(Los Angeles) The California public university announced on Friday that the United States government was calling for a monster fine of $ 1 billion for the 2024 Propalestinian demonstrations, a new Donald Trump administration offensive against higher education.
The amount represents five times what Columbia University has agreed to pay at the end of July, more than $ 200 million, to settle a dispute over anti -Semitism accusations which would have proliferated on its campus during the spring 2024 movement against the war waged by Israel in the Gaza Strip.
“As a public university, we are dependent on the taxpayer’s resources and a payment of this magnitude would completely destroy the best public university system in the country and would do an immense harm to our students and all Californians,” the President of the University of California (UC) James Millike told the press.
According to this official who oversees ten campuses, the most important of whom in Los Angeles (UCLA), headquarters of last year’s demonstrations and in the Trump administration’s crosshairs, the university received the request from the federal government on Friday.
Milliken invoked the “crucial work that UCLA and the UC network do in terms of technological and medical research, in order to save lives, grow the American economy and preserve national security”.
According to media in California, the Trump government would also demand that the University pay $ 172 million to its Jewish students who have felt discriminated against and intimidated during the campus movement 15 months ago.
The UC network, located in the most populated and richest state in the country, is considered to be the best public higher education system in the United States, where prestigious private universities are practicing prohibitive costs.
Since his return to power on January 20, President Trump, an unwavering ally of Israel, has continued to accentuate the pressures on universities by freeze, in the case of Columbia, hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidies paid by the federal state for research.
Columbia sealed a financial agreement at 221 million dollars with the US government at the end of July to end months of conflict, but experts denounced a “devastating precedent” in this “authoritarian” offensive carried out against higher education in the United States.
The New York Times also reported last week that an agreement at $ 500 million would be in preparation between the Trump administration and the oldest university in the country, Harvard.
