UC administration is still laying low and not joining the fight
By Roberta Millstein
This is just meant to be a quick follow up to my earlier article, “Trump’s Attacks on the University of California (and higher education more generally).” On Friday, the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California granted the Plaintiffs in AAUP v. Trump, including the Davis Faculty Association, a preliminary injunction. By temporary court order, the federal government is prohibited from holding federal funds hostage in an effort to coerce the University of California into imposing policies that would violate our First Amendment rights.
The judge’s decision is a rebuke of the “Demand letter” I wrote about in the earlier article (and I believe its arguments would likewise apply to the “Compact” that has been presented to other U.S. universities). Judge Rita Lin writes:
Plaintiffs have submitted overwhelming evidence. Across 74 declarations and more than 700 pages of supporting documents, Plaintiffs show that the Administration and its executive agencies are engaged in a concerted campaign to purge “woke,” “left,” and “socialist” viewpoints from our country’s leading universities. Agency officials, as well as the President and Vice President, have repeatedly and publicly announced a playbook of initiating civil rights investigations of preeminent universities to justify cutting off federal funding, with the goal of bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune. Universities are then presented with agreements to restore federal funding under which they must change what they teach, restrict student anonymity in protests, and endorse the Administration’s view of gender, among other things. Defendants submit nothing to refute this.
In her article on the decision, Davis Enterprise journalist Monica Stark helpfully explains that the order will stay in place until all of the required procedures under Title VI and Title IX are followed — in other words, the procedures that the Trump administration should have followed instead of simply declaring guilt and trying to impose an outrageous $1.2B fine with illegal conditions. (See Stark’s article or the judge’s order for the list of required procedures). The Trump administration’s conditions included, the judge states, “conditions on continued federal funding that impermissibly burden their First Amendment rights” (p. 74).
Judge Lin offered examples of conditions on the granting or continuance of federal funding that would violate the First Amendment rights of Plaintiffs’ members (meaning that the Trump administration is prohibited from doing the following):
- Requiring the UC to make hiring, firing, or funding decisions on the basis of Plaintiffs’ members’ protected speech or freedom of assembly.
- Requiring the UC to restrict its curriculum, scholarship, or research based on the Defendants’ preferred viewpoints.
- Requiring the UC to screen international students based on “anti- Western” or “anti-American” views and/or “socialize” international students to favored “norms.”
- Requiring the UC to institute reporting requirements concerning Plaintiffs’ protected speech or freedom of assembly.
- Requiring the UC to adopt specific definitions of “sex,” “male,” and “female,” or adopt Defendants’ favored views as to gender or gender affirming care and disallowing inconsistent speech by its faculty, staff, or students.
- Restricting how the UC decides scholarship awards, hiring, or admissions, beyond what current constitutional or statutory law requires.
As for the UC administration, who played no role in this lawsuit other than to resist revealing the demand letter that it had received from the Trump administration, it has neither supported nor criticized the ruling. The UC spokesperson response said only that the UC remains “remains focused on our vital work to drive innovation, advance medical breakthroughs and strengthen the nation’s long-term competitiveness” and “remains committed to protecting the mission, governance, and academic freedom of the university.”
In other words, the UC administration is still keeping its head down while the faculty fight the battle for the UC. It is time for President James Milliken and the UC Board of Regents to stand with UC faculty.
Davisite 
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