Trump administration to investigate UC Berkeley over Turning Point USA event
The U.S. Department of Education launched an investigation into the University of California at Berkeley Tuesday over violence that erupted earlier this month at protests outside an event organized by conservative group Turning Point USA.
The department said it will investigate whether UC Berkeley violated the Jeanne Clery Campus Safety Act, a federal law that requires colleges and universities that receive federal financial aid to record and report campus crime data.
The announcement comes as UC Berkeley also faces a Department of Justice investigation into the university’s handling of the event and protests, which resulted in at least four arrests and left one person injured after being struck in the head by a thrown object. Turning Point USA, a nonprofit that promotes conservative values on high school and college campuses, was co-founded by Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot in September during a tour stop at a university in Utah.
“Just two months after Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was brutally assassinated on a college campus, UC Berkeley allowed a protest of a Turning Point USA event on its grounds to turn unruly and violent, jeopardizing the safety of its students and staff,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement Tuesday.
She said the department is reviewing UC Berkeley’s procedures to ensure that it maintains campus safety and security.
“This is not about students’ First Amendment rights to protest peacefully. This is about ensuring accurate and transparent reporting of crime statistics to the campus community and guaranteeing that every student can safely participate in educational programs and activities,” McMahon said. “The department will vigorously investigate this matter to ensure that a recipient of federal funding is not allowing its students to be at risk.”
In a statement Tuesday, UC Berkeley said the university has “an unwavering commitment” to abide by the laws and will cooperate with the investigations, as well as continue to host speakers and events representing a variety of viewpoints “in a safe and respectful manner.”
The university said the campus provided public reports about two violent crimes that happened that evening — a fistfight over an attempted robbery and the person hit by a thrown object.
“The campus administration went to great lengths to support the First Amendment rights of all by deploying a large number of police officers from multiple jurisdictions and a large number of contracted private security personnel,” the university said Tuesday. “The campus also closed adjoining buildings and cordoned off part of the campus in order to prevent criminal activity, keep the peace, and ensure the event was not disrupted by protests.”
The Education Department’s office of Federal Student Aid will lead the investigation. It gave UC Berkeley 30 days to provide copies of the school’s annual security report, all incidents of crime from 2022-2024, all arrests made by law enforcement and referrals for disciplinary action against students or employees disclosed in the annual security report, daily crime logs from 2022-2025 and several other reports.
In 2020, UC Berkeley was fined $2.35 million for failing to comply with the Clery Act after a six-year federal review revealed thousands of crime incidents were misclassified — the majority of which were related to liquor, drug and weapons violations. UC Berkeley said the campus had referred students for disciplinary proceedings but wrongly classified the violations — many involving minors in possession of alcohol in residence halls — as a campus policy violation rather than a law violation, as required under the Clery Act.
The Department of Education’s investigation — started in July 2014 — also found a range of issues including failure to comply with sexual violence policies and procedures, failure to maintain accurate and complete daily crime logs, failure to disclose accurate hate crime statistics and failure to issue emergency notifications. UC Berkeley entered into a settlement agreement with the Education Department in 2020 and acknowledged that the campus had made “many administrative errors in the past,” but said it has taken aggressive steps toward improvement.
Notably, the Education Department’s finding that the campus failed to issue emergency notifications surrounded a campus visit by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos in February 2017, which sparked violent protests and caused $100,000 in damages to the campus, the school said.
The Education Department’s investigation said the university failed to notify students of any violence until an hour after protests began to escalate — a delay the department said could have compromised community members’ safety. In a response to the department, UC Berkeley said the finding was based on an incorrect timeline of events and that it had alerted the community immediately after learning the protest had become violent.