As UCLA works to restore $500 million in federal grant funding cut by the Trump administration earlier this year, the university’s chancellor, Julio Frenk, said on Thursday that there are three principles the campus must “safeguard” amid its negotiations with the government. 

“We need to assure that there’s no government interference in who we hire, who we admit and what we teach or do research on,” Frenk told radio talk show host Larry Mantle. The two spoke during a virtual event on Thursday hosted by Jews United for Democracy and Justice, a group formed in response to President Donald Trump’s executive orders during his first term that prohibited travel and refugee resettlement from select, predominately Muslim, countries. 

“That’s the core of academic freedom,” Frenk, who began his tenure as chancellor in January, said of the series of principles.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration sent a 28-page settlement proposal to UCLA, The Los Angeles Times reported. In addition to accusations that the university failed to address antisemitism on campus, the government said it was cutting funding over the school’s use of race in admissions and the school’s recognition of transgender identities. Frenk said that he is not directly participating in the negotiations. 

Frenk, a Jewish physician whose grandparents settled in Mexico after fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s, admitted that UCLA has “a real problem with antisemitism” and said the university needs “to tackle it.” 

But he criticized the Trump administration’s approach of “cutting funding for life-saving and life-transforming research,” saying it “doesn’t address the problem of antisemitism.”

Asked how he would handle an incident similar to last year’s demonstration in which pro-Palestinian protesters blocked campus access for some Jewish students, leading to a lawsuit and a $6 million settlement in July, Frenk responded that “if anything happens like that, we will act immediately, because we now have very clear rules” around demonstrations. The university released a new set of time, place and manner policies earlier this month.  

Questioned whether UCLA would adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism — as Harvard and Columbia have recently done while similarly under antisemitism investigations — Frenk declined to endorse or oppose the idea, which is supported by many pro-Israel students and faculty.   

Soon after stepping into his new role at UCLA, Frenk suspended the undergraduate and graduate chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine after their members vandalized the home of UC Regent Jay Sures. In March, he announced an initiative to implement the recommendations of a task force that examined antisemitism and anti-Israel activity on campus. On Thursday, Frenk said that as part of the initiative, the university was “about to announce the recruitment of a Title VI officer” to enforce federal civil rights statutes and implement training for students and staff. 

Frenk said that combating campus antisemitism will make all students on campus safer. “A reason to fight antisemitism is to also protect our non-Jewish, including our Muslim students. We cannot accept bigotry, discrimination, hatred against one group. History shows us that if one group is attacked, and we allow that to go on, everyone is unsafe. So, this applies to all of our students.”

School may be out of session for the summer, but officials from Georgetown University, the University of California, Berkeley and the City University of New York will be in the hot seat this week when they testify on Tuesday before the House Education and Workforce Committee.

This is not the first time that university officials have appeared in front of Congress to account for the situations on their campuses, but this week’s hearing aims to focus on more than just the anti-Israel activism that has permeated many campuses since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza to focus on root issues, including foreign funding in higher education as well as faculty anti-Israel organizing efforts.

With that as the backdrop, Georgetown’s interim president, Robert Groves, is likely to face hard-hitting questioning about the school’s donations from authoritarian regimes. 

Nearly a decade ago, Georgetown took a $10 million donation from an organization connected to Beijing’s ruling Chinese Communist Party — more specifically, according to The Washington Post, to “the specific CCP organizations that manage overseas influence operations” — to establish the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues.

But that $10 million is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money Qatar is alleged to have sent to Georgetown. According to a study by the research institute ISGAP — which primarily focuses on progressive and Islamist antisemitism — Qatar has donated more than $1 billion dollars to the Jesuit school in recent decades. In addition, Qatar has long had a partnership with Georgetown that includes an outpost of the school in Doha. Earlier this year, the school extended its contract with Doha for another decade.

UC Berkeley’s own handling of foreign funding will be under the microscope during Tuesday’s hearing. Earlier this year, the Department Education launched an investigation into the school’s alleged failure to report hundreds of million dollars in foreign funding — including $220 million from China for the creation of a Berkeley-linked campus in the city of Shenzhen.

The CUNY system doesn’t receive foreign funding. But it is likely to face scrutiny for its handling of campus antisemitism issues, which date back long before the Oct. 7 attacks. A decade ago, CUNY’s graduate student union was one of the first to push an anti-Israel vote on Shabbat. 

In the years since, the school has seen a number of issues across its campuses and disciplines. CUNY Law School’s 2022 commencement speaker, Nerdeen Kiswani, said from the lectern that she had been targeted by “well-funded organizations with ties to the Israeli government.”

Kiswani, one of the founders of the far-left anti-Israel Within Our Lifetime organization, was a national leader of Students for Justice in Palestine when she was an undergraduate attending both Hunter College and the College of Staten Island.

We also expect a number of committee members to grill Georgetown and Berkeley leaders on their handling of campus incidents, such as the Georgetown’s support for a professor earlier this year who was alleged to have ties to Hamas, as well as the more recent call last month by the chair of the school’s Islamic studies department to call for “symbolic” Iranian strikes on American bases in the Middle East. 

Past hearings have proven to be significant moments for some of those testifying, as well as members of Congress. Rep. Elise Stefanik’s (R-NY) profile was elevated following her grilling of University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard leaders — two of whom resigned shortly after appearing before the committee.

But they are perhaps most consequential for the Jewish students on those campuses — many of whom matriculated amid the COVID-19 pandemic after having lost out on key adolescent and teenage experiences. For some of these students, their desire to have a “normal” college experience was taken from them by the protests and anti-Israel activity that swept across campuses nearly two years ago. But still, many continue to apply to these schools, hopeful that the worst is in the past.

There’s a saying that has floated around many a conference, Jewish organizational board meeting and Shabbat dinner table in recent years: Jews endow buildings, their enemies endow what happens inside of them. Tomorrow’s hearing will see just how deeply those efforts have permeated.