Judge orders US leader not to threaten university's funding

US govt also barred from seeking payments from University of California over civil rights

- Alan Blinder

A US federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Nov 14 not to coerce the University of California (UC) by threatening its research funding in defiance of the First Amendment, an extraordinary rebuke to the federal government's pressure campaign against elite schools.

Judge Rita Lin of the US District Court in San Francisco also said the US government was forbidden “from seeking payments” from the university system in connection with civil rights investigations - an order that could upend the Trump administration’s settlement talks with the university months after the Justice Department demanded more than US$1 billion (S$1.3 billion).

Trump administration officials have spent much of 2025 trying to remake elite US universities that they perceive as hubs of liberal indoctrination and depict as epicentres of anti-Semitism. They have often wielded the halting of federal research funding to prod schools into negotiations, and the government has reached settlements with a handful of top universities, including Brown, Columbia and Cornell.

UC, which has about 560,000 students and employees, has been a leading target for much of President Donald Trump’s second term. The 10-campus system receives about US$i7 billion in federal funding each year, and Trump administration officials have sought in recent months to start cutting off some of that money.

Judge Lin had already ordered the government to restore millions of dollars in grants that it had stripped from the system. But her order on Nov 14, coming in a separate case brought by labour groups, went beyond rote matters of dollars and cents.