California, Aug 7 (IANS) The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), one of the top US public universities, said Wednesday that the Trump administration has suspended 584 million US dollars in federal grants for the university.
“Currently, a total of approximately $584 million in extramural award funding is suspended and at risk. If these funds remain suspended, it will be devastating for UCLA and for Americans across the nation,” UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk said in a statement.
“The suspension of these funds is not only a loss to the researchers who rely on critical grants. It is a loss for Americans across the nation whose work, health and future depend on our groundbreaking research and scholarship,” Frenk noted.
Last week, UCLA said that the Trump administration suspended its federal research funding over claims of “antisemitism and bias.”
The suspension came after a US Department of Justice civil rights investigation alleged that UCLA had been “deliberately indifferent” to widespread harassment of Jewish and Israeli students during 2024 pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses, reports Xinhua news agency.
The University of California (UC) President James Milliken on Wednesday also released a statement on research grant suspensions at UCLA, which has the largest enrollment among the ten campuses within the UC system.
Milliken said that the UC has agreed to “engage in dialogue with the federal administration,” and their “immediate goal is to see the $584 million in suspended and at-risk federal funding restored to the university as soon as possible.”
“These 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,” said Milliken.
Last week, the university agreed to pay 6.45 million dollars to settle a lawsuit over the treatment of Jewish students and a professor during the protests.
Sixty universities, including Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia and Stanford, are among the top universities in the country under investigations into alleged antisemitic discrimination and harassment on their campuses.
–IANS
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