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An extraordinary rebuke to the federal government’s campaign against elite schools, the ruling could upend settlement talks with the university system.
Nov. 14, 2025, 9:49 p.m. ET
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Friday not to coerce the University of California by threatening its research funding in defiance of the First Amendment, an extraordinary rebuke to the federal government’s pressure campaign against elite schools.
The judge, Rita F. Lin of Federal District Court in San Francisco, also said the government was forbidden “from seeking payments” from the university system in connection with civil rights investigations — an order that could upend the Trump administration’s settlement talks with the university months after the Justice Department demanded more than $1 billion.
Trump administration officials have spent much of this year trying to remake elite American universities that they perceive as hubs of liberal indoctrination and depict as epicenters of antisemitism. They have often wielded the halting of federal research funding to prod schools into negotiations, and the government has already reached settlements with a handful of top universities, including Brown, Columbia and Cornell.
The University of California, which has about 560,000 students and employees, has been a leading target for much of President Trump’s second term. The 10-campus system receives about $17 billion in federal funding each year, and Trump administration officials sought in recent months to start cutting off some of that money.
Judge Lin had already ordered the government to restore millions of dollars in grants that it had stripped from the system. But her order on Friday, coming in a separate case brought by labor groups, went beyond rote matters of dollars and cents.
Writing across 80 pages of court filings, Judge Lin said that the government was “engaged in a concerted campaign to purge” certain viewpoints from American universities, and that “the undisputed record” showed that Trump administration officials had “engaged in coercive and retaliatory conduct in violation of the First Amendment and the 10th Amendment.”
