Senator Wiener on Trump Administration’s Threat to Defund University of California Campuses: “The Trump Administration Does Not Care About Jewish Students or Faculty.”
SAN FRANCISCO – The Trump Administration issued a list of universities subject to investigation and potential defunding, including University of California Berkeley (“UC Berkeley”), University of California Los Angeles (“UCLA”), UC Davis, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, and California State University, Sacramento (“Sacramento State”), supposedly on the basis of campus antisemitism. On Friday, the Administration announced it was withholding $400 million from Columbia as part of this investigation, sending a signal that other universities could soon face similar retribution.
Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) issued the following statement in response. Senator Wiener serves as Co-Chair of the Jewish Legislative Caucus, but this statement is purely on his own behalf, not on behalf of the Jewish Caucus:
”President Trump and his Administration claim they are investigating UCLA, UC Berkeley, and Sacramento State, in addition to scores of other universities across the country, due to antisemitic targeting of Jews on those campuses. Each of these universities will no doubt be expected to bend the knee to Trump in order to keep their funding, just like Disney, Meta, Amazon, Target, Google, and other corporations have bent the knee. These bullying tactics are drawn straight from the authoritarian playbook.
”While antisemitism has absolutely been a problem on some of our campuses — with utterly despicable targeting, harassment, intimidation, and even violence against Jewish students and faculty — UC, CSU, and campus leadership have worked with the Jewish Legislative Caucus and Jewish community organizations on intensively addressing the problem, and the situation, while not fully resolved, has improved at these campuses.
”It is extremely clear to me that President Trump’s targeting of the UC and CSU has nothing to do with antisemitism and everything to do with an attack on higher education writ large. The Trump Administration is the most antisemitic Administration in modern U.S. history, and it has no credibility whatsoever in seeking to root out antisemitism. The President’s inauguration included a Nazi salute by Elon Musk. Vice President Vance and Musk then tried — and thankfully failed — to elect a Nazi-aligned party in Germany. Musk and other Trump appointees have long histories of antisemitic posts and conspiracy theories. Trump recently blamed the stock market’s slump on ‘globalists,’ a common conspiratorial reference to Jews controlling the economy. Just yesterday, Trump posted a Nazi image relating to gay men in concentration camps.
“We need to be very clear-eyed in assessing this federal investigation: The Trump Administration does not care about Jewish students or faculty.
“Instead, President Trump’s targeting of the UC and CSU is part of his Neanderthal Administration’s frontal assault on our nation’s university system — threatening and punishing universities to force them to conform to his MAGA views on education, research, disease promotion, diversity, student protest, and so forth. Trump is doing so by taking a wrecking ball to science funding throughout the federal government, an assault that will have profoundly negative financial and academic ramifications for UC and CSU, for California as a whole, and for the entire planet, given how many scientific and health care breakthroughs happen at the UC. Trump has also begun illegally deporting students who are lawful permanent residents for expressing views with which he disagrees.
“This fight is about whether we will continue to have an American university system that is independent of the government. It’s about whether our universities will remain places of critical thinking, creativity, scientific research, and societal change. We must stand with our universities.”
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