DOJ Sues UC, Alleging ‘Hostile Work Environment’ for Jews

The Justice Department sued the University of California system Tuesday, alleging it has tolerated antisemitism to such an extent that it’s created a hostile work environment for Jewish and Israeli employees at UCLA, violating federal law banning employment discrimination.

The case continues the Trump administration’s targeting of the campus through allegations that it failed to properly respond to pro-Palestinian protests that followed Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which sparked the recent Israel-Hamas war. The administration previously cut off research funding for UCLA, but lost in court.

“Swastikas, calls for the extermination of Jews and the Jewish state of Israel, antisemitic violence, and open harassment of Jewish students, faculty, and staff: this was the grim scene at the University of California Los Angeles,” the new lawsuit begins. It says “the general atmosphere of antisemitism was, and remains, so severe and pervasive that UCLA’s own official Task Force on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias concluded that the University’s failures to protect Jewish staff and faculty constituted a hostile work environment.”

The DOJ already concluded, last July, that UCLA violated other laws—the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—in its response to alleged antisemitism at a spring 2024 pro-Palestinian protest encampment. Multiple federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, promptly began freezing funding; UC estimated it lost $584 million.

The Trump administration further demanded that UCLA pay $1.2 billion and make other concessions, including that it stop enrolling “foreign students likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment” and cease “performing hormonal interventions and ‘transgender’ surgeries” on anyone under 18 at its medical school and affiliated hospitals.

But after UC researchers sued, U.S. District Court judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District of California ordered almost all of the frozen funding to be restored. In November, Lin further ordered federal agencies to end their “blanket policy of denying any future grants” to UCLA and ruled that the administration can’t seek payouts from any UC campus “in connection with any civil rights investigation” under Titles VI or IX. Lin also prohibited the DOJ and federal funding agencies from withholding funds, “or threatening to do so, to coerce the UC in violation of the First Amendment or Tenth Amendment.”

Now, the DOJ has sued in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California under Title VII, a different law that bans employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin. Among other things, it’s asking a judge to force the UC system to pay damages to Jewish and Israeli employees and “modify and enforce its anti-discrimination and anti-retaliation policies and procedures to effectively prevent and correct antisemitic discrimination and retaliation at UCLA.”

Mary Osako, UCLA’s vice chancellor for strategic communications, noted in a statement that the university has taken “concrete and significant steps to strengthen campus safety, enforce policies, and combat antisemitism,” including hiring a dedicated Title VI/Title VII officer within the Office of Civil Rights.

“We stand firmly by the decisive actions we have taken to combat antisemitism in all its forms, and we will vigorously defend our efforts and our unwavering commitment to providing a safe, inclusive environment for all members of our community,” she wrote.

In a statement, Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, wrote that “allegations of antisemitism must be taken seriously, but this lawsuit comes amid a broader pattern in which the federal government has increasingly weaponized antisemitism to pressure and reshape higher education institutions towards a far right agenda, including through prior federal attacks on UCLA. Civil-rights enforcement should protect people from discrimination without becoming a vehicle for political overreach that undermines academic freedom, shared governance, and the independence of universities.”