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Tag: UCLA

  • Federal judge is ‘inclined’ to order Trump to restore $500 million in UCLA research grants

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    A federal judge Thursday said she was “inclined to extend” an earlier ruling and order the Trump administration to restore an additional $500 million in UCLA medical research grants that were frozen in response to the university’s alleged campus antisemitism violations.

    Although she did not issue a formal ruling late Thursday, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin indicated she is leaning toward reversing — for now — the vast majority of funding freezes that University of California leaders say have endangered the future of the 10-campus, multi-hospital system.

    Lin, a judge in the Northern District of California, said she was prepared to add UCLA’s National Institutes of Health grant recipients to an ongoing class-action lawsuit that has already led to the reversal of tens of millions of dollars in grants from the National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Endowment for the Humanities and other federal agencies to UC campuses.

    The judge’s reasoning: The UCLA grants were suspended by form letters that were unspecific to the research, a likely violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, which regulates executive branch rulemaking.

    Though Lin said she had a “lot of homework to do” on the matter, she indicated that reversing the grant cuts was “likely where I will land” and she would issue an order “shortly.”

    Lin said the Trump administration had undertaken a “fundamental sin” in its “un-reasoned mass terminations” of the grants using “letters that don’t go through the required factors that the agency is supposed to consider.”

    The possible preliminary injunction would be in place as the case proceeds through the courts. But in saying she leaned toward broadening the case, Lin suggested she believed there would be irreparable harm if the suspensions were not immediately reversed.

    The suit was filed in June by UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley professors fighting a separate, earlier round of Trump administration grant clawbacks. The University of California is not a party in the case.

    A U.S. Department of Justice lawyer, Jason Altabet, said Thursday that instead of a federal district court lawsuit filed by professors, the proper venue would be the U.S. Court of Federal Claims filed by UC. Altabet based his arguments on a recent Supreme Court ruling that upheld the government’s suspension of $783 million in NIH grants — to universities and research centers throughout the country — in part because the issue, the high court said, was not properly within the jurisdiction of a lower federal court.

    Altabet said the administration was “fully embracing the principles in the Supreme Court’s recent opinions.”

    The hundreds of NIH grants on hold at UCLA look into Parkinson’s disease treatment, cancer recovery, cell regeneration in nerves and other areas that campus leaders argue are pivotal for improving the health of Americans.

    The Trump administration has proposed a roughly $1.2-billion fine and demanded campus changes over admission of international students and protest rules. Federal officials have also called for UCLA to release detailed admission data, ban gender-affirming healthcare for minors and give the government deep access to UCLA internal campus data, among other demands, in exchange for restoring $584 million in funding to the university.

    In addition to allegations that the university has not seriously dealt with complaints of antisemitism on campus, the government also said it slashed UCLA funding in response to its findings that the campus illegally considers race in admissions and “discriminates against and endangers women” by recognizing the identities of transgender people.

    UCLA has said it has made changes to improve campus climate for Jewish communities and does not use race in admissions. Its chancellor, Julio Frenk, has said that defunding medical research “does nothing” to address discrimination allegations. The university displays websites and policies that recognize different gender identities and maintains services for LGBTQ+ communities.

    UC leaders said they will not pay the $1.2-billion fine and are negotiating with the Trump administration over its other demands. They have told The Times that many settlement proposals cross the university’s red lines.

    “Recent federal cuts to research funding threaten lifesaving biomedical research, hobble U.S. economic competitiveness and jeopardize the health of Americans who depend on cutting-edge medical science and innovation,” a UC spokesperson said in a statement Thursday. “While the University of California is not a party to this suit, the UC system is engaged in numerous legal and advocacy efforts to restore funding to vital research programs across the humanities, social sciences and STEM fields.”

    A ruling Lin issued in the case last month resulted in $81 million in NSF grants restored to UCLA. If the UCLA NIH grants are reinstated, it would leave about $3 million from the July suspensions — all Department of Energy grants — still frozen at UCLA.

    Lin also said she leaned toward adding Transportation and Defense department grants to the case, which run in the millions of dollars but are small compared with UC’s NIH grants.

    The hearing was closely watched by researchers at the Westwood campus, who have cut back on lab hours, reduced operations and considered layoffs as the crisis at UCLA moves toward the two-month mark.

    In interviews, they said they were hopeful grants would be reinstated but remain concerned over the instability of their work under the recent federal actions.

    Lydia Daboussi, a UCLA assistant professor of neurobiology whose $1-million grant researching nerve injury is suspended, observed the hearing online.

    Aftewards, Daboussi said she was “cautiously optimistic” about her grant being reinstated.

    “I would really like this to be the relief that my lab needs to get our research back online,” said Daboussi, who is employed at the David Geffen School of Medicine. “If the preliminary injunction is granted, that is a wonderful step in the right direction.”

    Grant funding, she said, “was how we bought the antibodies we needed for experiments, how we purchased our reagents and our consumable supplies.” The lab consists of nine other people, including two PhD students and one senior scientist.

    So far, none of Daboussi’s lab members have departed. But, she said, if “this goes on for too much longer, at some point, people’s hours will have to be reduced.”

    “I do find myself having to pay more attention to volatilities outside of our lab space,” she said. “I’ve now become acquainted with our legal system in ways that I didn’t know would be necessary for my job.”

    Elle Rathbun, a sixth-year neuroscience PhD candidate at UCLA, lost a roughly $160,000 NIH grant that funded her study of stroke recovery treatment.

    “If there is a chance that these suspensions are lifted, that is phenomenal news,” said Rathbun, who presented at UCLA’s “Science Fair for Suspended Research” this month.

    “Lifting these suspensions would then allow us to continue these really critical projects that have already been determined to be important for American health and the future of American health,” she said.

    Rathbun’s research is focused on a potential treatment that would be injected into the brain to help rebuild it after a stroke. Since the suspension of her grant, Rathbun, who works out of a lab at UCLA’s neurology department, has been seeking other funding sources.

    “Applying to grants takes a lot of time,” she said. “So that really slowed down my progress in my project.”

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    Jaweed Kaleem, Daniel Miller

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  • Pepper-balls, rifle rounds, drones: UC police get green light for military-grade weapons

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    SAN FRANCISCO — University of California police will be replenishing and increasing their stockpile of military-grade weapons and equipment — including drones, bullets and thousands of pepper ball rounds — as part of an annual request approved Wednesday by the governing board of regents.

    As UC’s handling of protests and campus security comes under scrutiny from the Trump administration, five campuses — UCLA, Irvine, Santa Barbara, San Diego and San Francisco — asked for more weapons, while those in Berkeley, Davis, Merced, Riverside and Santa Cruz did not seek to make new purchases.

    The biggest request came from UC San Diego, which said it needed 5,000 new 5.56-millimeter caliber rifle rounds to replace ones used in trainings. At UC Irvine, police asked for 1,500 pepper-ball projectiles. UCLA, which has a significant weapons inventory compared to other campuses — among it 39,500 rifle rounds and ammo — made relatively few requests, including four new pepper-ball launchers and 100 sponge foam rounds.

    California law enforcement agencies are required by state law to make annual reports on the acquisition and use of weapons that qualify as military equipment. The definition includes munitions, explosives and long-range acoustic devices, which are regularly used by U.S. law enforcement and are not exclusive to the military. Some equipment under the definition, such as drones, are not traditional weapons but used for patrol and special events.

    A report from the office of UC President James B. Milliken presented Wednesday to the board of regents, which approved the requests, added that the tools “are not used indiscriminately but with caution to protect the lives of UC community members/visitors and UC officers when bringing an incident to a conclusion with the least amount of force.”

    The report said “no UC campus uses or receives goods from the U.S. Department of Defense and Law Enforcement Support Office program for surplus military equipment.”

    Under the state law, police departments also have to disclose use of such weapons in the last year. In 2024, the report said weapons were primarily used during training and that new orders would help replenish supplies used in those exercises.

    There were dozens of non-training exceptions at UCLA:

    • On June 10, 2024, police deployed 240 pepper-ball projectiles “during an incident involving an aggressive crowd.” It added that none of the rounds were “aimed at individuals and there were no reports of these rounds directly affecting any person.” A single sponge foam round was also fired. Police were responding to a pro-Palestinian encampment and protest.
    • A long-range acoustic device was used for crowd management 71 times. The report described the device as “a portable speaker used to provide increased sound and clarity over public address systems, bullhorns, or megaphones so officers can effectively communicate with crowds and provide emergency directions to people in large areas so they can take immediate actions such as sheltering in place or evacuating.”
    • A sponge foam round was fired “during an arrest when a suspect put their hand near a police officer’s firearm.”

    The report also detailed non-training uses at two additional campuses: UC Davis deployed drones 11 times for “patrol and special events,” and UC Santa Cruz also used a long-range acoustic device for crowd management at least once.

    California Assembly Bill 481, which requires the disclosures, was signed into law in 2021. But public scrutiny of UC policing has grown since 2024, when pro-Palestinian protests grew across the 10-university system and officers clashed with demonstrators at several campuses.

    UCLA police, the LAPD and California Highway Patrol were faulted in internal and external reports, including one compiled by a congressional education committee, for a failure to coordinate and quickly respond to a violent attack on a UCLA encampment on April 30 and May 1, 2024. The agencies have also faced criticism and lawsuits by pro-Palestinian protesters after officers shut down multiple demonstrations that year.

    Since then, UCLA has created a new top campus safety post, installed new police leadership and instituted changes to protest rules, including zero tolerance of encampments.

    Speaking at the regents meeting Wednesday during a public comment period, UCLA associate professor Chelsea Shover encouraged regents to reject the purchases.

    “My concern is that it will be used against students and faculty,” said Shover, who works in the medical and public health schools. In an interview, Shover added, “I have no confidence military-grade equipment will make the campus safer, as last year’s UCLA campus protests made clear.”

    Together with demands President Trump has made recently to restrict protests and speech freedoms at UCLA — in exchange for the release of frozen federal research funding — “this sets a worrying and chilling effect on rights protected by the 1st Amendment,” Shover said.

    Graeme Blair, a UCLA professor of political science who was part of the 2024 encampment and additional pro-Palestinian protests, said he believed Wednesday’s presentation “obscures an extraordinary use of force that injured students and faculty” during the June 10, 2024, campus protest that ended in arrests.

    Blair said the police-fired projectiles ended up “hitting students and faculty, leaving them bruised and with burning eyes.” Police reported only using one foam round. Blair said he witnessed multiple rounds.

    “The fact that UCPD fails to describe these harms calls into question whether they can be trusted with more munitions and their deployment,” he said. “Less-lethal munitions like sponge rounds, rubber bullets, and pepper balls have no place on a college campus, much less to be deployed against students and faculty exercising their right to free expression.”

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    Jaweed Kaleem

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  • How a young mom is

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    Elissa Kalver was 34 when she found a lump in her breast. She had no family history of cancer and had just welcomed her first child. She assumed the lump was a cyst. But when she went to get it checked out, doctors found another lump in her armpit. Biopsies found that both lumps were malignant. 

    More tests found the situation was worse than she could have imagined: a PET scan found cancer in her lower spine and liver. She was diagnosed with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer. Diseases that have spread as far as Kalver’s are considered incurable, according to the Cleveland Clinic.  

    “I was told I wasn’t going to die tomorrow, but I was told that there was an 80% chance that I would die within five years,” Kalver said. “The first oncologist I had, to uplift me, was like, ‘Well, I have some patients who are six, seven years out.’ Hearing that, as a 34-year-old, that your hope is to live till 40, was crazy.” 

    The new mom had to quickly adjust to her new reality.

    Elissa Kalver and her daughter shortly after her diagnosis. 

    Elissa Kalver


    “In my head, I was like, I know other people who have gone through this, I’ll cut off my breasts, whatever we have to do to get rid of it,” Kalver, now 38, said. “And it was after the PET scan, I understood that I didn’t understand. It really shifted to trying to understand that I’m essentially a cancer patient for the rest of my life.” 

    What is HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer? 

    HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer is an aggressive and fast-growing form of breast cancer that is considered incurable but treatable. Patients with HER2-positive breast cancer have high levels of human epidermal growth factor receptor 2, or HER2, a protein that manages how cells grow and divide, according to the Cleveland Clinic. 

    The prognosis and treatment of HER2-positive breast cancer vary depending on when it is diagnosed and the spread of the disease at the time. Patients who are diagnosed before the cancer spreads have a 97% five-year survival rate. For patients like Kalver, the five-year survival rate drops to 39%, according to the Cleveland Clinic. 

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    Elissa Kalver, her daughter and her husband shortly after her diagnosis.

    Elissa Kalver


    Medical advances are continually improving the prognosis, according to Dr. Shari Goldfarb, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who leads the hospital’s Young Women with Breast Cancer center. 

    “Over the past 10 to 15 years, we’ve developed so many new medications that target the HER2 receptor, and that significantly improves the outcome of women diagnosed with HER2-positive disease. It used to be one of the worst and most aggressive subtypes of cancer,” Goldfarb said. “Many women are living years and even decades now with metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer.” 

    Treating HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer

    Treating the disease requires constant surveillance, Goldfarb said. A patient like Kalver gets scans every three to four months. If their cancer is stable or improving, they will continue their current treatment. If the disease is progressing, the treatment would need to be changed, Goldfarb said. Doctors also need to consider a patient’s quality of life and treatment side effects. 

    “Generally, the principle is to give people the best quality of life possible for as long as possible,” Goldfarb said. 

    Kalver sought treatment at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. Her first treatment was an aggressive course of chemotherapy. Over the past four years, she has participated in multiple clinical trials and undergone several different forms of treatment, according to her oncologist, Dr. Marla Lipsyc-Sharf.

    Elissa Chemo

    Elissa Kalver undergoes chemotherapy. 

    Billye Brenneisen


    About a year after her diagnosis, doctors found the cancer had spread to Kalver’s brain. 

    “I always thought tumors in your brain, like, ‘That’s it,’” Kalver said.

    But a targeted chemotherapy that crossed the blood-brain barrier to attack the tumors. The masses were reduced by about 80%, Kalver said, and they have not grown in the past three years. 

    The treatments have taken their toll, Kalver said. One chemotherapy made her so nauseous that “it was hard to be awake,” Kalver said. Another caused her to lose her hair, which Kalver worried would alarm her then 1-year-old daughter. Sharf said other treatments caused Kalver to experience symptoms including bone pain, muscle pain and a bleeding rash. Each time the side effects have become too intense, Sharf works to recalibrate Kalver’s treatment. 

    Currently, Kalver is receiving chemotherapy infusions every three weeks and takes an oral medication twice a day. The treatment caused her to become “a bit anemic,” which recently required a blood transfusion, but otherwise, things are going well, she said. 

    “After being on chemo for four years, I’ve really learned that we have to prioritize living, not just surviving,” Kalver said. “I feel really grateful to still be on chemo treatments that work.” 

    216c-02-0180-epines-elissakalver-20240919.jpg

    Elissa Kalver in her “We Got This” home office. 

    Ethan Pines


    “Living like I’m alive”  

    Kalver may spend the rest of her life on chemotherapy or other treatments. She, and many other HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer patients, may never enter a remission or see no evidence of disease on their scans. She did ring the bell after finishing her first course of chemotherapy, taking part in a ritual many cancer patients use to mark the end of their treatment. 

    “I thought about it a lot going into it, because I was like, ‘I’m not done with treatment, but I’m done with this treatment. And this treatment was pretty hard, and I deserve to ring that bell,’” Kalver recalled. “I rang it so hard that I actually broke the bell.” 

    Since then, Kalver has developed other ways to mark important milestones. 

    Every year, she celebrates what she calls a “cancerversary,” honoring the day she was diagnosed. For her first “cancerversary,” Kalver launched “We Got This,” the first nonprofit gift registry for cancer patients. Since then, she has written a book, become a professional speaker and worked to educate other patients about the reality of participating in clinical trials. In July, Kalver will celebrate her fifth “cancerversary.” She’s still mulling over how to celebrate the “big milestone.” 

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    Elissa Kalver poses with her book during a chemotherapy infusion.

    Elissa Kalver


    When she’s not busy with work and advocacy, she spends time with her daughter, now 4, and her husband. Living life to the fullest is a priority, she said. 

    “I want to live as long as I can with the best quality of life that I can, making the biggest impact that I can,” Kalver said. “I do all the things, and I really make an effort at living like I’m alive.” 

    Kerry Breen

    Kerry Breen is a news editor at CBSNews.com. A graduate of New York University’s Arthur L. Carter School of Journalism, she previously worked at NBC News’ TODAY Digital. She covers current events, breaking news and issues including substance use.

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  • How a Macy’s parking structure became L.A. latest luxury apartment complex

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    An unlikely corner of one of L.A.’s once-famous/now-dead malls is open for business again this week as residents move into luxury apartments on the spot that used to be a Macy’s parking lot.

    The Westside Pavilion was one of the city’s premier shopping venues and a cultural touchstone for generations of Angelenos, appearing in movies, television shows and music videos.

    1992 photo of interior of Westside Pavilion that was designed like a Paris arcade.

    (Randy Leffingwell)

    Built on the site of California’s first drive-in movie theater, the center played prominent roles in the 1995 film “Clueless” and the video for musician Tom Petty’s 1989 hit “Free Fallin’.”

    But like many other indoor malls, the Westside Pavilion fell out of favor in the 21st century before closing in 2019 to be converted to offices for rent.

    Now the former mall also has housing, which is even more in demand than offices these days. New residents will be allowed to start moving in this week.

    On a spot once occupied by what the developer called an “absolutely horrible, obsolete” parking structure, there are now 201 luxury apartments — a six-story complex that includes townhouses with front doors that open onto a residential street.

    “You have your own stoop,” developer Lee Wagman said of the townhouses. “It’s kind of like a brownstone.”

    Developer Lee Wagman of GPI Companies stands in the rooftop lounge.

    Developer Lee Wagman of GPI Companies in the rooftop lounge area at the Overland & Ayres apartments.

    (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

    Wagman is managing partner of GPI Cos., the Los Angeles real estate company that built the Overland & Ayres apartments and converted the mall’s former Macy’s building into the West End office complex. The combined cost of both builds was $350 million.

    Wagman said the company got the temporary certificate of occupancy for the apartment complex just last week and move-ins can start as early as this week.

    The rest of the former mall was in the process of being converted to offices for rent to Google when it was purchased last year by UCLA. The university is turning the old shopping center into a nearly 700,000-square-foot research center that will focus on immunology, quantum science and engineering.

    The biomedical research center, which is set to open as early as next year, will be trying to tackle towering challenges such as curing cancer and preventing global pandemics.

    The pool area at Overland & Ayres.

    The pool area at Overland & Ayres.

    (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

    The new apartments will be convenient for people working at the research center or other nearby job centers, such as UCLA in Westwood, Century City or Culver City.

    As has grown more common for buildings competing at at the top of the apartment market, Overland & Ayres has amenities such as a gym with a resort-style pool deck and spa, an outdoor lawn for working out, a sauna and a cold plunge tub.

    It has a large rooftop space with both indoor and outdoor lounging, dining areas and gas grills. There is a game room and two event kitchens. The building also includes an outdoor dog park and a spa for pets.

    The dog park at the new Overland & Ayres Apartments.

    The dog park at the Overland & Ayres Aapartments.

    (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

    Services available to tenants for a fee include personal training and private yoga instruction, dry cleaning pickup and delivery, car washing, dog walking, grocery delivery and housekeeping. Plans also call for commercial tenants along Overland Avenue that would serve the building, such as a restaurant or Pilates studio.

    Rents range from $3,800 per month for a studio apartment to $8,500 per month for a townhouse.

    The mall makeover is part of a decades-long trend of repurposing dead shopping centers, devastated by the pivot to online shopping.

    Once the kings of retail, indoor shopping centers fell out of favor and lost customers to e-commerce, as well as outdoor “lifestyle” centers — places such as the Grove and Westfield Century City, which feature fancy restaurants, entertainment and pleasant spaces to hang out, even if you’re not buying anything.

    The kitchen and living room area of a two-bedroom den unit at the new Overland & Ayres Apartments.

    The kitchen and living room area of a two-bedroom den unit at the Overland & Ayres apartments.

    (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

    The Sherman Oaks Galleria, a legendary indoor mall used in the filming of “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “Valley Girl,” is now mostly offices.

    Lakewood Center, one of the largest enclosed malls in Los Angeles County, spanning 2 million square feet, has been sold to developers who plan to transform it by adding housing, green spaces and entertainment venues.

    “A lot of malls now are going towards mixed use,” said Wagaman, who helped turn an indoor mall in Pasadena into an outdoor mall with apartments more than two decades ago.

    It is not just old mall space. Struggling office buildings are also looking at transitioning to residences.

    With downtown L.A.’s office rental market struggling with high vacancies and falling values, stakeholders are lobbying for city support to convert high-rises to housing. The hope is that this could help address the city’s persistent housing shortage.

    Among the suggested targets for conversion are elite Financial District towers that commanded top rents before the COVID-19 pandemic’s stay-at-home orders shut down offices, leaving many buildings more than one-third vacant.

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    Roger Vincent

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  • Week 1 picks against the spread: Texas, Clemson, Notre Dame look enticing as West Coast schedule carries limited intrigue

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    Week 1 features a series of marquee matchups, all of them in the eastern half of the country. On the West Coast, the intrigue level is low.

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    Jon Wilner

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  • Padilla leaves door open for UCLA to reach deal with Trump over research cuts

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    SACRAMENTO, California — Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla said on Wednesday that UCLA could consider reaching a settlement with the Trump administration to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in frozen research funding, breaking from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s hardline stance that California “will never bend the knee” to the federal demands.

    Padilla told POLITICO that a “minor, negligible” payment or policy change would be appropriate “in exchange for keeping the money going on important research and student support programs.”

    “I can’t say they shouldn’t consider it, but it all depends on what they’re willing to budge on or agree to,” Padilla said, noting that he isn’t aware of what proposals are on the table.

    Padilla added that any potential settlement may not be palatable to the Trump administration, considering that it is targeting other institutions from the judiciary branch to media organizations, law firms and the Smithsonian Institution.

    “We can’t ignore the context here,” Padilla said.

    The Trump administration suspended more than $500 million in research funding from UCLA in late July over allegations of antisemitism on campus, just days after the university had agreed to a $6.5 million settlement with Jewish students and a professor over the pro-Palestinian protests last year. It followed that up with a $1 billion settlement demand to restore the funding, along with a host of other sweeping requests that included eliminating scholarships based on race or ethnicity and the use of proxies for race in their admissions process.

    Newsom, who sits on the regents, strongly pushed back against the demands, threatening to sue and likening the proposal to “extortion.” He stressed the state would “not be complicit in this kind of attack on academic freedom on this extraordinary public institution.” He called out Brown and Columbia for reaching deals with the Trump administration in recent weeks and said Harvard’s president “must resign” over reports that it was close to settling.

    The UCs have revealed little publicly about their strategy, saying only earlier this month that the demands were “devastating” but that leadership was “evaluating” the proposal. A group of regents held closed door meetings in recent weeks and UC President James Milliken held meetings with state lawmakers this week in Sacramento that a spokesperson said “covered a wide range of issues, including the far-reaching consequences of the federal government’s actions against UCLA.”

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  • UCLA Faces $500M Federal Grant Suspension

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    A District Judge has prevented the Trump administration from cutting federal funding for cities and counties that limit cooperation with ICE

    UCLA campus (Photo via Getty Images)
    Credit: Photo via Getty Images

    Around $500 million in federal grants have been suspended from UCLA, halting research in cancer, heart disease, diabetes, strokes, PTSD and fighting antibiotic-resistant infections.

    In August, a federal judge ordered the restoration of 114 National Science Foundation grants. However, grants from the National Institutes of Health remain suspended. Researchers have since been struggling to maintain experiments and keep staff. Many researchers feel a sense of uncertainty as funding is up in the air.

    Physician scientist and chair of the Neurology Department at UCLA, Dr. S. Thomas Carmichael, told LAist his department lost about $23 million meant for staff salaries and experiments among other critical needs. He also claimed that the suspension of funding has disrupted several projects, many of which are aimed at treating Alzheimer’s, stroke and Parkinson’s patients.

    Researchers were also working on a new drug meant to assist with learning and memory function for those with stroke and dementia damage. Carmichael estimated that, if all went well, the drug was on a five-year timeline from discovery to clinical trials. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case.

    “We’re at the stage where, hey, this works,” Carmichael said. “It does something different in these diseases that we haven’t been able to do. So now we need to replicate it. And now we need to do a lot of the studies that show what dose can be given. Is there toxicity? Those kinds of things.”

    The Neurology Department will be able to cover salaries and minimal research efforts for the next three months using money meant for high-risk, high-reward projects that NIH funding may not cover. It is not clear what will occur after this three month period. Some researchers have been using personal funds, but this is also limited.

    It is possible that researchers could lose more than a year’s worth of experiments.

    Scroll to continue reading

    Not only would losing staff negatively affect lab research, but growing uncertainty and instability could also drive many out of the field. That, in turn, could disrupt industries such as pharmaceuticals and biotech, which depend on this research. Some even worry it could collapse entirely.

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    Elizabeth Ahern

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  • Trade Issues Give Developers Pause – Los Angeles Business Journal

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    More than a third of developers statewide are putting the brakes on projects – or canceling their plans all together – due to concerns over tariffs and supply chain constraints, according to a recent commercial real estate survey released by UCLA Anderson School of Management and the downtown L.A. law firm Allen Matkins.

    The joint initiative surveyed 140 real estate firms statewide across multifamily, office, retail and industrial sectors and found that 85% of respondents also reported being more cautious of new developments.

    “Real estate investors and developers are wary of any uncertainty, and so when you talk about tariffs and the difficulties in capital markets, that leads to uncertainty,” Spencer Kallick, operating partner at Allen Matkins’ Century City office, said. “Nonetheless, there’s still a lot of dry powder and capital on the sidelines who are looking to invest in great deals.”

    Kallick said much of this is coming from the multifamily space right now, both on stabilized multifamily and on entitlements for new multifamily. This already active market has taken off further in L.A. with the increased need for housing after the wildfires.

    Demand for multifamily continues to outpace supply across the state, and 53% of the survey’s Los Angeles respondents anticipate rental supply to tighten even further.

    The majority of California’s regions anticipate office recovery, apart from Los Angeles, Sacramento and the Inland Empire, the report found. Moreover, just 27% of Southern California professionals believed office would recover and see a new development cycle in the next three years.

    When it comes to office, L.A.’s overall market is down, but Kallick emphasized how different the landscape becomes within the county’s submarkets.

    “Trends are very submarket driven. Downtown L.A. continues to be a challenge, but when you talk about Century City, it’s the hottest submarket in all the United States,” Kallick said.

    Avison Young reported in May that Century City was the top-performing office submarket in the entire West Coast.

    Additionally, the survey showed SoCal’s office development intentions went up from 9% in Allen Matkins and UCLA’s 2024 winter survey to 16% now. While this is still relatively low, Kallick outlined where he’s seeing office growth. He said that he first sees growth opportunities with owner-user buildings and second is with class A plus, which has much lower vacancy than office overall.

    He is also seeing a shift toward longer term office leases locally in the 15- to 25-year range.

    Spencer Kallick

    “People have adjusted, and businesses have adjusted to the new norm when it comes to being back in the office and have a better idea about how they can right size and how much space they need,” he said. “As a result, they are starting to make longer-term decisions about growing their office footprint.”

    Similar to the office sector, Los Angeles, Sacramento and Inland Empire are the only markets in the state with pessimistic outlooks in the retail space.

    Yet despite lower retail optimism in L.A. and with rental rate growth expected
    to lag inflation, more SoCal developers reported planning new retail projects than NorCal developers.

    The most prevalent retail developments Kallick is seeing in Los Angeles are centered around new brands, not as easily accessible through e-commerce, as well as experiential retail.

    Across the state, industrial remains a steady asset class with survey respondents anticipating moderate rental rate growth in Los Angeles, as well as San Francisco, East Bay, Inland Empire, Orange County and Silicon Valley.

    “The industrial sector always seems to remain strong, and I think that’s driven in large part due to e-commerce,” Kallick said.

    In fact, e-commerce was the top answer in the survey for factors driving industrial development, outranking data centers and AI.

    With more retailers operating at a similar delivery pace as Amazon.com Inc., the need for warehouse space in close proximity to a company’s customer bases is important, Kallick said.

    Even still, the survey also found that 31% of Southern California respondents expect more than one industrial project to break ground, compared to 54% from the prior survey.

    In response to this decline, Kallick asserted that this trend is being seen across all sectors when it comes to new projects.

    “Real estate investors and developers are loath to begin construction in this uncertain market, and they’re concerned about locking in a GMP (guaranteed maximum price contract) when the next day, tariffs might go up, might go down,” Kallick said. “That creates confusion about when to start new construction.”

    One factor impacting occupancy in the existing supply is that some of the industrial buildings that have traded hands in the last few years have implemented higher rent pricing, Kallick said.

    “As a result, those buildings that need to hit a high rental rate are remaining vacant while older class B and C buildings that don’t have a rental assumption quite as high are seeing more leasing activities,” he said.

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  • ‘A continual assault.’ How UCLA’s research faculty is grappling with Trump funding freeze

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    Their medical research focuses on potentially lifesaving breakthroughs in cancer treatment, and developing tools to more easily diagnose debilitating diseases. Their studies in mathematics could make online systems more robust and secure.

    But as the academic year opens, the work of UCLA’s professors in these and many other fields has been imperiled by the Trump administration’s suspension of $584 million in grant funding, which University of California President James B. Milliken called a “death knell” to its transformative research.

    The freeze came after a July 29 U.S. Department of Justice finding that the university had violated the civil rights of Jewish and Israeli students by providing an inadequate response to alleged antisemitism they faced after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.

    The fight over the funding stoppage intensified Friday after the Trump administration demanded that UCLA pay a $1-billion fine, among other concessions, to resolve the accusations — and California Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state will sue, calling the proposal “extortion.”

    Amid heightened tensions in Westwood, thousands of university academics are in limbo. In total, at least 800 grants, mostly from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, have been frozen.

    UCLA scholars described days of confusion as they struggle to understand how the loss of grants would affect their work and scramble to uncover new funding sources — or roles that would ensure their continued pay, or that of their colleagues. While professors still have jobs and paychecks to draw on, many others, including graduate students, rely on grant funding for their salaries, tuition and healthcare.

    At least for the moment, though, several academics told The Times that their work had not yet be interrupted. So far, no layoffs have been announced.

    Sydney Campbell, a UCLA cancer researcher whose grant funding has been cut, stands inside the Biomedical Sciences Research building at UCLA.

    (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

    Sydney Campbell, a pancreatic cancer researcher and postdoctoral scholar at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, said her work — which aims to understand how diet affects the disease — is continuing for now. She has an independent fellowship that “hopefully will protect the majority of my salary.” But others, she said, don’t have that luxury.

    “It is absolutely going to affect people’s livelihoods. I already know of people … with families who are having to take pay cuts almost immediately,” said Campbell, who works for a lab that has lost two National Institutes of Health grants, including one that funds her research.

    Pancreatic cancer is among the most deadly of cancers, but Campbell’s work could lead to a better understanding of it, paving the way for more robust prophylactic programs — and treatment plans — that may ultimately help tame the scourge.

    “Understanding how diet can impact cancer development could lead to preventive strategies that we can recommend to patients in the future,” said Campbell, a member of the UAW 4811 academic workers union. “Right now we can’t effectively do that because we don’t have the information about the underlying biology. Our studies will help us actually be able to make recommendations based on science.”

    Campbell’s work — and that of many others at UCLA — is potentially groundbreaking. But it could soon be put on hold.

    “We have people who don’t know if they’re going to be able to purchase experimental materials for the rest of the month,” she said.

    Fears of existential crisis

    For some, the cuts have triggered something close to an existential crisis.

    After professor Dino Di Carlo, chair of the UCLA Samueli Bioengineering Department, learned that about 20 grants were suspended there — including four in his lab worth about $1 million — he felt a profound sadness. He said he doesn’t know why his grants were frozen, and there may not be money to pay his six researchers.

    So Di Carlo, who is researching diagnostics for Lyme and other tick-borne diseases, took to LinkedIn, where he penned a post invoking the Franz Kafka novel “The Trial.” The unsettling tale is about a man named Josef K. who wakes up and finds himself under arrest and then on trial — with no understanding of the situation.

    “Like Josef K., the people actually affected — the public, young scientists, patients waiting for better treatments and diagnostic tools — are left asking: What crime did we commit?” wrote Di Carlo. “They are being judged by a system that no longer explains itself.”

    The LinkedIn post quickly attracted dozens of comments and more than 1,000 other responses. Di Carlo, who has been working to find jobs for researchers who depend on paychecks that come from now-suspended grants, said he appreciated the support.

    But, goodwill has its limits. “It doesn’t pay the rent for a student this month,” he said.

    Di Carlo’s research is partly focused on developing an at-home test that would detect Lyme and other tick-borne diseases, which are on the rise. Because no such product is currently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, he said, people who’ve experienced a tick bite have to wait for lab results to confirm their infection.

    “This delay in diagnosis prevents timely treatment, allowing the disease to progress and potentially lead to long-term health issues,” he said. “A rapid, point-of-care test would allow individuals to receive immediate results, enabling early treatment with antibiotics when the disease is most easily addressed, significantly reducing the risk of chronic symptoms and improving health outcomes.”

    Di Carlo lamented what he called “a continual assault on the scientific community” by the Trump administration, which has canceled billions of dollars in National Institutes of Health funding for universities across the country.

    It “just … hasn’t let up,” Di Carlo said.

    Scrambling for funds

    Some professors who’ve lost grants have spent long hours scrambling to secure new sources of funding.

    Di Carlo said he was in meetings all week to identify which researchers are affected by the cuts, and to try to figure out, “Can we support those students?” He has also sought to determine whether some could be moved to other projects that still have funding, or be given teaching assistant positions, among other options.

    He’s not alone in those efforts. Mathematics professor Terence Tao also has lost a grant worth about $750,000. But Tao said that he was more distressed by the freezing of a $25-million grant for UCLA’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. The funding loss for the institute, where Tao is director of special projects, is “actually quite existential,” he said, because the grant is “needed to fund operations” there.

    Tao, who is the James and Carol Collins chair in the College of Letters and Sciences, said the pain goes beyond the loss of funds. “The abruptness — and basically the lack of due process in general — just compounds the damage,” said Tao. “We got no notice.”

    A luminary in his field, Tao conducts research that examines, in part, whether a group of numbers are random or structured. His work could lead to advances in cryptography that may eventually make online systems — such as those used for financial transactions — more secure.

    “It is important to do this kind of research — if we don’t, it’s possible that an adversary, for example, could actually discover these weaknesses that we are not looking for at all,” Tao said. “So you do need this extra theoretical confirmation that things that you think are working actually do work as intended, [and you need to] also explore the negative space of what doesn’t work.”

    Tao said he’s been heartened by donations that the mathematics institute has received from private donors in recent days — about $100,000 so far.

    “We are scrambling for short-term funding because we need to just keep the lights on for the next few months,” said Tao.

    Rafael Jaime, president of United Auto Workers Local 4811, which represents 48,000 academic workers within the University of California — including about 8,000 at UCLA — said he was not aware of any workers who haven’t been paid so far, but that the issue could come to a head at the end of August.

    He said that the UC system “should do everything that it can to ensure that workers aren’t left without pay.”

    What comes next?

    A major stressor for academics: the uncertainty.

    Some researchers whose grants were suspended said they have not received much guidance from UCLA on a path forward. Some of that anxiety was vented on Zoom calls last week, including a UCLA-wide call attended by about 3,000 faculty members.

    UCLA administrators said they are exploring stopgap options, including potential emergency “bridge” funding to grantees to pay researchers or keep up labs such as those that use rodents as subjects.

    Some UCLA academics worried about a brain drain. Di Carlo said that undergraduate students he advises have begun asking for his advice on relocating to universities abroad for graduate school.

    “This has been the first time that I’ve seen undergraduate students that have asked about foreign universities for their graduate studies,” he said. “I hear, ‘What about Switzerland? … What about University of Tokyo?’ This assault on science is making the students think that this is not the place for them.”

    But arguably researchers’ most pressing concern is continuing their work.

    Campbell explained that she has personally been affected by pancreatic cancer — she lost someone close to her to it. She and her peers do the research “for the families” who’ve also been touched by the disease.

    “That the work that’s already in progress has the chance of being stopped in some way is really disappointing,” she said. “Not just for me, but for all those patients I could potentially help.”

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    Daniel Miller, Jaweed Kaleem

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  • Trump seeks $1-billion fine against UCLA. Newsom says ‘we’ll sue,’ calling it extortion

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    Hours after the Trump administration demanded that the University of California pay a $1-billion fine to settle federal accusations of antisemitism in exchange for restoring frozen grant funding to UCLA, Gov. Gavin Newsom called the proposal “extortion” and said the state will go to court to protect the nation’s premier university system.

    “We’ll sue,” Newsom said during a news conference with Texas legislators over California’s effort to counter a contentious Republican redistricting plan in that state.

    President Trump is “trying to silence academic freedom” by “attacking one of the most important public institutions in the United States of America,” Newsom said, adding that he would “stand tall and push back against that, and I believe every member of California Legislature feels the same way.”

    The federal government on Friday said UC should pay the billion-dollar fine in installments and contribute $172 million to a fund for Jewish students and other individuals affected by alleged violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The statute covers illegal discrimination related to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, including Jewish and Israeli identity.

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    In addition, the Trump administration demanded sweeping campus changes encompassing protests, admissions, gender identity in sports and housing, the abolition of scholarships for racial or ethnic groups, and submission to an outside monitor over the agreement, according to four UC senior officials who have reviewed the proposal.

    “He has threatened us through extortion with a billion-dollar fine, unless we do his bidding,” Newsom said.

    “We will not be complicit in this kind of attack on academic freedom on this extraordinary public institution. We are not like some of those other institutions,” he said.

    The governor appeared to be referring to controversial and costly deals the Trump administration secured from Columbia and Brown universities over charges similar to those facing UCLA, deals Newsom criticized a day earlier in public remarks.

    In a statement Friday that UC was “reviewing” the terms, UC President James B. Milliken, who oversees the 10-campus system that includes UCLA, also seemed to rebuff the demand.

    “As a public university, we are stewards of taxpayer resources and a payment of this scale would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians,” Milliken said. “Americans across this great nation rely on the vital work of UCLA and the UC system for technologies and medical therapies that save lives, grow the U.S. economy, and protect our national security.”

    UC Regents Chair Janet Reilly told The Times the university was still willing to negotiate with the Trump administration but not on “unacceptable” terms.

    “Demand for a $1 billion payment from UCLA, coupled with conditions that contradict the university’s values, is unacceptable,” Reilly said, describing it as a “financial burden” that would be “catastrophic for our students, research, our patients and the people of California.

    “The university remains willing to engage in a constructive and good faith dialogue with the federal government but the University of California will always stand firm in protecting the integrity and values of our institution,” Reilly said.

    A spokesperson for UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk referred The Times to Milliken’s statement. Federal negotiations are being handled on a UC-wide level.

    UC is grappling with how to restore $584 million in frozen medical and science grant funds to UCLA. If the deal was accepted, it would be the largest settlement between a university and the Trump administration, far surpassing a $221-million agreement that Columbia University announced last month. Harvard is also reportedly considering a settlement involving a hefty fine.

    “We would never agree to this,” said one of the UC officials who is involved in the deliberations with the Trump administration. “It is more money than was frozen at UCLA. So how does that make sense?”

    But another senior UC official said the figure was understandable if it resolved all federal investigations across the system, even if UC may not ultimately agree to it. The federal proposal focuses on UCLA only, not all campuses.

    Any payment would be a political liability for the university and state leaders in deep-blue California, where Trump’s policies are highly unpopular. A billion dollars would be a financial burden for a university system that is already facing a hiring freeze, budget squeezes, deferred state funding and scattered layoffs.

    UC and individual campuses are under multiple federal investigations into alleged use of race in admissions, employment discrimination against Jews, civil rights complaints from Jewish students and improper reporting of foreign donations.

    UCLA has faced the most charges from the government of any UC or public university, many of them tied to a 2024 pro-Palestinian encampment.

    The encampment, which unsuccessfully demanded the university divest from weapons companies tied to Israel’s war in Gaza, was targeted in a violent overnight attack last spring and was later the subject of federal lawsuit by pro-Israel Jewish students. The students, along with a professor, accused UCLA of enabling antisemitism by not shutting down the encampment, which plaintiffs said blocked pro-Israel Jews from campus pathways. UCLA settled the suit for $6.45 million, including more than $2 million in donations to Jewish nonprofits.

    The Trump administration’s Friday offer follows a similar playbook to agreements it reached with Columbia and Brown universities to restore federal funding and resolve allegations of civil rights violations against Jewish and Israeli students.

    Trump wants to remake universities, which he has called “Marxist” hotbeds of liberalism and anti-Israel sentiment. During his second term, federal agencies have suspended or canceled billions in federal medical and science grants related to gender, LGBTQ+ issues or in response to campuses it accuses of being antisemitic. The White House has also attacked campus diversity programs and admissions practices as being illegal discrimination against white and Asian Americans.

    University leaders have challenged the notion that cutting medical research helps protect Jewish people. “This far-reaching penalty of defunding life-saving research does nothing to address any alleged discrimination,” Frenk, the UCLA chancellor, said in a campus letter this week.

    At UCLA, Trump’s demands include an end to scholarships that focus on race or ethnicity, the sharing of admissions data with the government and changes to campus protest rules. The Trump administration is also proposing that UCLA Health and the medical school cease gender-affirming care for transgender people.

    UC has already overhauled practices in some areas called for by the Trump administration — including a ban on protest encampments and the abolition of diversity statements in hiring.

    The Trump administration is also saying it wants an outside monitor to oversee the agreement.

    The proposal came one day after Newsom said UC should not bend “on their knees” to Trump. Newsom, a Democrat, has fashioned himself as a national anti-Trump figure and is considering a presidential run in 2028.

    The university system, run by Milliken — who assumed his role only last week — and the Board of Regents, is independent under the state Constitution. But the governor can exercise political sway over the regents, whose members he appoints. Newsom also holds an ex-officio seat on the board.

    Kaleem reported from Los Angeles and Wilner from Washington. Times staff Writer Taryn Luna in Sacramento and Seema Mehta in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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  • Two major reports slam UCLA over policing, violence at pro-Palestinian protest

    Two major reports slam UCLA over policing, violence at pro-Palestinian protest

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    Two high-profile, back-to-back reports slam UCLA leaders for a confusing breakdown in its police response leading to violence at a pro-Palestinian encampment in April, with one investigation also calling out the university’s “dramatic failures in confronting antisemitism.”

    A draft report to the Los Angeles Police Commission released Friday cited a lack of coordination between UCLA, LAPD and the California Highway Patrol and smaller municipal police agencies that were hastily called to campus in the spring.

    UCLA, which has its own police force, had distanced itself from relying on the LAPD in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests four years ago, a practice that contributed to the poorly coordinated response, the report suggested. Some arriving teams of officers did not even know their way around the sprawling campus and were subjected to conflicting orders about what to do as the melee unfolded for hours in front of them the night of April 30.

    The LAPD should take the the lead on campus law enforcement ahead of future “large scale events” if university staffing isn’t adequate, the report said.

    The report to the commission, the civilian agency tasked with LAPD oversight, came on the heels of a congressional probe that pilloried the university for allowing antisemitism to foment on campus during pro-Palestinian protests.

    The Republican-led U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce criticized UCLA and other elite universities, including Harvard and Columbia, for “dramatic failures in confronting antisemitism.” The report — which drew upon emails between UCLA Police, UCLA administrators, UC President Michael V. Drake and UC Regents — followed explosive committee hearings in the last year that contributed to the resignations of presidents of Harvard, Columbia, Rutgers and the University of Pennsylvania.

    In a statement, UCLA Associate Vice Chancellor for Campus Safety Rick Braziel said the findings and recommendations sent to the police commission were under review.

    “Meanwhile, both UCLA and the University of California Office of the President are conducting separate reviews of the events that took place last spring, and UCLA has already been implementing a host of measures to improve campus safety,” Braziel said.

    In a separate university statement on the congressional report, UCLA said it was “committed to combating antisemitism and fostering an environment where every member of our community feels safe and welcome. We have learned valuable lessons from the events of last spring, and ahead of the start of this academic year, instituted reforms and programs to combat discrimination and enhance campus safety.”

    In August, Drake directed chancellors of all 10 campuses to strictly enforce rules against encampments, protests that block pathways and masking that shields identities amid sharp calls to stop policy violations during demonstrations.

    Early signs of trouble

    The combined narrative of both reports offer the most detailed timeline on events leading up to the night of violence that began April 30, with repercussions spanning through May 2, when a massive police sweep of the encampment led more than 200 arrests and six uses of police force.

    In a UCLA Police message thread on April 25, five days before the violence, a patrol officer suggested police should identify and remove people who were not UCLA students, staff and faculty from the recently formed encampment at Royce Quad in the center of campus, the House report said. An unidentified individual responded that UCLA had decided to “hold off.”

    Around 5 a.m. on April 25, then-UCLA police Chief John Thomas texted LAPD commanders Steve Lurie and Jonathan Tom to inform them that multiple tents were being set up on campus and that UCLA “may need some assistance as the day progresses,” said the police commission report, compiled by LAPD and submitted by Interim Police Chief Dominic H. Choi to the commission. The panel could approve it as early as its next meeting Tuesday.

    On April 25, a UCLA police lieutenant informed the then-UCLA police chief that more than 50 unidentified people were unloading wood, tents and other materials from truck at Royce Quad. UCLA closed off a nearby street to prevent further access, but the erection of tents in by Royce Quad and Powell Library continued, the House committee report said.

    The encampment grew to more than 150 people with tents surrounded by wooden pellets, with the university fire marshal warning that the use of wood was not advised, the House committee report said.

    “Over the course of the next day, it became apparent to UCPD and campus administrators that the university was underequipped,” according to the House report, which largely summarized university emails.

    “UCLA leaders worried that they would be unable to restrict access to the area or prevent further expansion of the encampment without a significant surge in manpower, with one senior administrator warning that ‘no temporary fence is going to keep these people out,’” the House report said.

    On April 27, Choi approved the deployment of two LAPD mobile response squads to campus to stand by. Thomas told Choi that Beverly Hills, Culver City and Santa Monica were also sending squads and that LAPD would be the last resort.

    The following morning, Thomas wrote in a group chat with other law enforcement leaders that more pro-Palestinian protesters planned to go to campus. A few minutes later, an LAPD lieutenant texted his colleagues to say that UCLA had “no plans” to clear out protesters, the report said.

    By 10:30 a.m. more than 1,000 pro-Israel counterprotesters arrived by the encampment.

    That morning, a single squad car from West L.A. was dispatched to monitor the protest. By 10:41 a.m., police began receiving reports that protesters and counterprotesters were “getting physical.”

    Additional LAPD officers were sent to campus. About 11:14 a.m., the LAPD lieutenant texted Lurie to say that UCLA had requested the LAPD’s help in clearing out the protesters. But he responded that the LAPD would not participate in making arrests.

    Around 1:34 p.m., Lurie texted a group of LAPD senior staff to inform them that the pro-Israel protest crowd was thinning out and UCLA administrators were discussing how and when to clear the encampment. Choi responded that the LAPD would not be involved in clearing out the area. About 90% of the pro-Israel group left within the hour.

    There were further moments of tension during the next two days, as coordination with the LAPD showed signs of being disjointed, the report to the police commission indicated.

    It exploded the night of on April 30.

    As reports of clashes began to increasingly pick up, UCLA police leaders contacted Lurie to let him know that campus police were being overwhelmed by the crowd.

    While the initial message was sent at 11:07 p.m., campus police officials didn’t make an official request for mutual aid until 11:31 p.m. and again 10 minutes later, the commission report said. The first LAPD units arrived on campus by 12:12 a.m. By about 1:45 a.m., several mobile response squads waded into the melee to try to separate protesters and counterprotesters who’d converged near a flagpole.

    But they took “no further action to clear the crowds” because they were still formulating a plan and awaiting backup, the commission report said. Under the department’s crowd control rules, officers are supposed to wait for “sufficient personnel” before entering a crowd to make arrests. It was at least another hour before CHP officers began to clear the rest of the courtyard near the encampment. By 3:48 a.m., the area was cleared although the encampment remained.

    By the next night, multiple law enforcement agencies participated in clearing the encampment with more than 200 arrests.

    The report to the commission recommended that UCPD, LAPD and other police agencies “establish procedures” for who is in control when officers in the primary jurisdiction over “overwhelmed,” as was the case at UCLA. It said combining different agencies together can be “problematic” because of “varying use of force policies and tactics.”

    It also said that LAPD officers should better coordinate with UCLA so they are more aware of how to navigate campus and that the LAPD should improve on its record keeping and training to improve response to similar future protests.

    Protests fomented antisemitism

    The House committee’s findings accuse UCLA of largely ignoring the growing encampment while being aware as early as April 27 of campus accusations of antisemitic language or acts stemming from it.

    Chaired by Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), the committee has been accused of bias. Democrats, who make up 20 of the 44 members of the committee, have criticized Republicans as not being serious in their pursuit to combat antisemitism. Members of the House minority have called the hearings an attempt by the chamber’s Republicans to use campus unrest for political gain, pointing out that equal attention has not been given to anti-Muslim or anti-Arab hatred, which have also increased since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.

    The committee grilled former UCLA Chancellor Gene Block in the spring along with the presidents of Northwestern and Rutgers universities but questions to Block about the violence at UCLA largely came from Democrats.

    USC escapes harsh criticism

    Separately on Friday, the Los Angeles Police Commission also released a report on USC, where LAPD arrested 94 people on April 24 as police and campus safety officers cleared a pro-Palestinian encampment at Alumni Park.

    That report, which is significantly shorter than the UCLA one, was less critical. USC did not reply to a request for comment about on the finding, which said that LAPD deployed 619 officers the campus over three days between April 24 and May 5. The report’s recommendations included that police do a better job at “tracking personnel” in order to estimate costs and more closely follow reporting procedures on use of force.

    Police used force on two occasions at USC. In one, an LAPD officer fired a 40mm round at a protester, and in the other an officer used their baton. Neither incident resulted in injuries, the report said. But, the cases weren’t immediately investigated, as required by department policy, because of the department’s reliance on paper records.

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    Jaweed Kaleem, Libor Jany

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  • Judge allows UCLA baseball team to return to Jackie Robinson Stadium

    Judge allows UCLA baseball team to return to Jackie Robinson Stadium

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    The UCLA baseball team was cleared to resume using its baseball stadium at noon Tuesday after a judge temporarily lifted an order barring the team from the stadium on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ West Los Angeles campus.

    U.S. District Judge David O. Carter entered an order Monday restoring UCLA’s access to Jackie Robinson Stadium through July 4, allowing the team to complete its coming season. After that, the stadium will face an uncertain fate.

    After a four-week trial this summer, Carter ruled the lease to UCLA of 10 acres on which the stadium sits was illegal because it did not predominantly focus on service to veterans. He ordered the stadium cordoned off in late September.

    A class-action lawsuit alleged that the VA had failed in its duty to provide adequate housing for disabled veterans and that its leases of portions of the 388-acre campus for other purposes violated the 1888 deed of the land to the U.S. government for the “establishment, construction and permanent maintenance” of a home for disabled soldiers.

    In an attempt to regain use of the stadium, UCLA attorney Raymond Cardozo said the university was willing to nearly double its rent to $600,000 and release two acres for housing. Carter initially spurned that offer while working with attorneys in the case to identify parcels where an initial 106 modular units of temporary housing could be placed.

    After selecting the stadium’s parking lot and two other parcels during a hearing Friday, Carter abruptly changed direction, asking attorneys for the veterans who sued why they shouldn’t take the $600,000 and allow the baseball team to play at the stadium when the veterans were not using it. He gave them the weekend to confer with their clients.

    Returning to court Monday, attorney Roman Silberfeld said they objected to the terms the judge described.

    But Carter said he thought it would not make sense to pass up money that could be used for housing now.

    He again urged the university and veterans to come up with a “holistic” agreement by July 4, when the grace period expires, and made it clear he still considers the stadium as a potential site for housing. He suggested that one option would be for UCLA to use more than 30 acres it owns in the Palos Verdes Peninsula for a new stadium.

    UCLA praised the decision in a statement attributed to athletic director Martin Jarmond.

    “We are excited to practice and play in Jackie Robinson Stadium this season,” it said. “Our young men have been working hard and keeping a positive attitude throughout this period of uncertainty, and we are pleased that they will be able to resume their regular training at the stadium.”

    Rob Reynolds, a veteran who acts as a spokesman for the plaintiffs, said Carter’s change of heart “caught everybody by surprise.”

    Reynolds said the veterans felt insulted that the amount offered was less than the UCLA baseball coach’s salary.

    “It’s a travesty for them to see them get them come back for nothing,” he said.

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    Doug Smith

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  • California wildfires are spreading and intensifying faster, putting more people in danger

    California wildfires are spreading and intensifying faster, putting more people in danger

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    Just from what they’ve experienced over the years, California residents may suspect that wildfires have gotten more extreme amid a warmer and more drought-prone climate.

    A new paper in the journal Science puts that sentiment to the test, with startling findings: California fires spread almost four times faster in 2020 than they had in 2001.

    The study, authored by scientists from the University of Colorado, UC Merced and UCLA, also found that across the West, fires grew 250% more quickly in 2020 than they did in 2001.

    “People are pretty good at putting out all fires,” said Park Williams, a UCLA professor and co-author of the study, but “the faster the fire, the more easily it can escape control.”

    Although intuitive, the relationship between the speed at which a fire spreads and the damage it causes to structures and land was difficult to quantify until recent developments in satellite technology, he said.

    Now, scientists can plot “trends in the daily growth rates,” he said. Using daily fire spread imagery for some 60,000 fires from 2001 to 2020, they were able to determine a relationship between damage and speed, Williams said.

    “During this 20-year study period, fires in the U.S. did indeed on average begin moving faster,” he said. The 3% of fires with the fastest daily growth rates made up around 90 percent of property loss in the two decades studied.

    “In California more than most places in the U.S., people are being confronted with the changes in fire behavior,” Williams said.

    Many Californians live in close proximity to flammable vegetation and are put increasingly in harm’s way.

    The study gave several possible explanations for the increase in fire speed.

    “Fires may be growing faster due to warming trends, vegetation transitions to more flammable fuels, or the co-occurrence of high winds with increasing human-related ignitions,” the study posited.

    Recent wildfires in California have caused death and destruction and brought the home insurance industry to the brink of crisis. With the 2024 fire season ending, all eyes will be on next year.

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    Terry Castleman

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  • Photos: L.A. events mark first anniversary of the Israel-Hamas war

    Photos: L.A. events mark first anniversary of the Israel-Hamas war

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    Gina Ferazzi grew up in the small New England town of Longmeadow, Mass. She has been a staff photographer with the Los Angeles Times since 1994. Her photos are a part of the staff Pulitzer Prizes for Breaking News in 2016 for the San Bernardino terrorist attack and for the wildfires in 2004. She’s an all-around photographer covering assignments from Winter Olympics, presidential campaigns to local and national news events. Her video documentaries include stories on black tar heroin, health clinics, women priests and Marine suicide. A two-sport scholarship athlete at the University of Maine, Orono, she still holds the record for five goals in one field hockey game.

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    Jason Armond, Gina Ferazzi

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  • UCLA investigating reports of 2 students drugged at parties near campus

    UCLA investigating reports of 2 students drugged at parties near campus

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    Police at UCLA have issued a crime alert after two students reported being drugged at recent parties near campus.

    The first incident occurred Thursday, when the first victim went to three different parties along Gayley Avenue and “developed symptoms which they did not believe were from alcohol,” according to the crime alert.

    That student reported the incident a couple days later.

    The second incident occurred in the 600 block of Gayley Avenue on Saturday when a student, after being handed a drink, also developed symptoms they did not believe to be from alcohol or marijuana, according to the alert. That student went to the emergency room and reported the incident later that night.

    No suspect description was provided, and the incidents are being investigated as off-campus aggravated assaults using drugs, police said.

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    Joseph Serna

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  • Robert Rosen, Former UCLA Theater, Film and TV Dean, Dies at 84

    Robert Rosen, Former UCLA Theater, Film and TV Dean, Dies at 84

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    Robert “Bob” Rosen, a pioneering film historian, archivist and former dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, has died. He was 84.

    Rosen died Wednesday, UCLA said without specifying a cause of death. Born in 1940, Rosen was named Dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in 1999, a position he held for slightly more than a decade.

    Before that, he served as director of archives at UCLA starting in 1975, growing the school’s original film and TV vault into a world-leading collection. That appointment grew out of an invitation to teach one 10-week course at the UCLA Department of Film and Television in 1974.

    “I never left. Understanding motion pictures and teaching filmmakers was to become my life’s goal, and over the course of the next four decades, I served as professor, then department chair, and finally for 11 years as dean of the school,” Rosen said during an informal conversation at the 68th International Federation of Film Archives Congress in Beijing in 2012.

    “Bob was a transformative figure at UCLA, and his contributions to the field of film and television education, as well as his leadership here at the School of Theater, Film and Television, have left an indelible mark on our community,” UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television Dean Brian Kite said in a statement. “Bob’s impact on the global film community was profound, and his legacy will continue to shape the industry for years to come.”

    In 2008, Rosen told the Associated Press that studying classic films helped young filmmakers find new ways to tell stories and discover their own point-of-view. “When you look at films from the past, you see the many different ways that filmmakers solve storytelling problems,” he noted. “And you break with formulas because you realize there are many ways to solve a problem. By looking at the past, you get the courage to find your own voice.”

    Rosen also was the founding director of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the American Film Institute. He served on the executive committee of the International Federation of Film Archives, as a member of the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress for more than two decades and as a board member of both the Stanford Theatre Foundation and the Geffen Playhouse.

    He was the film critic for KCRW National Public Radio for 10 years and a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. He helped launch The Film Foundation and was the founding chair of The Film Foundation’s Archivists Council. 

    He also received The Film Foundation’s John Huston Award from Martin Scorsese in 2008 for his contributions to film preservation and restoration.

    “A titan of the film community, Bob elevated the field of archiving by championing training and advocating for the preservation of moving image media in all forms, from classic Hollywood to independent productions,” May Hong HaDuong, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, said. “With advocacy, passion and an indomitable spirit, Bob played a pivotal role in transforming the UCLA Film & Television Archive into the world-class institution it is today.”

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    Etan Vlessing

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  • Rocket Project at UCLA and Valworx Announce Partnership for Experimental Rocket Project

    Rocket Project at UCLA and Valworx Announce Partnership for Experimental Rocket Project

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    CORNELIUS, N.C., September 23, 2024 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Valworx, Inc., a leading supplier of actuated valves and controls, has partnered with the Rocket Project at UCLA to develop their next generation of liquid-fueled rockets.

    This year the UCLA team is undertaking an ambitious project to develop a closed-loop throttle system for their bi-propellant liquid rocket. This builds on last year’s effort when the team achieved a significant milestone by launching an ethanol and LOX liquid rocket to an altitude of 24,100 feet.

    “The UCLA Rocket program continues to build on prior innovations, and we’re excited to play a part in helping the next generation of aerospace leaders literally aim high,” said Kurt Naas, President of Valworx.

    The valves are a special V-port design that will precisely meter the flow of oxidizer and propellant for the liquid oxygen/ethanol-powered flight vehicle.

    “We are grateful to partner with Valworx, an industry leader in valve and controls technology. This collaboration will not only provide us with the lightweight and durable solutions we need, but it will also empower us to continuously raise the standard for our rocket systems and push the boundaries of collegiate rocketry,” said Michael Ferrell, Electronics Subteam Lead of Rocket Project at UCLA.

    About Valworx

    Established in 1991, Valworx is a leading supplier of actuated valves and controls in stainless, brass, PVC, and sanitary ball and butterfly valves. They offer free shipping on orders over $99, free lifetime technical support, extensive online documentation and a generous return policy. All products are backed by a comprehensive one-year warranty.

    Valworx-brand products are known, trusted and preferred by tens of thousands of users worldwide, meeting their customers’ expectations for price, delivery, and performance.

    For more info, visit https://www.valworx.com, follow us on Twitter (@valworxvalves) and https://www.facebook.com/valworxvalves

    About the Rocket Project at UCLA

    Rocket Project at UCLA is a student engineering team that teaches rocket engineering through hands-on exposure to the complete design-build-test cycle of engineering, giving students an opportunity to apply classroom subjects to a project with real-world challenges and thrilling results. https://www.rocketproject.seas.ucla.edu

    Source: Valworx Inc.

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  • CSU Rams announce decision to join Pac-12 Conference

    CSU Rams announce decision to join Pac-12 Conference

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    CSU is joining a revamped and re-stocked Pac-12 Conference.

    According to a report published late Wednesday night by Yahoo Sports, the long-standing collegiate league, which was ravaged by membership defections — including that of the CU Buffs — over the past 18 months, is moving forward with plans to expand.

    The first wave of that expansion includes four of the top athletic brands from the Mountain West: CSU, Boise State, San Diego State and Fresno State, will all four becoming members on July 1, 2026.

    “We are taking control of our future at CSU by forming an alliance of six peer institutions who will serve as the foundation for a new era of the Pac-12,” CSU President Amy Parsons said in a news release announcing the move.

    “This move elevates CSU in a way which benefits all our students, bolsters our core mission, and strengthens our reputation for academic and research excellence. CSU is honored to be among the universities asked to help carry on the history and tradition of the Pac-12 as a highly competitive conference with some of the nation’s leading research institutions.”

    The Rams, whose football program hosts rival CU in the Rocky Mountain Showdown for the first time at Canvas Stadium on Saturday, are a founding member of the Mountain West Conference, a league which began operations in January 1999.

    By accepting an invitation from the Pac-12, CSU will gain association with what the athletic department has sought for decades — membership within a “power” conference.

    “This moment has been a long time coming,” CSU authentic director John Weber said. “I know our students, faculty, staff, alumni, donors and fans are hungry for this move and are going to love what comes next as CSU charts a transformational new course as a member of the Pac-12.”

    The Pac-12, which was founded in 1915, has historically been the most prestigious collegiate league west of the Central time zone. However, that prestige, and indeed its membership, were crippled by the defections of CU, Utah, Arizona and Arizona State to the Big 12; USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington to the Big Ten; and Stanford and Cal to the ACC.

    Washington State and Oregon State were left with the conference’s holdings, trademarks and media rights. Per Yahoo Sports, the remaining Pac-12 programs believe they can rebuild the brand with the likes of the Rams, Aztecs, Broncos and Bulldogs as peers.

    They’re also not done looking at new members, as the NCAA requires a minimum of eight schools to qualify as an FBS conference.

    CSU football plays at Oregon State on Oct. 5 as part of a scheduling alliance between the MW and the remains of the Pac-12, a partnership that Yahoo Sports reports will not continue for a second fall.

    Mountain West members are contracted to pay a $17 million exit fee to leave the league.

    The primary motivations for CSU are the same reasons CU left the Pac-12 this past summer — money, prestige, potential access to the College Football Playoff, and stability.

    While the mass defections from the Pac-12 would denounce the latter, Yahoo Sports reports that the remaining Pac-12 members feel a new-look league would reach a media rights agreement worth more than the current or expected payouts presented to MW members.

    The Mountain West has a $270 million television contract with CBS and Fox that runs through 2026.

    Published reports have estimated that non-Boise members of the MW, including CSU, receive roughly $3.5 million annually from that deal, with the Broncos receiving an additional $1.8 million per year.

    CSU noted in its financial report to the NCAA for the 2022-23 fiscal year, the most recent public report available, that its media rights revenues from all sources, including conference distributions, was $3.3 million.

    The Yahoo Sports report infers that the Rams could also have access to Pac-12 assets such as “monies from the Rose Bowl contract, College Football Playoff, NCAA basketball tournament units and Pac-12 Enterprises, previously the Pac-12 Network.”

    CSU indicated in its announcement Thursday morning that the four new schools “will have immediate voting privileges” within the conference.

    “We have nothing but the utmost respect and appreciation for the Mountain West and its members,” Parsons said. “There will be conversations going forward about the Mountain West exit fees and Pac-12 support for our transition. We are confident the path forward will not impact our current university budget and will set CSU up for incredible opportunities to come.”

    However, the two-team Pac-12 recently lost its status as a Power 5/”autonomous” conference within the CFP — and it’s not clear whether supplementing the expanded league with Group of 5 programs would restore those privileges.

    CSU athletics reported revenues of $64.3 million to the NCAA for the ’22-23 fiscal year this past January. The Rams’ revenues of $61.2 million, per a USA Today database, ranked fourth among known MW athletics budgets in ’21-22, behind Air Force, San Diego State and UNLV. Wazzu and Oregon State had revenues of $85 million and $83.5 million in ’21-22, respectively.

    Originally Published:

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    Sean Keeler

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  • Major gift accelerates transformation of old mall into UCLA research hub

    Major gift accelerates transformation of old mall into UCLA research hub

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    The reincarnation of a shuttered Los Angeles retail mecca as a sprawling UCLA research center has received a major boost from billionaire philanthropist Dr. Gary Michelson and his wife, Alya, who will give $120 million to ramp up the project.

    Michelson, a spine surgeon and inventor, said the money will help launch the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, which aims to create breakthrough discoveries that prevent and cure diseases including cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s.

    The institute will be a tenant in UCLA Research Park, which is under construction in the former Westside Pavilion. The indoor mall two miles south of the university at Pico and Westwood boulevards was a 1980s icon popular with shoppers and filmmakers before falling out of favor. Most of its stores closed by 2019.

    The shopping center was being converted to offices when the UC Regents bought it for $700 million in January to create the research park. Along with the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, it will house the UCLA Center for Quantum Science and Engineering, as well as other science and medicine programs.

    By purchasing the former shopping center, UCLA saved years of toil to build such a facility on its campus, which is the smallest of the nine UC undergraduate campuses and has very little room for growth.

    A courtyard view of the UCLA research center now under construction in the former Westside Pavilion shopping center.

    (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

    “That building would have gone on the last available piece of property on the UCLA campus,” Michelson said, “and it would have been extraordinarily expensive to build there. As a real estate matter, this was just an extraordinary opportunity.”

    The immunology institute had been planned for years, while a full-scale research park was something “we’ve always dreamed of having … but we always recognized we could never find a piece of property that big close to campus. We had sort of given up on the idea many years ago — and it came alive,” said former UCLA Chancellor Gene Block, who was instrumental in the purchase of the former Westside Pavilion.

    An earlier plan to build the institute on the campus called for tearing down a parking garage, digging a hole deep enough to replace the parking and erecting a new building on top, Block said.

    The gift, through the Michelson Medical Research Foundation, designates $100 million to establish two research entities within the institute, each funded with $50 million; one will focus on rapid vaccine development and the other on harnessing the body’s microbiome to advance human health. The microbiome research will be conducted in collaboration with the new UCLA Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center, placing it among the largest microbiome research enterprises in the world, the foundation said.

    The foundation is also funding a $20-million endowment to provide research grants to young scientists using novel processes to advance immunotherapy research, human immunology and vaccine discovery.

    The institute will have labs of different sizes meant to serve biotech researchers who can start with small teams that can grow into larger labs if they find success.

    “We’re going to create an entire ecosystem of biotech startups and they’re going to stay right here” and attract other players to the neighborhood, Michelson said. “We’re going to build out an entire ecosystem of biotech all through Westwood.”

    He envisions 5,000 people, including 500 research scientists, working in the institute. Gov. Gavin Newsom estimated in January that it would take more than three years to fully transform the 700,000-square-foot complex, but Michelson hopes to have a large portion of the immunology institute operating in half that time, he said. At 360,000 square feet, the institute will be the research park’s primary tenant.

    The former mall’s 12-screen multiplex movie theater may be converted into lecture halls or performance spaces offering programming across the arts, humanities, sciences and social sciences, the chancellor’s office said.

    Interior view of the new UCLA Research Park.

    An interior view of the UCLA research center now under construction in the former Westside Pavilion shopping center.

    (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

    The gift is the Michelsons’ largest single donation in 30 years of philanthropy that includes $50 million to build Michelson Hall at the University of Southern California, which is home to the Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience. The Michelson name will not be attached to the new UCLA complex, he said, because other philanthropists — perhaps one who donates more than he did — may want the recognition.

    “The gift will change countless lives here and across the globe,” UCLA interim Chancellor Darnell Hunt said.

    The institute will operate as a nonprofit medical research organization funded by a public-private partnership and governed by an independent board that includes UCLA representatives, according to a UC Regents document. The institute will pay UCLA 7.5% of the net revenues generated by the sale of new medicines and other inventions its scientists create, the document said.

    Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said the project “has the potential to fundamentally change health outcomes around the world and create good jobs in Los Angeles.”

    The purchase of the former Westside Pavilion marked the third major acquisition for the public university system in Los Angeles in less than two years.

    Seeking to expand its footprint, UCLA announced in June 2023 that it had acquired the Art Deco-style Trust Building in downtown Los Angeles and renamed it UCLA Downtown.

    Nine months prior, the school spent $80 million to buy two other major properties owned by Marymount California University, a small Catholic university that was shuttered last year. The purchase included Marymount’s 24.5-acre campus in Rancho Palos Verdes and an 11-acre residential site in nearby San Pedro.

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    Roger Vincent

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  • Police confront pro-Palestinian protesters at UCLA

    Police confront pro-Palestinian protesters at UCLA

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    Scores of protesters formed a roving pro-Palestinian camp on UCLA’s campus Monday afternoon, reciting the names of thousands of people who have died in Gaza.

    After several hours of mostly peaceful demonstration, however, the situation turned chaotic, with Los Angeles police and private security guards forming a skirmish line and confronting protesters who stood behind barricades.

    A crowd formed on the opposite side of the skirmish line, with protesters chanting, “Let them go!”

    Associate professor Graeme Blair, who is a member of Faculty for Justice in Palestine, said one student went to the hospital for treatment of wounds from a rubber bullet, which he said was fired when students were barricaded near Dodd Hall. He criticized authorities, saying the students had been following dispersal orders throughout the evening.

    A UC Police representative declined to answer questions about arrests or whether “less than lethal” weapons were used.

    Earlier, police had ordered the demonstrators to disperse at least twice, and the crowd quickly dismantled tents and barricades and moved to different locations on campus.

    As protesters marched, one among them was reading aloud names of Palestinians killed.

    “They will not die in vain,” protesters chanted after each name. “They will be redeemed.”

    Some protesters set roses down next to a coffin painted with the Palestinian flag that sat alongside fake bloodied corpses. A helicopter hovered overhead.

    Many protesters declined to give interviews, saying they were not “media liaisons” or “media trained.”

    The event was organized by the Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA. Several faculty members followed the crowd with a banner showing support for the students and the demonstration.

    Monday’s event marked the third pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA in recent weeks, the handling of which has drawn outrage and questions about how ill-prepared the university was for such an event.

    The first one was set up April 25, sparking mixed reactions and a largely peaceful counterprotest on April 28.

    Two days later, however, UCLA declared the encampment unlawful and directed campus members to leave or face discipline.

    Later that night, a violent mob attacked the camp. The few police officers on duty were quickly overwhelmed, and the violence continued for three hours until authorities finally brought the situation under control.

    At Monday’s demonstration, most protesters wore surgical masks, and those at the edges of the moving encampment held makeshift wooden shields or set up chicken wire to barricade themselves in. The crowd moved from the courtyard outside Royce Hall to the bottom of the Tongva steps, to the patio behind Kerckhoff Hall, to a courtyard outside Dodd Hall.

    Los Angeles police and private security guards formed a line as an unlawful assembly was declared Monday at UCLA.

    (Alene Tchekmedyian / Los Angeles Times)

    As evening set in, the protesters set up their barricades in the Dodd Hall courtyard. The confrontation escalated as an unlawful assembly was declared. Police and guards formed a line, with protesters shouting, “Cops off campus!”

    L.A. Police Capt. Kelly Muniz confirmed to The Times that arrests were made at the protest but did not provide further details.

    UCLA professor Yogita Goyal, who teaches English and African American studies, was among faculty on campus Monday expressing support for the protesters. Goyal said police should not have declared an unlawful assembly on Monday — or on April 30 when students were protesting peacefully.

    “UCLA leadership should be out here and should be allowing our students to express their political views,” she said.

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    Alene Tchekmedyian

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