Trump offers UCLA $1bn settlement amid pro-Palestine protest standoff
A White House official and the University of California system both confirmed the proposed settlement to news agencies on Friday.
The settlement proposal is notable for the massive sum requested, as the Trump administration seeks to pressure top schools into compliance with its policies.
The $1bn price tag would far exceed the payouts inked in previous agreements reached with Columbia University and Brown University last month. Columbia agreed to pay a fine of about $221m, and Brown confirmed it would pay $50m to a state workforce development programme.
'The University of California just received a document from the Department of Justice and is reviewing it,' University of California President James Milliken said in a statement.
He added that the institution had offered to have talks with the government earlier this week.
UCLA, which boasts the largest student body in the University of California system, had also announced this week that the Trump administration suspended $584m in federal grants to the school.
The Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division explained that the funding would be frozen as a result of civil rights violations connected to pro-Palestinian protests since 2023. The school had acted 'with deliberate indifference in creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students', it said.
Free-speech advocates, however, have accused the Trump administration of willfully conflating pro-Palestine and antiwar advocacy with anti-Semitism in order to silence protesters.
Last month, UCLA reached a $6m settlement with three Jewish students and a Jewish professor who claimed their civil rights were violated by pro-Palestinian protesters blocking their access to class and other areas on campus during a 2024 protest encampment.
It was not immediately clear why the $1bn settlement sought by the Trump administration was so high.
UCLA is also the first publicly funded university to face a potential grant freeze from the Trump administration. In his statement, Milliken said the payment would have wide-ranging consequences.
'As a public university, we are stewards of taxpayer resources, and a payment of this scale would completely devastate our country's greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians,' he said.
Civil liberties organisations have also underscored that students at publicly funded universities are typically afforded wider constitutional protections while on campus.
That stands in contrast to private institutions, where students are generally subject to whatever restrictions on speech are outlined by administrators in their enrollment agreement.
The First Amendment of the US Constitution restricts the government's ability to limit free speech. Any future agreement between the University of California system and the Trump administration might face a legal challenge, should it be perceived to trample on free-speech rights.
Speaking on Thursday, California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has been one of Trump's most vocal Democratic opponents, urged the state's university officials not to kowtow to the administration's demands.
'We're not Brown, we're not Columbia, and I'm not going to be governor if we act like that,' Newsom said, according to the Los Angeles Times. 'Period. Full stop. I will fight like hell to make sure that doesn't happen.'
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