Teachers and Unions Fight Back as UC Campuses Prepare to Fuel Trump’s Witch Hunt
A coalition of University of California faculty, students, staff, and labor unions is suing the Trump administration.
Marjorie Cohn
This story was originally published by Truthout.
Outrage flared last week about the University of California’s capitulation to this era’s resurgent McCarthyism, as news spread that the university has provided the names of at least 160 students, faculty members, and staff at the University of California, Berkeley, to federal officials who — under the guise of investigating “alleged antisemitic incidents” — are scrutinizing people who have expressed opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Judith Butler, a UC Berkeley philosophy professor and Jewish critic of the Israeli government, said in a recent interview with Democracy Now!, “There is no good evidence that antisemitism is rampant on campus,” adding, “To take a position against genocide is certainly not an antisemitic thing to do. Most Jews are against genocide, and we were taught to be against genocide, and we were taught, as well, that ‘never again’ is a slogan that should apply to all people.” Butler noted that most of those whose names were reported to the administration had not been apprised of the allegations against them.
A Truthout analysis of a voluntary agreement signed by the University of California and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights nine months ago reveals that more such disclosures from other schools may be yet to come. In December 2024, after the election of Donald Trump but under the auspices of the outgoing Biden administration, the University of California promised to also hand over names of people who either reported or were the subject of allegations of discrimination at five other University of California campuses — UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, UC Davis, and UC Santa Cruz.
The 12-page agreement says that by September 30, 2025, the University of California will give the Office for Civil Rights a spreadsheet or other file of “responses by the University or the individual University campuses to all complaints and reports alleging discrimination, including harassment and disparate treatment, on the basis of actual or perceived national origin, including shared Jewish, Palestinian, Muslim, and/or Arab ancestry, or association with these national origins/ancestries, during the preceding academic year.” Although the agreement covers alleged discrimination against non-Jewish individuals as well, repression on campuses across the country has focused primarily on allegations of “antisemitism.”
The agreement requires the spreadsheet to include a broad range of information, including the names and positions of both the people who made the complaint and subjects of the complaints, as well as any potential witnesses. It demands the university disclose information about the nature of the complaints, background on any investigations or measures offered to mitigate the issue, and information on whether the subject of the complaint appealed the decision.
This specific agreement, which was reported on by the Daily Bruin, UCLA’s student paper, in 2024, has caused a new round of concern among faculty at the five campuses. When Truthout asked the University of California Office of the President whether the UC system or any of the individual schools listed in the agreement have provided any of the information detailed in the agreement to the federal government, and if not, whether they plan to do so, we received the following response from Charles F. Robinson, University of California, General Counsel and Senior Vice President for Legal Affairs:
The University of California, like many institutions nationwide, is subject to oversight by federal and state agencies and has legal obligations to respond to information requests arising from audits, compliance reviews, and investigations. Last week, UC Berkeley provided notice to a group of students and employees whose information had been included in materials provided to a federal agency during a federal investigation.
Where a legal obligation has been identified, UC has complied with investigative requests consistently over many years and across numerous administrations, reflecting the University’s overall commitment to compliance with applicable laws and regulations, including applicable privacy laws. UC will continue to meet its legal obligations while exploring all legal avenues to safeguard the privacy and trust of our community members.
UC San Diego Professor Adam Aron told Truthout:
It is simply shocking that my local administration, along with the Office of the University of California President, have released names and files of people from our campus to the Trump administration, without even notifying the people whose information was shared. This has all sorts of implications such as putting those people at peril, without their yet knowing it, and also undermining the academic freedom of professors to teach what they want as the new school term is about to start.
Kina Thackray, Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Services at UC San Diego, told Truthout:
The implications are so broad, it’s stunning. They include concerns about violations of university policies and constitutional rights in terms of free speech, and knowing what you’re accused of, and student rights regarding the sharing of their personal information. It’s also concerning for international students because our academic year is just starting and many will be traveling. This type of information is not required for such an investigation.
When then University of California President Michael V. Drake announced the agreement in December, he wrote that the school was “deeply committed to cultivating a safe, respectful, and welcoming environment for our students, faculty, staff, patients, and other visitors, free from discrimination and harassment.” Faculty told Truthout they worry about what the agreement could mean for discrimination complaints going forward.
Thackray added:
Imagine teaching in a classroom: students could allege that you’re anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-male depending on the topics you cover in class. It doesn’t really stop. Does that mean they can allege a civil rights violation and your name will be given to the government? It has huge implications for what faculty teach and whether they will feel intimidated about what they’re teaching. I teach in the medical school where we train students in research and clinical practice. Will faculty get into trouble and get their names put on a list for teaching about women’s health or trans health? It’s a betrayal of our people, our principles and our policies.
On September 15, the UC Berkeley Faculty Association and the American Association of University Professors wrote a letter to the UC Berkeley Chancellor, charging that the disclosures of the names of the 160 faculty, staff, and students to the federal government had “caused them significant harm, including chilled speech and association and, among non-citizens, heightened fear of detention and deportation.” The letter continues:
The broad request for such personally sensitive information is intended to incite individual and institutional fear and thus chill First Amendment rights. By succumbing to this fear and complying with this overbroad and unlawful request, the University has participated in the chilling of speech and association rights of students, staff, and faculty.
On September 16, the San Diego Faculty Association addressed a letter to the UC San Diego Chancellor, which says:
Release of [personally identifiable information] about individuals associated with discrimination complaints is irrelevant to a legitimate investigation into an institution’s management of such complaints and creates substantial risk of harm to those individuals. Such a disclosure is likely to cause UC San Diego faculty, students, and staff significant harm, including the infringement of first amendment rights to free speech and assembly, the violation of faculty rights to academic freedom and, among non-citizens, potential visa termination, detention, and deportation. … We urge your administration to protect the UC San Diego community from government threats and investigations that are wielded as tools to force us into compliance with a political agenda.
The efforts to pressure universities to name names is part of the Trump administration’s campaign to cut federal funding from academic institutions and target international students who express solidarity with Palestinians.
Last month, the administration fined UCLA $1.2 billion and halted federal research funding after the Department of Justice (DOJ) determined that the university violated federal civil rights law. In its July report, the DOJ accused UCLA of “acting with deliberate indifference in creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students.”
But students, faculty, and staff at the University of California are not sitting idly by while the Trump administration uses the threat of cutting federal funding as a cudgel to coerce political compliance. On September 16, a group of UC faculty, students, staff, and labor unions filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against the Trump administration for violation of their academic freedom and free speech rights. They accuse the administration of trying to “commandeer this public university system and to purge from its campuses viewpoints with which the President and his administration” disagree.
The lawsuit says the Trump administration sent a letter to UCLA on Aug. 8, 2025, that listed several demands for UCLA in exchange for unfreezing the university’s federal research funding. Those demands require that UCLA ban demonstrations in certain areas of campus, share disciplinary records of international students with the federal government, eliminate racial preferences in hiring and race-based scholarships, and alter its policies toward transgender students in sports, health care, and public spaces.
“Defendants’ threats and coercive conduct have caused a pervasive sense of fear and intimidation among UC faculty, students, academic employees, and staff employees, who have seen the UC already begin to alter its policies and practices seemingly in capitulation to the Trump administration,” the lawsuit says.
The University of California is not a party to the suit.
Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, dean of the People’s Academy of International Law and past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She sits on the national advisory boards of Veterans For Peace and Assange Defense, and is a member of the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the U.S. representative to the continental advisory council of the Association of American Jurists. Her books include Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues.
