UCLA Students, Professors, Staff Sue Trump Administration Over Using Civil Rights To 'Wage A Campaign'

(MENAFN- Live Mint) Student organisations, faculty, staff and every labour union of the University of California on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Tuesday, saying that the government is misusing civil rights laws to wage a campaign against the institute with a goal to curtail academic freedom and undermine free speech.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, comes weeks after the US administration led by President Donald Trum imposed a $1.2 billion fine on University of California, Los Angeles, and froze funding for research, accusing the school of allowing antisemitism on campus and violating other civil rights.

“The blunt cudgel the Trump administration has repeatedly employed in this attack on the independence of institutions of higher education has been the abrupt, unilateral, and unlawful termination of federal research funding on which those institutions and the public interest rely,” the lawsuit says.

The Trump administration has targeted other universities too, pausing or freezing funding over similar allegations against elite private colleges, including Harvard, Brown and Columbia.

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The coalition that has sued the government is led by the American Association of University Professors union (AAUP), and represented by Democracy Forward, a legal group that has filed other lawsuits against the Trump administration over frozen federal funds.

The lawsuit says that the Trump administration has made multiple demands in the proposed settlement offer to the UCLA. These include giving the government access to faculty, student, and staff data, releasing admissions and hiring data. It has also demanded an end to diversity scholarships, banning overnight demonstrations on university property and cooperating with immigration enforcement.

The Department of Justice has not yet issued a statement regarding the lawsuit.

UCLA is not directly involved in the lawsuit but is part of various legal and advocacy efforts to restore and maintain funding, according to a report by The Associated Press quoting university spokesperson Stett Holbrook.

“Federal cuts to research funding threaten lifesaving biomedical research, hamper US economic competitiveness and jeopardise the health of Americans who depend on the University's cutting-edge medical science and innovation,” he said.

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University of California President James Milliken said on Monday that the federal government has also launched investigations and other actions against all of the UC's 10 campuses, but he offered no details in a statement.

“This represents one of the gravest threats to the University of California in our 157-year history,” he said, adding that the university system receives more than $17 billion each year in federal support, including nearly $10 billion in Medicare and Medicaid funding, and funding that goes toward research and student financial aid.

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