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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cautious_Optimist who wrote (356770)	12/9/2025 11:44:25 AM
From: Wharf Rat	2 Recommendations Recommended By bustersmith Cautious_Optimist Respond to of 358084

UC workers beat Trump in court - and provided a roadmap for countering his attacks on universities *Opinion by Jonah J. Lalas, Christian Dyogi Phillips* • 4h Demonstrators rally at UCLA on April 8 during a "Kill the Cuts" protest against the Trump administration's research funding cuts. (Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images) This summer, the Trump administration canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants to UCLA and threatened the loss of federal funding throughout the University of California system unless it imposed conditions in line with President Donald Trump's ideological agenda. The demands included restricting on-campus protests, ending diversity-related scholarships and conforming to the administration's definitions of gender identity. On Nov. 14, a U.S. district judge in San Francisco issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration's unpopular efforts to squash academic freedom at the University of California. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin concluded that by using threats of economic devastation, the Trump administration had "engaged in coercive and retaliatory conduct in violation of the First Amendment and the 10th Amendment." The administration may appeal the ruling, but has not done so yet. A historic coalition of 21 unions and organizations representing over 150,000 workers and faculty in the UC system - among them nurses, cafeteria workers, building custodians, graduate students working as academic employees, medical residents and professors - served as the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the Trump administration. At a time when even the most powerful Republican elected officials admit to being afraid of speaking out against the president, these workers and educators submitted public declarations to illustrate the harm that the Trump administration's coercive actions are wreaking on the university's public mission and their rights. They had the courage to do what UC has not: Stand up to authoritarianism and win. Labor leader and former UCLA Labor Center Director Kent Wong, who passed away in October, would have celebrated this victory. It mirrors the types of winning coalitions that Kent built during his long, storied career. Throughout that work, Kent demanded a more inclusive labor movement that did not separate worker justice from racial, gender or immigrant justice. As its director for 30 years, Kent transformed the UCLA Labor Center on an audacious premise: The finest public university system in the world should tackle the thorny social challenges of economic inequality and worker justice with the same urgency and talent as other marquee goals, like treatments for cancer and climate change solutions. He taught courses that enriched students' knowledge of labor history and immigrant rights. But the Labor Center went beyond theory; it put students into action by creating opportunities for students - documented or undocumented - to work directly with unions, nonprofits and community organizations. The labor center at UC Berkeley and the UCLA Labor Center became models for similar centers throughout the UC system. This was all part of Kent's vision to mentor and train the next generation of organizers who could unite movements for justice and transform the lives of working people. As leaders at Unite Here Local 11 put it: "His legacy lives on in every organizer he mentored, every campaign he shaped, and every person he uplifted." To be sure, some liberal commentators concerned with beating Trump's Republican Party in the next wave of elections may sound the alarm: An approach like that of the Labor Center promotes the kind of "woke" campus politics of the "academic left" that alienates the working-class voters Trump won over; a university center training over 1,000 everyday citizens to nonviolently resist federal immigration raids instead of focusing on bread-and-butter economic issues is academic freedom run amok. Indeed, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein highlighted the "impressive and encouraging" approach to elections of populist senatorial candidate Dan Osborn in Nebraska. A former local union leader, Osborn aligned himself with Trump's xenophobic stance on immigration: "If Trump needs help building the wall, well, I'm pretty handy." Klein and others seem to suggest that winning over working-class voters who supported Trump necessarily involves deprioritizing the interests of the most vulnerable members of the Democratic Party coalition because their identity involves "cultural issues" as opposed to "economic issues." We've heard this all before. Kent would have been the first to list all the moments in U.S. history where people in power have tried to divide American workers with the racist specter of immigration. He never hesitated to point out that Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor, championed the Chinese Exclusion Act that banned most immigration from China for decades. Excluding wide swaths of workers from the labor movement based on race or immigration status only hampered the fight for workplace democracy. Time and again, it allowed employers and politicians to exploit racial resentments, pitting workers against each other to prevent them from uniting for better wages, benefits, working conditions and laws that strengthen the social safety net. Keenly aware of these patterns in our nation's past, Kent insisted that "We need to rise together, not just to defend immigrant communities, but to build a world where everyone can thrive." There is no better place to teach these social justice history lessons, and in the case of the UC workers' court victory last month, see these lessons in action, than at the world's top public institution of higher education.