A Montreal doctor says her presentation at NYU was abruptly cancelled and believes the university did so out of fear of being pressured by the Donald Trump administration.
Dr. Joanne Liu, the former international president of Doctors Without Borders, said the abrupt cancellation speaks to the “climate of fear” universities in the U.S. are now living under in which they preemptively “self-censor” themselves to avoid retaliation.
“Academia feels vulnerable nowadays and what happened in Columbia University, and the fact that there’s threats of losing some funding,” she said in an interview Thursday.
Liu, a pediatric emergency physician at Sainte-Justine Hospital and professor at McGill University’s School of Population and Global Health, was due to give a presentation on challenges in humanitarian crises on March 19 at NYU, her alma mater.
The night before the presentation, she said she got a call from the vice chair of the education department who had raised concerns with the contents.
A couple of the slides in her presentation touched on the casualties in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas war as well as the cuts at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Liu said she was told the slides about Gaza “could be perceived as antisemitic” while the USAID section might be perceived as “anti governmental.”
Liu, who was already in New York when she got the call, offered to make edits to those slides but then three hours later, after some deliberations, she said the university apologized and said they had to cancel.
“I was stunned,” Liu said.
She wrote about the ordeal in an op-ed in Le Devoir on Thursday, referencing the recent controversy at Columbia University after the school bowed to Trump’s demands in a bid to restore US$400M in federal funding. The university announced on social media Friday evening that its interim president, Dr. Katrina A. Armstrong, was stepping down.
“Other elite universities are also in the crosshairs of presidential cuts. I have sympathy for those who feel insecure on campus. And I have just as much sympathy for the university managers who are trying to preserve their funding and, ultimately, their jobs, their research and their teaching,” Liu wrote in the newspaper.
CTV News reached out to NYU about the cancellation. In an email, a spokesperson for NYU Langone Health wrote: “Guest speakers at our institution are given clear guidelines at the outset. Per our policy we cannot host speakers who don’t comply. In this case we did fully compensate this guest for her travel and time.”
The cancellation comes as faculty at post-secondary institutions on both sides of the border are expressing concern about the pressure the Trump administration is putting on academia.
CNN reported that three Ivy league professors are leaving the U.S. and setting their eyes on Toronto “to advocate for democracy, speak out against fascism and teach without fear of academic capitulation to the White House.”
A McGill University professor told CTV News last week that he cancelled three visits to the U.S. due to the current political climate and what he believes is the “breakdown of the rule of law” south of the border. He said other colleagues are also avoiding visits to the U.S.
Liu said she’s concerned about what she describes as an “assault on academia.” She said she hopes it doesn’t creep up north and that universities remain a place where different points of view and facts are not silenced.
“This is what a university is about,” Liu said.
“I know that I don’t have much, I would say, control of what may happen south of the border but I do hope here in Canada we will make sure that we do safeguard the integrity of the mission of our universities.”
