Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday said UC should not bend “on their knees” to the president as university leaders negotiate with the Trump administration to restore more than half a billion dollars in frozen UCLA grants amid antisemitism accusations.
Newsom chided settlements Trump struck with two Ivy League universities. Columbia and Brown agreed to pay hefty fines and make sweeping campus changes in exchange for the restoration of research money that was also canceled over Trump antisemitism allegations. Harvard too is negotiating with the government over similar charges.
“We’re not Brown, we’re not Columbia, and I’m not going to be governor if we act like that,” Newsom said, referring to settlements the universities announced last month. “Period. Full stop, I will fight like hell to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Columbia’s and Brown’s agreements included highly criticized payouts. Columbia will pay more than $200 million to the federal government and Brown will pay $50 million to Rhode Island workforce programs — in addition to promises to share admissions data with federal authorities. The Trump administration has accused elite universities, including UCLA, of illegally considering a person’s race when deciding whom to admit.
Columbia also agreed to review its Middle Eastern studies programs and submit to an outside monitor to oversee whether it was following the settlement. Faculty have accused the university’s leaders of relenting on coveted higher education values of academic freedom independent of government or political influence.
The remarks from Newsom were his first public comments about how UC should proceed with Trump, and the first indication — if vague — of how a UC settlement with Trump may or may not look like.
The university system, run by its president and Board of Regents, is independent under the state Constitution of “all political or sectarian influence.” At at the same time, the governor can exercise political sway over the regents, whose members he appoints. Newsom also holds an ex-officio seat on the board.
Newsom, speaking in San Francisco, made the remarks during a media question-and-answer period after an event about artificial intelligence workforce partnerships the state announced with Google, Adobe, IBM and Microsoft.
“There’s principles. There’s right and wrong, and we’ll do the right thing. This is about our competitiveness. It’s about the fate and future of this country. It’s about our sovereignty. It’s about so much more than the temperament of an aggrieved individual who happens to currently be president of the United States,” Newsom said.
Asked about UC’s negotiations, Newsom said, “They’ll do the right thing.”
“I have the confidence and I’ll do everything in my power to encourage them to do the right thing and not to become another law firm that bends on their knees, another company that sells their soul or another institution that takes a shortcut and takes the easy wrong versus the hard right.”
UC and UCLA spokespeople did not immediately respond Thursday to a question about Newsom’s comments.
UC President James B. Milliken said Wednesday that the university system was “agreeing to engage in dialogue with the federal administration” after the Department of Justice sent a letter to UC last week saying it found UCLA had violated the civil rights of Jewish students after activists erected a pro-Palestinian encampment in April 2024.
Milliken said the the goal of negotiations was for all “suspended and at-risk federal funding restored to the university as soon as possible.”
The grant suspensions affect research into areas including neuroscience, clean energy and cancer. The Justice Department and U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said on July 28 that UCLA would pay a “heavy price” for acting with “deliberate indifference” to the civil rights of Jewish and Israeli students who complained of antisemitic incidents since Oct. 7, 2023. The date marks when Hamas attacked Israel, which led to Israel’s war in Gaza.
In his UC-wide statement, Milliken said that the cuts “do nothing to address antisemitism. Moreover, the extensive work that UCLA and the entire University of California have taken to combat antisemitism has apparently been ignored. The announced cuts would be a death knell for innovative work that saves lives, grows our economy, and fortifies our national security. It is in our country’s best interest that funding be restored.”
In a campuswide letter Wednesday, UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk said the grant suspensions were “devastating for UCLA and for Americans across the nation.”
