Since Trump is always bragging about his arty deals, how genius he is, and has even had books ghostwritten under his byline about what strategies to engage in as you pursue a deal, you’d think that not throwing good money after bad would be Exhibit No. 1.
Like, if someone took $584 million from you, and then said that if you paid him $1 billion you could have the other money back, it wouldn’t take a trained international hostage negotiator to note that this was no bargain and to nix the proposed pact.
But this unartful deal is precisely the one Trump is offering to UCLA in the ongoing bickering over allegations of antisemitism on campus.
A draft agreement in the effort to restore the $584 million in federal research funding the White House halted called for the university to make the cool $1 billion payment to the U.S. government and then to contribute $172 million to a claims fund that would compensate victims of civil rights violations, The New York Times reported earlier this month.
One UCLA professor quoted Tuesday morning on KCRW said that, yes, she felt she was a victim of anti-Semitism on campus last year during those dismal pro-Palestinian occupations of both open space and buildings that disrupted classes and student and faculty life for weeks.
But, she said, does that mean she supported cutting crucial research on campus, or paying an exorbitant ransom to Trump? She does not.
As if he really cared about antisemitism. All he cares about as he rousts the Harvards, Columbias and UCLAs of this world is evening perceived scores with a professoriate that, like most academic communities around the world, does not in the main agree with Trumpian politics. I won’t even dignify them by calling them conservative politics — simply because they are not. Actual conservatism is not authoritarian, or bullying, or isolationist or anti-science.
Tuesday as well a group of more than 360 Jewish UCLA faculty members came together to sign a letter that says cutting research funding does “nothing to make UCLA safer for Jews nor diminish antisemitism in the world.” The group also decries the Trump administration’s “misguided and punitive” demand for this $1 billion fine to settle claims over alleged campus antisemitism, the Los Angeles Times reports.
“Cutting off hundreds of millions of research funds will do nothing to make UCLA safer for Jews nor diminish antisemitism in the world,” the letter said. “It will not benefit Jewish Bruins nor Jews beyond campus who make extensive use of its first-rate medical facilities, ground-breaking scientific innovations, and cutting-edge cultural institutions.”
The signatories aren’t by any means all progressives. One is described as an “anti-Zionist Jew” and others are big supporters of Israel. But they stand united on the main point: “We urge the Trump administration to cease its attempts to deprive institutions such as ours of vital research funds intended to save and improve lives. And we ask that it cease its misplaced efforts to withhold funds in the name of combating antisemitism.”
In fact, Trump’s supposed abhorrence of supposedly rampant academic antisemitism is all a con. UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk’s father had to flee Nazi Germany with his Jewish paternal grandparents. “This far-reaching penalty of defunding life-saving research does nothing to address any alleged discrimination,” he wrote in response to the $1 billion ransom demand.
Other universities — and white-shoe law firms — around the nation have capitulated to the Trump shakedown. Columbia has agreed to pay $221 million to settle with the government, and Brown has pledged $50 million. Harvard, which along with Columbia lost a president in the fracas (probably just as well, as both were weirdly incapable of defending the rights of Jews on their campuses, or even vowing to protect them) has the big endowment bucks to fight back, and is doing so. I hope that UCLA takes this tack.
“We do not want to back down,” one of the authors of the campus letter, law school professor Ariela Gross, said. “And we don’t think that you can negotiate with an extortionist. It seems particularly important for Jewish community members to [express this], given that this is being so cynically done in our name — antisemitism is being used as the fig leaf excuse for all of these actions.”
Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com
