Go almost anywhere in the multiple medical centers of slogan-obsessed UCLA, and you’ll see signs reading “It Begins With U” and “Innovating Patient Care since 1926,” bromides urging every employee from nurses to heart surgeons toward ever-better performance and ratings.

So far, the slogans have helped place UCLA’s medical centers first among Western hospitals in the U.S. News & World Report ratings, topping even famed institutions like Stanford University’s hospital, the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and UCLA’s sister medical centers in San Francisco, Sacramento and Irvine.

UCLA also placed first in a far less desirable category, though: It was the university that President Donald Trump sought to threaten the most with fines and cuts to federal research, going after a total

See Full Page