Trump is Right: Schools Must Pay Dearly for Discrimination
Fixing American education, especially at the college level, won’t be easy. Put simply, it will take shock therapy to overcome the parade of DEI, anti-Semitism, and the broader efforts to instill leftwing doctrines on campuses today. But students will suffer until there’s a major course correction. And insisting on hefty sums from colleges like UCLA—such as the Department of Justice’s recent $1 billion demand—is the type of tough medicine that it will take to get there.
UCLA is a public school. That means that it has to abide by the U.S. Constitution, just like any other branch of federal or state government. But not just that; it also receives millions of dollars from the federal government, in numerous different forms like grants, student financial aid dollars that flow to the school, and other payments. In order to be eligible for those funds, it has consistently sworn to the U.S. Department of Education that it does not discriminate. That was a lie.
Most notably, in 2024, campus anti-Israel protests at UCLA turned violent, with a student sleepover area called an “encampment” forming. The encampment participants blocked Jewish students from entering parts of campus, on the pretext that the blockades really applied only to students who were Zionists—meaning students who had the temerity to support Israel’s right to exist. UCLA, for its part, barely lifted a finger to help Jewish students
When Jewish students sued UCLA, a California federal court saw through the rhetoric that the exclusion zones didn’t technically target Jewish students. It entered an injunction prohibiting UCLA from looking the other way when Jewish students were blockaded from parts of campus. At first, UCLA even appealed the entry of that injunction. Just recently, UCLA adjusted its course and settled the case, but only for a mere $6.5 million. A nice start, but not enough to create systemic change at UCLA itself, much less provide a deterrent effect to other schools.
And on DEI, UCLA is still flouting the law. Recently, an organization called “Open the Books” busted UCLA for DEI-related grants related to dwelling more on creating racial “equity” in math, computer science, and other disciplines. That’s to say nothing of the potential violations in the Admissions department, where UCLA has likely been considering an applicant’s race, in violation of both California law and the Constitution. And at UCLA’s medical school, even the members of the Admissions Committee itself are chosen using race.
So the question is not so much whether UCLA is guilty, but what the consequences of breaking the law ought to be. The truth is that taxpayers have subsidized the school’s misconduct for so long that anything less than an eye-popping number will be insufficient to remedy the damage done.
Yes, a billion dollars is a lot. And UCLA will surely object that the Department of Justice’s proposed penalty will injure the school and its students. But pulling punches would send the wrong message here. Instead, whatever sacrifices UCLA must make now to satisfy DOJ will imprint the indelible message that engaging in discrimination hurts in the long run.
Even better, the effect of a $1 billion penalty is not limited to UCLA. Other schools are watching to see what happens here. Imposing the bitter pill of a severe monetary sanction against UCLA will send a loud and succinct message to other universities: you could be next.
That is a valuable proposition, because the rot in post-secondary education has reached the center of the apple core. The only way for the Trump Administration to trigger widespread change is to make schools fear the consequences of not listening to its guidance and agenda. In other words, once other schools see UCLA needing to tighten its belt to find the resources for its payment to DOJ, the incentive structure immediately flips—other schools will realize the need to eliminate the use of race in their operations now, and take a strong stance against violent anti-Semitism when it arises, lest they have their own operations suffer when the DOJ comes knocking on their doors. The internal pressures favoring radicalism and discrimination will finally be outweighed by the need to comply with the law.
UCLA got away with lying for decades by accepting innumerable federal dollars while failing to live up to the law and its promises. It has no inherent right to federal funding, research grants, student aid eligibility, tax-exempt status, or the numerous other goodies that are open to universities in the United States. Yet it received those items and funneled taxpayer dollars into discriminatory programming and operations. Now, it must pay the piper.
