Go almost anywhere in the multiple medical centers of slogan-obsessed UCLA, and you’ll see signs reading “It Begins With U” and “Innovating Patient Care since 1926,” bromides urging every employee from nurses to heart surgeons toward ever-better performance and ratings.
So far, the slogans have helped place UCLA’s medical centers first among Western hospitals in the U.S. News & World Report ratings, topping even famed institutions like Stanford University’s hospital, the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and UCLA’s sister medical centers in San Francisco, Sacramento and Irvine.
UCLA also placed first in a far less desirable category, though: It was the university that President Donald Trump sought to threaten the most with fines and cuts to federal research, going after a total of $1.7 billion. That was in keeping with Trump’s practice of attacking prominent targets and rarely secondary ones.
Also in keeping with the Trump approach was compromise and then restoration of most of the research money Trump threatened. The $1.7 billion represented nearly all annual federal research money that UCLA gets, sixth most in the country behind places like UC San Francisco, the University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins University, schools which had far less antisemitic activity during the 2023-24 school year.
By contrast, UCLA sprouted anti-Israeli encampments like mushrooms. So in many ways, UCLA was the largest target Trump could find, and his psychology suggests that’s why he singled it out. Fully $500 million of the federal research money was to be taken from UCLA’s medical facilities and research before a judge the other day stopped the process at least temporarily on grounds the demands were made via form letters not listing any transgressions by researchers.
The other $1.2 billion is a “fine” for allowing antisemitic camps and other anti-Jewish activities on the campus for weeks. Totally ignored were petitions signed by hundreds of Jewish UCLA faculty noting that the campus has seen no medically-linked antisemitism.
Trump’s administration more than any other appears struck with the central injustice of Gaza: More than 1,000 Israelis were murdered and kidnapped, but Israel somehow has been blamed for the entire conflict. UCLA has been widely blasted ever since for its long tolerance of the campus encampments and concurrent interference with other students’ freedom of movement.
As part of negotiations over the grant money, the overall University of California system said it would resist any federal penalties, a big commitment from this huge institution. Overall, UC campuses get about $17 billion per year from the federal government, including more than $9 billion for the care of Medicare and Medicaid patients and almost $9 billion in research funding.
What does America get for its research money? Early on, it got CT (computerized tomography) scans. More recently, there has been a wireless implantable brain device that partially restores vision in some of the blind; drug delivery systems that cross the blood-brain barrier to reach cancers in the central nervous system; and gene therapies for babies born without immune systems.
Should there be any threat of losing advances like these to Donald Trump’s “war on California,” of which the attempted UCLA extortion was one part? So far, UCLA and the larger UC system appear to have succeeded with a mix of lawsuits and compromise. The campus last month announced new protest rules at least partly matching federal demands. UCLA will allow preapproved overnight events but not in the campus center.
It stopped far short of cutting off admissions of students with pro-Palestinian or anti-American views, as Trump demanded. The rules make clear that campus disruptions and blocking of building access will not be allowed. All this met many Trump demands. Similar rules have not yet been applied to other UC campuses, including those in urban settings like UCSF and its law school.
Settlement talks reportedly involved 10 of the 24 members of UC’s Board of Regents, along with President James Milliken. Whether Trump appointees will make more demands is an open question. Further pressures would likely spur an increase in UC’s emphasis on lawsuits to uphold its rights.
Meanwhile, this has all made the slogan “It starts with U” as good as obsolete, since no campus employee from nurse to specialized researcher did anything to provoke the crisis.
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com, and read more of his columns online at californiafocus.net.