UCLA and Duke Join the List of Universities Losing Research Funding

On Thursday, July 31, 2025, UCLA announced it was losing research funding from the federal government. The Justice Department said that UCLA violated federal law by “acting with deliberate indifference in creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students.” The Los Angeles Times reported UCLA’s loss in funding to be $300 million.

Duke University had $108 million in research funding suspended over its affirmative action and DEI policies. A letter to the university from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy and Education Secretary Linda McMahon said, “Racism is a scourge when practiced by individuals, but it is especially corrosive when enshrined in the nation’s most eminent and respected institutions.” The issues cited included “racial preferences in hiring, student admissions, governance, patient care, and other operations.”

This comes at a time when the Trump administration has enacted sweeping cancellations of federal funding to several U.S. universities, citing failures to address antisemitic discrimination, violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and the implementation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. As of mid-2025, at least 60 universities including, Harvard and Columbia and have faced investigations or enforcement actions from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Harvard saw over $2.6 billion in research grants frozen. Columbia had to take corrective action and pay a $200 million fine to restore $400 million in funding.

Critics argue the administration is targeting DEI initiatives and chilling academic freedom under the guise of civil rights enforcement. In his letter to the UCLA community, Chancellor Julio Frenk said, “With this decision, hundreds of grants may be lost, adversely affecting the lives and life-changing work of UCLA researchers, faculty and staff. In its notice to us, the federal government claims antisemitism and bias as the reasons. This far-reaching penalty of defunding life-saving research does nothing to address any alleged discrimination.”

The Administration’s orders have sparked legal challenges and pushback from civil rights groups, who warn that underrepresented communities, including Asian Americans, could be disproportionately affected by the rollback of equity programs and research cuts. On February 3, 2025, Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC) was among the first groups to file a lawsuit to stop Donald Trump’s executive order to rollback DEI from taking effect. The lawsuit made it clear that the executive orders violate constitutional protections on free speech, equal opportunity, and due process.

Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC) has warned that rescinding affirmative action initiatives will widen educational inequities and erase their communities from campus narratives. “Southeast Asian American students are uniquely impacted by systemic racial inequity leaving them overlooked and misunderstood. They are descendants of the largest refugee community ever resettled in America as survivors of war, genocide, and trauma that impact their educational outcomes.” Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, Vietnamese Americans already face low college attainment rates.

The wave of federal funding cuts signals a profound shift in national education policy, with potentially devastating impacts on academic freedom, equity, and underrepresented communities whose voices and futures hang in the balance.