Behind UCLA’s Funding Freeze: Anti-Israel Professors, Radical Grantmaking and Major DEI Investments

Earlier in August the Trump administration announced it would close the federal funding spigot to a major part of the University of California system, UCLA. The funding freeze involves $339 million worth of federal grants from agencies like the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes for Health and more.

The university had just settled a lawsuit with Jewish students for $6.45M over their being denied access to parts of campus following October 7, 2023. On the same day, the Department of Justice alleged they were in violation of the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI because of antisemitism and race-based discrimination. President Trump himself had said the school should pony up $1 billion to come to a settlement with the feds. The DOJ also continues to investigate UCLA’s admissions process.

After the 10/7 attacks by Hamas, UCLA was one of the campuses that quickly drew national attention. Anti-Israel activists on campus formed a human barricade and refused to permit Jewish students to cross the campus. The lawsuit from three Jewish students described the university as a “hotbed of antisemitism” and called the campus division a “Jew Exclusion Zone.” The area was peppered with “Zionist checkpoints.” Per NBC News:

The complaint alleges the protesters created a “Jew Exclusion Zone” where in order to pass “a person had to make a statement pledging their allegiance to the activists’ view.” Those who complied with the protesters’ view were issued wristbands to allow them to pass through, the complaint says, which effectively barred Jewish students who supported Israel and denied them access to the heart of campus.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Mark C. Scarsi sided with the three students and rebuked the school.

“Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom,” he wrote.

Amid the controversy, Open the Books did what it does best and dove into the facts and figures. Multiple professors at the school have made radical anti-Israel statements that are littered with the same hallmarks -- anticolonialism, anti-police sentiments, race essentialism -- that also define DEI-based rhetoric. Since 2021, the university collected $4.3 billion in federal grants and contracts, including some money to support the departments that employ those radical professors. And while they’ve reorganized their DEI infrastructure, an Office of Inclusive Excellence remains -- led by a woman whose forthcoming book is titled “Racial Exhaustion.”

UCLA’s Anti-Israel Professors

Khaled Abou El Fadl is a UCLA law professor and “one of the world’s leading authorities on Shari'ah, Islamic law and Islam, and a prominent scholar in the field of human rights,” according to his bio page. He is former chair of the Islamic Studies Interdepartmental Program at UCLA, and founder of the Institute of Advanced Usuli Studies, “a non-profit educational institute dedicated to ethics, beauty and critical thinking in the Islamic intellectual tradition.”

In 2024, he compared Israel policy to that of the Nazis, saying in an X video, “The Germans blamed the Jews for their own slaughter. The Germans insisted that what they did in the countries they occupied wasn’t their fault. It was always the fault of the occupied. The rhetoric of the Germans is indistinguishable from the rhetoric that Israel uses about Palestinians.”

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance highlights as an example of anti-Semitism, “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

In the same video, El Fadl stated, “We are considered like animals. Exactly like the Nazis looked at Jews. Something subhuman, something less than human, exactly like the narrative and the language of the Nazis.”

He has spread anti-Israel conspiracy theories, including that Indian Hindu nationalists are volunteering to fight alongside the Israeli army in Gaza “for the joy of killing Muslims.”

History professor Robin D.G. Kelley is an advisory board member of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, which is part of the BDS movement, and is an advisory board member of Palestine Legal, a group that provides advice and support to anti-Israel activists.

Kelley has been affiliated with the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine, the anti-Israel groups Jewish Voice for Peace and Palestinian Youth Movement.

Kelley served as a judge for Palestinian Youth Movement’s “Annual Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Scholarship in 2019.”

Kanafani was a leader and spokesperson for the terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, during which he announced the PFLP’s responsibility for the Lod Airport Massacre outside Tel Aviv of May 1972 that killed 26 people and wounded 80 others.

He has made numerous anti-Israel statements, whitewashing violent protests as resistance and considering Israel an apartheid state. For example, in a 2021 lecture at York University, he ruminated: “I was thinking about what it meant when Germany… gave 58 billion dollars to Israel to help start a nation in the name of reparations…In the name of reparations for the Holocaust, it literally provided start-up capital for a new settler-colonial state…” In 2017, at University of Toronto, he said, “The way that Zionism has emerged in Israel has basically taken up the mantle of white supremacy… that is domination by the peoples, through colonial domination.”

Kelley has contributed essays to two anti-Israel books with familiar themes of anticolonialism with anti-capitalist and anti-police rhetoric: “Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation” and “Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy,” both published in 2015. He is writing a book “Making a Killing: Cops, Capitalism, and the War on Black Life” set to be released next year.

UCLA’s DEI Infrastructure and Spending

UCLA has extensive DEI programming, that has somewhat been impacted by Trump’s executive orders and regulatory reforms aimed at eliminating the race-based preferences DEI engenders. UCLA has openly stated one of its goals is to become a federally-recognized “Hispanic-Serving Institute” (HSI) by 2025. In order to be designated an HSI, a university must have at least a 25% Hispanic student body. The website for the UCLA HSI task force states the university “has a responsibility to ensure that our institution reflects the diversity of California and welcomes members of our Latinx communities, honors their intellectual and cultural contributions, and empowers them to flourish both at UCLA and well past graduation.”

But the financial incentives for this interest in “equity” are also stated plainly on the webpage: “achieving federal recognition as an HSI will make UCLA eligible for a range of federal grants that would bolster existing educational programs, research training and academic attainment for Latinx, low-income and other underrepresented students.”

Their website states their HSI Task Force has compiled recommendations for becoming an HSI, “including directing efforts and resources toward improving admission, yield and retention rates for Latinx students.”

This program raises questions: Is UCLA conducting race-based admissions preferencing in order to obtain financial benefits from the federal government? They certainly have an incentive to do so. In June 2025, the Trump administration opened a Department of Justice investigation into the UC system, including UCLA, for illegal race and sex-based hiring and admissions practices.

Beyond their HSI initiative, UCLA maintains an “Office of Inclusive Excellence” which “supports all Bruins by leading and advancing strategies for enhancing equity, diversity and inclusion; protecting civil rights; and upholding dignity for all in our community.” Ralina Joseph was chosen to lead the office in May 2025. The press release announcing her appointment called her a “widely respected scholar of race, racism, gender and class,” highlighting her books on those topics:

• “Racial Exhaustion: How to Move Through Racism in the Wake of DEI” (2025)

• “Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity” (2018)

• “Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial” (2013)

A synopsis of Racial Exhaustion reads in part:

“Through practices of deep listening, embracing discomfort, and interrupting microaggressions, this book guides readers in transforming everyday interactions into opportunities for anti-racist change. Racial Exhaustion challenges us to recognize and address the fatigue that racial discourse brings while offering practical strategies to foster more equitable and productive conversations.”

Joseph’s history on X shows her strong commitment to DEI ideology, in one instance stating white mentors should acknowledge their “whiteness.”

One major way UCLA has responded to Trump's policies against DEI is by no longer requiring employment applicants to submit a DEI statement, although the UC provost stated at the time that it was a difference without a distinction:

“To be clear, stand-alone diversity statements will no longer be permitted in recruitments,” she said in the letter, according to the Daily Bruin. “However, consistent with federal and state law, the University should, and will, continue to provide due recognition to prospective or current employees who wish to share how they have contributed to inclusive excellence.”

Federal Dollars at UCLA

UCLA has received $4.3 billion in federal grants and contracts from FY 21 to June 2025. They break down as follows:

While the university might have engaged in DEI extremism on its own, it was encouraged by federal grantmaking reinforcements like:

• $1 million from NSF since 2021 for University of California, Los Angeles for “researching equity and antiracist learning in computer science.”

The grant extends funding to the University of Oregon, in collaboration with UCLA, to train high school computer science teachers on an “equity-focused CS course.” The grant description states, “This [Broadening Participation in Computing] alliance extension supports a BPC mission to challenge colorblind notions of building capacity in schools through antiracist approaches that disrupt and address systemic racism in high school computer science.”

• $1.6 million from NSF since 2020 for University of California, Los Angeles for “experiences that shape undergraduate computing trajectories: an equity-focused longitudinal study at center for inclusive computing institutions.”

• $216,000 from NSF since 2024 for University of California, Los Angeles for a “mathematical sciences institutes diversity initiative … to increase participation of underrepresented groups in the mathematical sciences.”

The member math institutes organize scientific conferences, including “a workshop on mathematics of racial justice … and two roots of unity conferences.”

In August 2025, NSF told UCLA that its own funding freeze was because the school was “not in alignment with current NSF priorities and/or programmatic goals.” While it had been handing out grants that contribute to the far-Left environment on campus, the agency’s priorities changed under the Trump administration. In April, NSF announced it was no longer in the business of DEI or combatting “misinformation.”

SIDENOTE: Open the Books reported that during the Biden-Harris administration, the federal government spent at least $267 million identifying and fighting “misinformation.” Read more here.

UCLA also received several Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grants since 2020 totaling $6.1 million — $2.8 million of which was for “near Eastern” studies, an alternative name for Middle Eastern studies. The rest was for Asian studies and Latin American studies.

The FLAS program has come under scrutiny in recent years as radical professors from funded departments engaged in or instigated anti-Israel activities in the wake of the October 7 attacks. Two professors listed on the UCLA FLAS grant application as examples of the Near Eastern department’s expertise are Saree Makdisi and Sherene Razack.

According to the New York Post, Makdisi and Razack held an “Emergency Teach-In on the Crisis in Palestine” just days after the Hamas attack on Israel. Razack told the Post about the event in an email:

“Yesterday’s panel did depict Israel as a settler colonial society that came into existence through the dispossession of Palestinians and that maintains a brutal occupation of Palestine.”

“Further, Israel practices Apartheid and Palestinians and Jews do not possess equal rights under law, a conclusion widely shared by scholars — Israeli and non-Israeli alike, and by Amnesty International, among others. As my panel member Professor Makdisi put it in a recent article in The Nation, Israel is ‘a colonial power driven by an exclusionary racial ideology.’”

The Near Eastern department also received $70,000 from National Endowment for the Humanities in 2024 to study “energy technologies, development, and the environment in modern Iran, 1935-2005’ focusing on “the history [of] natural gas in 20th-century Iran, using the energy source as both a varied material substance and an object of discourse as a lens to study the country’s developmental programs, its charged politics of modernization, and their connection to the natural world.”

NEH also gave a $35,000 in 2020 for “new directions in Middle East learning,” what was billed as a “multidisciplinary freshman course sequence exploring MENA [Middle East and North Africa] culture through diverse humanistic perspectives.”