Judge halts federal administration from cutting funding or fining UC over alleged discrimination
A San Francisco judge issued a preliminary injunction on Nov. 14 effectively barring the Trump administration from cutting funding or fining the University of California over alleged discrimination.
According to the National Public Radio, the ruling states the federal government cannot disrupt funding over claims that the University of California (UC) allows antisemitism and other civil rights violations without certain legal requirements. These requirements include notices to impacted faculty and a hearing.
U.S. District Judge Rita Lin, who issued the ruling, said labor unions representing UC employees and other groups representing faculty and students provided evidence that the federal government “engaged in a concerted campaign to purge ‘woke,’ ‘left,’ and ‘socialist’ viewpoints from our country’s leading universities.”
The federal government has been investigating several UCs for allegedly failing to respond adequately to antisemitism on its campuses. Over the summer, the federal government suspended about 800 grants meant for research at UC Los Angeles because the University allegedly engaged in “race discrimination including in its admissions process, and in other areas of student life, as well as failing to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias.”
“Agency officials, as well as the President and Vice President, have repeatedly and publicly announced a playbook of initiating civil rights investigations of preeminent universities to justify cutting off federal funding, with the goal of bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune,” Lin said in her ruling against immediate funding cuts. “It is undisputed that this precise playbook is now being executed at the University of California.”
UCI to open America’s first all-electric acute care hospital in December
UC Irvine will open the country’s first all-electric acute care hospital on Dec. 10. According to New University, the facility aims to provide “state-of-the-art” care while contributing to UC’s goal of achieving carbon neutrality.
The hospital, named the Irvine Campus Medical Complex, will be used for cancer treatment and research as well as inpatient and outpatient care. The $1.2 billion complex will have 144 beds and employ nearly 1,000 staff members.
Director of UCI Health Joe Brothman told LAist that “the operation of this campus will have no emissions.” Its electricity will be generated by alternative energy such as solar and wind.
“ It is absolutely beautiful. We don’t ever get snow. The weather here never really gets into the triple digits too often,” Brothman said about the hospital’s location in Orange County. “In that sense, this was the perfect location to build this all-electric facility because it’s the perfect tempered climate for this location.”
Math skills on the decline for UCSD freshmen
Students are matriculating at UC San Diego with declining mathematics skills. Writing and language skills are also on the decline, although to a lesser degree.
According to an internal report recently released by UCSD’s Senate-Administration Workgroup, the number of students whose math skills are below middle-school level increased almost 30 times over between 2020 and 2025.
“This deterioration coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on education, the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation, and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools,” the report read. “The combination of these factors has produced an incoming class increasingly unprepared for the quantitative and analytical rigor expected at UC San Diego.”
Per the report, the UCSD admissions team implemented several remedies for its 2025 cohort including a “math-GPA cutoff,” which was utilized for applicants with a first-choice major that required certain math courses. As a future measure, the report recommended a “Math Index” as a way of evaluating how well a student may do in their chosen major compared to their math skills at time of admission.
The report concluded by stating that more research is needed to assess the issue of declining writing and language skills, especially in the age of “widespread use of artificial intelligence tools.”
A version of this article appeared on p. 2 of the Nov. 20 print edition of the Daily Nexus.
