‘This Is a Full-Scale
Assault on Science’
Professor David Valentine Speaks Out as
UCSB Feels Fallout of Trump’s Second Term
By Margaux Lovely | May 1, 2025
Read more from our Reign of Administrative (T)error cover story.
Experts are starting to call it “jawboning.”
How the federal government has gone about jawboning universities — or intimidating them into censoring themselves — is a legal and moral enigma to many. How universities are responding to this increased federal involvement in academia is similarly puzzling, and the University of California is still figuring out how all the pieces fit together.
The Trump Administration’s demands on universities across the nation have put their leaders between a rock and a hard place. Do they succumb to the administration’s directives — eliminating projects with any mention of “DEI” buzzwords, abandoning international students, and suppressing certain political sentiment — or do they stand up to the attacks on academic freedom and risk losing billions of dollars in federal funding? For UC Santa Barbara, the answer is still in limbo.
“This is a full-scale assault on science,” asserted David Valentine, distinguished professor of Marine Science and vice chair of the Academic Senate at UCSB. “Threatening to cancel research projects is being used as a lever to coax campuses into politically getting in line.”
This lever, many attest, was strategically built on federal allegations of anti-Semitism against students and faculty at the hands of higher education institutions. After speaking with community and campus leaders from all sides of the equation — pro-Palestinian activists, Zionists, Jews, etc. — one sentence was reiterated with every interview: The Trump Administration is weaponizing claims of anti-Semitism to quash academic freedom.
Encampments, protests, and counterprotests marked much of the last academic year in what proved to be a messy situation for student protesters, faculty members, and university leadership. At UCSB, five arrests were made when a pro-Palestinian encampment was cleared next to Davidson Library, protesters occupied and vandalized Girvetz Hall, and the MultiCultural Center was shut down after anti-Zionist signs were posted, threatening then-president of the AS Tessa Veksler. All criminal charges relating to the encampment clearing have been dropped.
The Trump Administration saw these actions as evidence that UCSB, along with 59 other universities, did not do enough to protect Jewish students from antisemitism. UC President Michael V. Drake said that the UC system is the subject of at least 12 current federal investigations over these allegations, with UCSB being one of them.
Federal investigators have reportedly been asking faculty members at other UC campuses to act as whistleblowers against possibly anti-Semitic behavior from faculty members. The proposed punishment? Pulling federal funding from unrelated, paramount research.
Valentine is no stranger to the gravity of scientific research. His discovery of a massive toxic chemical dumping ground in the waters off Catalina Island grabbed headlines and the attention of environmental policymakers around the world. Cutting research grants like his would hugely impact both UCSB and the ability to learn worldwide, and still, there are ripple effects that most people don’t realize.
“I’m having to let people go prematurely,” Valentine said. “There is a complete inability to plan, and that underlying uncertainty prevents us from retaining the talented research staff that we have.” Some researchers are outright quitting their jobs in anticipation of their grants being cut, and nationally, some “very high-level science folks” have simply decided to retire early. Mentors are advising their mentees that now is a good time to explore non-STEM interests and career paths.
“It’s genuinely devastating,” Valentine said.
Since President Trump took office and put the state of California at the top of his hit list, UCSB supporters have been bracing for the possibility that the UC would act more like a Columbia and less like a Harvard. On that question, the jury is still out.
In March, the UC system stopped requiring DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) statements in hiring — a possible move of anticipatory compliance with the Trump Administration’s anti-DEI initiatives. A system-wide hiring freeze was also implemented that month in anticipation of funding cuts from both the state and the federal government. UCSB is the largest employer in Santa Barbara County, and as such, the hiring freeze will have severe impacts on an already tight job market.
Earlier this month, 12 UCSB students and recent graduates abruptly had their student visas terminated by the Trump Administration. While much was out of the university’s hands at that point, they did hire outside counsel and were planning to allow affected students to finish their degrees online. As of this Monday, 11 of those students’ visas became active again after the Department of Justice backtracked on their original visa crackdown in federal court.
On April 22, UCSB Chancellor Henry T. Yang signed onto a letter written by the American Association for Colleges and Universities titled “A Call for Constructive Engagement.” The letter, signed by more than 550 leaders in higher education as of midday Tuesday, denounced the administration’s “unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.”
“We are open to constructive reform and do not oppose legitimate government oversight,” the letter reads. “However, we must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses. We will always seek effective and fair financial practices, but we must reject the coercive use of public research funding.”
UC President Drake signed the letter after 500 others had already done so, three days after it became public. During internal meetings, President Drake has expressed that he doesn’t want the UC to be the highest nail for the Trump Administration to hit.
In response to anti-Semitism probes by the Department of Education, UCSB Chancellor Yang has announced the creation of two committees — one to investigate and combat anti-Semitism and one to do the same with Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment.
Staff members say that they are consistently given assurances that there is lots of work being done behind the scenes to protect students and faculty at UCSB from federal threats. However, some express unease about not knowing what that work entails.
Despite anecdotal evidence from researchers whose grants have been suspended or terminated, the university does not know how much federal funding has been pulled at this point.
“It is too early to determine the full impact of changes to federal research support on individual research projects,” said Kiki Reyes, a spokesperson for UCSB. “The campus’s direct federal and federal flow-through research funding, which was approximately $186 million in the last fiscal year, is likely to be impacted.”
One UCSB faculty member and friend of Valentine’s studies the structure of the Earth’s crust and how it responds to earthquakes in an ocean setting. He received a large grant, high-tech sensors, and research vessels from the National Science Foundation (NSF). He hired other researchers and made a plan to put millions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure into the ocean floor to detect earthquakes and changes in the Earth’s crust. It was all ready to go.
But the NSF recently put a stop to the project. “We can’t put infrastructure in the ocean floor if we don’t know if we’ll have the money to get it back out in two years,” they said.
Some research dealing with women, LGBTQ+ issues, and climate change, among other topics, has also been gutted per the Trump administration’s wide interpretation of “DEI-related” content.
“We are the foot soldiers of scientific enterprise for this country,” Valentine stated. “The proposals coming now from the executive branch would create an absolute gutting of the ability to do all forms of science in this country.”
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