The University of California UCLA said Thursday that the prime minister, known as “American Loss,” was informed that he had lost federal research funds due to alleged opposition.
“UCLA has been notified that the federal government has suspended certain research funding to UCLA through the management of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other agencies,” Prime Minister Julio Frenck said in a message to the campus community.
“This is not just a loss for researchers who rely on critical grants. This is the loss for Americans across the country, whose work, health and future relies on the groundbreaking work we do,” he writes.
The announcement comes as the Trump administration attempted to put pressure on and retaliate universities across the country following student protests on university campuses over the war in Gaza.
Some Republicans in Congress have called protests and some of the acts anti-Semitics.
In a message to the UCLA community, Frenk said the federal government used anti-Semitism as a reason for its loss of funds.
“In our notification, the federal government argues for anti-Semitism and prejudice. This widespread penalty in reimbursing life-saving research has nothing to address suspicious discrimination,” he wrote.
UCLA announced Tuesday that it agreed to pay $6 million to settle a lawsuit claiming discrimination, bringing it to Jewish students and faculty. The lawsuit filed in June 2024 accused the university of not taking action when Palestinian protesters established campus that spring.
Frenk writes in his message to the Bruin community, as the UCLA community is known, that anti-Semitism has no place on campus, but there is room for improvement. He said the university has taken steps to counter it and introduced a policy on student protest.
The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health did not immediately respond to requests for comment late Thursday.
In his message to the university, Frenk did not say how much federal funds would be suspended.
He highlighted the important work UCLA has done. This includes helping to create what will become the Internet, with researchers saying “now we are building new technologies that will fuel the entire industry and help protect soldiers.”
President Donald Trump has pledged to crack down on the university in order to protest students against the war in Gaza that Israel launched against Hamas after Hamas attacked on October 7, 2023.
Currently there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and this week the UN said it is increasing the UN’s integrated food security stage classification, or evidence of hunger that has worsened there. The IPC emphasized that the warning constitutes an alert and is not an official “hunger classification.”
Columbia University in New York City is one of the universities targeted by the Trump administration over anti-Semitism allegations, and last week Columbia announced a settlement with the federal government in its cuts efforts.
Brown University in Rhode Island said Wednesday it had reached an agreement with the federal government to restore funds. The university said the agreement resolves three reviews of Brown’s “compliance with federal non-discrimination obligations.”
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