Pot Boiler

Politico summarizes where things stand in the UC/UCLA conflict with the Trump administration:

President Donald Trump spent a good part of the year trying to bend elite universities to his will, cutting off federal funds as leverage. The assault left schools with a choice: Surrender or fight. But since the president put the University of California in his cross hairs, school officials have charted a decidedly different course. They have neither conceded defeat nor mounted a vigorous defense. Instead, they are watching as UC faculty members wage their own legal challenges against Trump, scoring early wins that so far have restored more than $580 million in scientific research funding the Trump administration stripped from UCLA.

With UC officials taking little overt action to resolve the crisis, the fight over UCLA funding has not progressed much in the months since it kicked off in July. While other high profile schools around the U.S. have either hammered out deals with the government to get Trump off their backs or dug in for protracted legal battles, UCLA goes into the new year with its future stuck in a seemingly open-ended limbo state. “There’s no evidence that any type of deal with the United States is going to be happening in the immediate future,” Abhishek Kambli, a Justice Department lawyer, said during a November court hearing in San Francisco.

...Federal science and health agencies quickly followed through on Bondi’s threat that UCLA would pay a “heavy price” for its alleged misdeeds, announcing they were withholding $584 million in research grants – more than half of the total researchers were slated to receive to fund their work. Days later, Justice officials proposed a deal to settle its case and restore the funding: UCLA would have to pay $1 billion in fines, $200 million more in legal payouts, and make sweeping reforms to limit campus protests, end scholarships based on race or ethnicity, and screen prospective international students for “anti-American” activity, among other changes.

...There has been little movement in negotiations since August, according to a UC official granted anonymity to discuss the deliberations. The realization that faculty had to stand up for themselves spurred Claudia Polsky, director of the environmental law clinic at UC Berkeley, into action even before the sweeping cuts to UCLA research. In June, Polsky led a first-of-its-kind class action lawsuit against the Trump administration, featuring researchers who had already seen their grant funding slashed...

In September, a coalition of faculty, staff, students and labor unions filed a second lawsuit over funding cuts hitting UCLA and other UC schools. In both cases, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin granted preliminary injunctions, temporarily restoring the funding and restricting how the administration can suspend funding from the university. Last week, a federal appeals court allowed the Trump administration to move forward with some grant suspensions that were made prior to the sweeping UCLA research cuts... 

In a statement, UC spokesperson Stett Holbrook pushed back on the idea it had taken a path of inaction. He pointed to lawsuits UC joined this year challenging new limits the administration imposed on how much universities are reimbursed for facilities and administrative costs associated with research.

...The UC, which has 10 campuses, nearly 300,000 students and receives close to a tenth of all federal research funding, is significantly different from the smaller private schools that have struck deals. The UCs face much greater public scrutiny, amplified by being in a deep blue state where Democratic politicians are eager to be seen as resisting Trump. Any deal would likely require the blessing of Newsom, who has made clear that the UC should not give in. A settlement could negatively impact Newsom’s potential 2028 presidential bid that has gained traction as the governor – who is also a member of the regents – continues to cast himself as an antagonist to Trump. While Newsom has been kept in the loop, he is not involved in day-to-day talks and has not recently directly engaged with the rest of the regents, according to a person briefed on the discussions...

Full story at https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/28/uc-facultys-fight-with-trump-has-put-the-university-in-a-tough-spot-00694193.

Bottom line (at least as seen by yours truly): It remains unclear - based on the outlandish $1 billion demand - whether the Trump administration's goal is really a deal with UC/UCLA or whether it is just to keep the pot boiling.

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Noteworthy is the UC President's 2025 year-in-review wrap up which doesn't mention the conflict:

Or direct to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKRTxVYl0VY or https://ia800103.us.archive.org/6/items/united-we-can-yes-on-50-united-we-can-10-3-2025/UC%20wrap-up%20for%202025%2012-10-2025.mp4.