement last month to pay $220 million to resolve the investigation.

When Harvard filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s actions, his administration tried to block the school from enrolling international students. The Trump administration has also threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status.

Northwestern University, Penn, Princeton and Cornell have seen big chunks of funding cut over how they dealt with the protests about Israel’s war in Gaza or over the schools’ support for transgender athletes.

Trump’s decision to target the wealthiest, most prestigious institutions provided some comfort to administrators at the approximately 4,000 other colleges and universities in the country.

Most higher education students in the United States are educated at regional public universities or community colleges. Such schools have not typically drawn attention from culture warriors.

Students and professors at UCCS hoped Trump’s crackdown would bypass the school and others like it.

“You’ve got everyone — liberals, conservatives, middle of the road” at the college, said Jeffrey Scholes, a professor in the philosophy department. “You just don’t see the kind of unrest and polarization that you see at other campuses.”

The purse strings

The federal government has lots of leverage over higher education. It provides about $60 billion a year to universities for research. In addition, a majority of students in the U.S. need grants and loans from various federal programs to help pay tuition and living expenses.

This budget year, UCCS got about $19 million in research funding from a combination of federal, state and private sources. Though that is a relatively small portion of the school’s overall $369-million budget, the college has made a push in recent years to bolster its campus research program by taking advantage of grant money from government agencies such as the U.S. Defense Department and National Institutes of Health. The widespread federal grant cut could derail those efforts.

School officials were dismayed when the Trump administration terminated research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Defense Department and the National Science Foundation, emails show. The grants funded programs in civics, cultural preservation and boosting women in technology fields.

School administrators scrambled to contact federal officials to learn whether other grants were on the chopping block, but they struggled to find answers, the records show.

School officials repeatedly sought out the assistance of federal officials only to learn those officials were not sure what was happening as the Trump administration halted grant payments, fired thousands of employees and closed agencies.

“The sky is falling” at NIH, a university official reported in notes on a call in which the school’s lobbyists were providing reports of what was happening in Washington.

There are also concerns about other changes in Washington that will affect how students pay for college, according to interviews with faculty and education policy experts.

While only Congress can fully abolish the Department of Education, the Trump administration has tried to dramatically cut back its staff and parcel out many of its functions to other agencies. The administration laid off nearly 1,400 employees, and problems have been reported in the systems that handle student loans. Management of student loans is expected to shift to another agency.

In addition, an early version of a major funding bill in Congress included major cuts to tuition grants. Though that provision did not make it into the law, Congress did cap loans for students seeking graduate degrees. That policy could have ripple effects in the coming years on institutions such as UCCS that rely on tuition dollars for their operating expenses.

DEI and transgender issues

To force change on campus, the Trump administration has begun investigations targeting diversity programs and efforts to combat antisemitism.

The Education Department, for example, opened an investigation in March targeting a PhD scholarship program that partnered with 45 universities, including the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, to expand opportunities for women and nonwhites in graduate education. The administration alleged the program was only open to certain nonwhite students and amounted to racial discrimination.

“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news UCCS is included on the list” of schools being investigated, wrote Annie Larson, assistant vice president of federal relations and outreach for the entire University of Colorado system.

“Oh wow, this is surprising,” wrote back Hillary Fouts, dean of the graduate school at UCCS.

UCCS also struggled with how to handle executive orders, particularly those on transgender issues.

In response to an order that aimed to revoke funds to schools that allowed trans women to play women’s sports, UCCS began a review of its athletic programs. It determined it had no transgender athletes, the records show. University officials were also relieved to discover that only one school in their athletic conference was affected by the order, and UCCS rarely if ever had matches or games against that school.

“We do not have any students impacted by this and don’t compete against any teams that we are aware of that will be impacted by this,” wrote the vice chancellor for student affairs to colleagues.

Avoiding the spotlight

The attacks led UCCS to take preemptive actions and to self-censor in the hopes of saving programs and avoiding the Trump administration’s spotlight.

Emails show that the school’s legal counsel began looking at all the university’s websites and evaluating whether any scholarships might need to be reworded. The university changed the web address of its diversity initiatives from www.diversity.uccs.edu to www.belonging.uccs.edu.

And the administrator responsible for the university’s division of Inclusive Culture & Belonging got a new job title in January: director of strategic initiatives. University professors said the school debated whether to rename the Women’s and Ethnic Studies department to avoid drawing attention from Trump, but so far the department has not been renamed.

Along the same lines, UCCS administrators have sought to avoid getting dragged into controversies, a frequent occurrence in the first Trump administration. UCCS officials attended a presentation from the education consulting firm EAB, which encouraged schools not to react to every news cycle. That could be a challenge because some students and faculty are calling for vocal resistance on issues from climate change to immigration.

Soon after Trump was sworn in, for example, a staff member in UCCS’s sustainability program began pushing the University of Colorado system to condemn Trump’s withdrawal from an international agreement to tackle climate change. It was the type of statement universities had issued without thinking twice in past administrations.

In an email, UCCS’ top public relations executive warned his boss: “There is a growing sentiment among the thought leadership in higher ed that campus leaders not take a public stance on major issues unless they impact their campus community.”

Tau writes for the Associated Press. AP education writer Collin Binkley in Washington contributed to this report.

Their medical research focuses on potentially lifesaving breakthroughs in cancer treatment, and developing tools to more easily diagnose debilitating diseases. Their studies in mathematics could make online systems more robust and secure.

But as the academic year opens, the work of UCLA’s professors in these and many other fields has been imperiled by the Trump administration’s suspension of $584 million in grant funding, which University of California President James B. Milliken called a “death knell” to its transformative research.

The freeze came after a July 29 U.S. Department of Justice finding that the university had violated the civil rights of Jewish and Israeli students by providing an inadequate response to alleged antisemitism they faced after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.

The fight over the funding stoppage intensified Friday after the Trump administration demanded that UCLA pay a $1-billion fine, among other concessions, to resolve the accusations — and California Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state will sue, calling the proposal “extortion.”

Amid heightened tensions in Westwood, thousands of university academics are in limbo. In total, at least 800 grants, mostly from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, have been frozen.

UCLA scholars described days of confusion as they struggle to understand how the loss of grants would affect their work and scramble to uncover new funding sources — or roles that would ensure their continued pay, or that of their colleagues. While professors still have jobs and paychecks to draw on, many others, including graduate students, rely on grant funding for their salaries, tuition and healthcare.

At least for the moment, though, several academics told The Times that their work had not yet be interrupted. So far, no layoffs have been announced.

Sydney Campbell, a UCLA cancer researcher whose grant funding has been cut, stands inside the Biomedical Sciences Research building at UCLA.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Sydney Campbell, a pancreatic cancer researcher and postdoctoral scholar at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, said her work — which aims to understand how diet affects the disease — is continuing for now. She has an independent fellowship that “hopefully will protect the majority of my salary.” But others, she said, don’t have that luxury.

“It is absolutely going to affect people’s livelihoods. I already know of people … with families who are having to take pay cuts almost immediately,” said Campbell, who works for a lab that has lost two National Institutes of Health grants, including one that funds her research.

Pancreatic cancer is among the most deadly of cancers, but Campbell’s work could lead to a better understanding of it, paving the way for more robust prophylactic programs — and treatment plans — that may ultimately help tame the scourge.

“Understanding how diet can impact cancer development could lead to preventive strategies that we can recommend to patients in the future,” she said. “Right now we can’t effectively do that because we don’t have the information about the underlying biology. Our studies will help us actually be able to make recommendations based on science.”

Campbell’s work — and that of many others at UCLA — is potentially groundbreaking. But it could soon be put on hold.

“We have people who don’t know if they’re going to be able to purchase experimental materials for the rest of the month,” she said.

Fears of existential crisis

For some, the cuts have triggered something close to an existential crisis.

After professor Dino Di Carlo, chair of the UCLA Samueli Bioengineering Department, learned about 20 grants were suspended there — including four in his lab worth about $1 million — he felt a profound sadness. He said he doesn’t know why his grants were frozen, and there may not be money to pay his six researchers.

So Di Carlo, who is researching diagnostics for Lyme and other tick-borne diseases, took to LinkedIn, where he penned a post invoking the Franz Kafka novel “The Trial.” The unsettling tale is about a man named Josef K. who wakes up and finds himself under arrest and then on trial — with no understanding of the situation.

“Like Josef K., the people actually affected — the public, young scientists, patients waiting for better treatments and diagnostic tools — are left asking: What crime did we commit?” wrote Di Carlo. “They are being judged by a system that no longer explains itself.”

The LinkedIn post quickly attracted dozens of comments and more than 1,000 other responses. Di Carlo, who has been working to find jobs for researchers who depend on paychecks that come from now-suspended grants, said he appreciated the support.

But, goodwill has its limits. “It doesn’t pay the rent for a student this month,” he said.

Di Carlo’s research is partly focused on developing an at-home test that would detect Lyme and other tick-borne diseases, which are on the rise. Because no such product is currently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, he said, people who’ve experienced a tick bite have to wait for lab results to confirm their infection.

“This delay in diagnosis prevents timely treatment, allowing the disease to progress and potentially lead to long-term health issues,” he said. “A rapid, point-of-care test would allow individuals to receive immediate results, enabling early treatment with antibiotics when the disease is most easily addressed, significantly reducing the risk of chronic symptoms and improving health outcomes.”

Di Carlo lamented what he called “a continual assault on the scientific community” by the Trump administration, which has canceled billions of dollars in National Institutes of Health funding for universities across the country.

It “just … hasn’t let up,” Di Carlo said.

Scrambling for funds

Some professors who’ve lost grants have spent long hours scrambling to secure new sources of funding.

Di Carlo said he was in meetings all week to identity which researchers are affected by the cuts, and to try to figure out, “Can we support those students?” He has also sought to determine whether some could be moved to other projects that still have funding, or be given teaching assistant positions, among other options.

He’s not alone in those efforts. Mathematics professor Terence Tao also has lost a grant worth about $750,000. But Tao said that he was more distressed by the freezing of a $25-million grant for UCLA’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. The funding loss for the institute, where Tao is director of special projects, is “actually quite existential,” he said, because the grant is “needed to fund operations” there.

Tao, who is the James and Carol Collins chair in the College of Letters and Sciences, said the pain goes beyond the loss of funds. “The abruptness — and basically the lack of due process in general — just compounds the damage,” said Tao. “We got no notice.”

A luminary in his field, Tao conducts research that examines, in part, whether a group of numbers are random or structured. His work could lead to advances in cryptography that may eventually make online systems — such as those used for financial transactions — more secure.

“It is important to do this kind of research — if we don’t, it’s possible that an adversary, for example, could actually discover these weaknesses that we are not looking for at all,” Tao said. “So you do need this extra theoretical confirmation that things that you think are working actually do work as intended, [and you need to] also explore the negative space of what doesn’t work.”

Tao said he’s been heartened by donations that the mathematics institute has received from private donors in recent days — about $100,000 so far.

“We are scrambling for short-term funding because we need to just keep the lights on for the next few months,” said Tao.

Rafael Jaime, president of United Auto Workers Local 4811, which represents 48,000 academic workers within the University of California — including about 8,000 at UCLA — said he was not aware of any workers who haven’t been paid so far, but that the issue could come to a head at the end of August.

He said that the UC system “should do everything that it can to ensure that workers aren’t left without pay.”

What comes next?

A major stressor for academics: the uncertainty.

Some researchers whose grants were suspended said they have not received much guidance from UCLA on a path forward. Some of that anxiety was vented on Zoom calls last week, including a UCLA-wide call attended by about 3,000 faculty members.

UCLA administrators said they are exploring stopgap options, including potential emergency “bridge” funding to grantees to pay researchers or keep up labs such as those that use rodents as subjects.

Some UCLA academics worried about a brain drain. Di Carlo said that undergraduate students he advises have begun asking for his advice on relocating to universities abroad for graduate school.

“This has been the first time that I’ve seen undergraduate students that have asked about foreign universities for their graduate studies,” he said. “I hear, ‘What about Switzerland? … What about University of Tokyo?’ This assault on science is making the students think that this is not the place for them.”

But arguably researchers’ most pressing concern is continuing their work.

Campbell explained that she has personally been affected by pancreatic cancer — she lost someone close to her to it. She and her peers do the research “for the families” who’ve also been touched by the disease.

“That the work that’s already in progress has the chance of being stopped in some way is really disappointing,” she said. “Not just for me, but for all those patients I could potentially help.”

Former Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband, attorney Doug Emhoff, is joining the USC faculty to teach law students, the university plans to announce later Monday.

Emhoff, who received his law degree from USC in 1990, will start the job at the USC Gould School of Law on July 1. He taught at Georgetown University’s law school while his wife served as then-President Biden’s vice president and when she was the 2024 Democratic nominee for president.

“One of the best parts of my time as Second Gentleman was spending time with these students and young people all around the country — so I look forward to continuing to share my experiences with the next generation and hearing from them in the vibrant academic community at USC,” Emhoff said in a statement.

The announcement comes as Harris weighs running for California governor next year, a decision she is not expected to make until the end of the summer. On Monday, she made a surprise virtual appearance at a summit of Free & Just, an organization focused on highlighting the stories of people impacted by the reduction of access to abortion and other reproductive healthcare services.

Emhoff said mentoring law students is particularly critical at this time in the nation’s history.

“In this difficult moment for the legal community, I believe it is more important than ever to instill in the next generation of lawyers the same principles that drove me to the legal profession: the imperative of speaking out on behalf of the vulnerable, standing up for the rule of law, defending every citizen’s fundamental rights, and always fighting for justice, without fear or favor,” Emhoff said.

Emhoff, who lives in Brentwood with Harris, will remain a partner at the global law firm of Willkie Farr & Gallagher, which in April was among the firms that struck a deal with President Trump’s administration agreeing to conform with the president’s policies. The firm agreed to provide at least $100 million in pro bono legal work during Trump’s time in the White House and beyond, which the president said at the time will be dedicated to helping veterans, Gold Star families, law enforcement members and first responders.

Emhoff’s continued employment at the firm in the aftermath of the agreement raised eyebrows in progressive circles. He said Monday that he continues to disagree with his firm’s decision to settle with the White House, but remains at the firm because of his faith in his colleagues’ principles, which he said were demonstrated by pro bono work the firm’s attorneys from across the country did during the federal immigration raids by ICE agents and border patrol officers in Los Angeles

“I remain confident in the firm’s values, its phenomenal people, and meaningful work we’re doing for our clients and the communities we serve, which have not changed since the settlement—and that’s why I remain at the firm,” Emhoff said.

Days after the firm struck the deal, Emhoff said he disagreed with the decision.

“At this critical moment, this very critical moment, I urge my colleagues across the legal profession to remain vigilant, engaged, and unafraid to challenge actions that may erode our fundamental rights,” Emhoff said on April 3 at a gala dinner for Bet Tzedek, a Los Angeles-based legal aid organization where he has long volunteered. “Cause we know, the work of justice is never easy, but it is always necessary.”