A federal judge delivered a blistering blow to the Trump administration on Friday, ordering officials to stop using the threat of massive research funding cuts to coerce the University of California into accepting sweeping viewpoint-based restrictions – a tactic she said violated the First Amendment, the New York Times reported.
Judge Rita F. Lin of the Federal District Court in San Francisco said the administration’s pressure campaign had veered into outright retaliation and barred the government “from seeking payments” or tying federal dollars to ideological conditions in its investigations of the 10-campus UC system.
The 80-page ruling – which the Times called “an extraordinary rebuke to the federal government’s pressure campaign against elite schools” – threatens to upend settlement talks after the Justice Department demanded more than $1 billion from the university earlier this year, the publication said.
“Trump administration officials have spent much of this year trying to remake elite American universities that they perceive as hubs of liberal indoctrination and depict as epicenters of antisemitism,” according to the Times. “They have often wielded the halting of federal research funding to prod schools into negotiations, and the government has already reached settlements with a handful of top universities, including Brown, Columbia and Cornell.”
The Friday decision said that the administration was “engaged in a concerted campaign to purge” viewpoints it opposes, and that UC faculty had already chilled their own research and teaching out of fear of triggering further reprisals.
“Numerous U.C. faculty and staff have submitted declarations describing how defendants’ actions have already chilled speech throughout the U.C. system,” Lin wrote Friday, as reported by the Times. “They describe how they have stopped teaching or researching topics they are afraid are too ‘left’ or ‘woke’ in order to avoid triggering further funding cancellations.”
“These are classic, predictable First Amendment harms, and exactly what defendants publicly said that they intended,” the judge added.
Civil liberties advocates on Friday celebrated the ruling.
Veena Dubal, general counsel for the American Association of University Professors, told the Times she was “kind of in tears” after learning of the decision.
“This represents saving higher education, saving public research and the standing up of faculty and staff and students,” said Dubal, who is also a law professor at the University of California, Irvine.