Hundreds of students, faculty and other community members packed the McCormick Foundation Center Forum on Northwestern University’s campus Thursday night for a discussion about the “university under threat.”
Five professors and a doctoral student participated in the panel. The tone they took was decidedly dark, as they referenced a palpable fear of Donald Trump and Elon Musk plunging the nation into an era of “pro racial apartheid” achieved through the “foreclosure of a variety of knowledge systems.”
“If the cuts to Medicaid and the other programs that the Republicans want to enact — and you probably heard that last week the House voted to cut Medicaid by $880 billion [over the next decade], an enormous amount of money — the situation will become immeasurably worse,” said Dr. Peter Sporn, an expert on lung disease at Northwestern Medicine and a professor at the Feinberg School of Medicine.
“Not only will millions of Americans lose the ability to get health care, those of us who still continue to be insured will be impacted by the closure of hospitals and clinics, inundated emergency rooms with unimaginably long wait times, and reduced access to health care providers because clinicians will leave the profession.”
Sporn went on to say that the impact on the rest of the world will be even worse because of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency essentially collapsing the U.S. Agency for International Development. That department provided care for millions of people across the globe, among whom were HIV and AIDS patients in Africa.
“People are already dying as a result of these changes just in the last few weeks, and the lives of literally millions of people are at risk in the near future,” he said.
Research at risk
Like Sporn, other speakers talked of a nation actively shutting down research at universities like Northwestern. Peter Cummings, an NU doctoral student studying behavioral medicine, spent the last two years working on a project about mental health interventions for transgender people receiving care at NU, and he won a grant from the National Institutes of Health to fund the project. But his adviser recently informed him there was no “viable pathway” to receive that grant because of the content of his research.
Other panelists spoke of similar impact on their work. Megan Bang, director of NU’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research, spoke of a decades-long effort to remove elements of the K-12 history education on minorities, particular Indigenous people and the LGBTQ community. Bang called it “mass destruction in very short periods of time.”
Similarly, Sadie Wignall, a molecular biosciences professor, said other universities are already cutting spots in their graduate programs because of threats to federal funding, which could reduce Northwestern’s research budget by more than $100 million a year. “I really worry about the future of science in this country,” Wignall said.
Nuggets of hope
But in the face of such an onslaught, the panel managed to supply nuggets of hope, encouraging everyone in attendance to organize and demand that Northwestern and other institutions not capitulate to the demands of the Trump administration.
Several people specifically referenced Northwestern’s decision to remove websites related to diversity, equity and inclusion programs in compliance with a federal order. The university even completely removed its website for the Women’s Center — during Women’s History Month — rerouting searchers to a page that says NU “is currently reviewing its policies and programs to ensure we meet all federal and state laws.”
But other colleges — including the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago — have defied the federal order, maintaining and even in some cases reiterating commitments to multicultural programs in support of diversity and inclusion.
Northwestern President Michael Schill and Provost Kathleen Hagerty issued a statement Thursday titled “Staying True to Our Guiding Principles, which said in part that “quite honestly, we don’t have all the answers yet” but reiterated the university’s values of academic freedom and free expression.
Pressuring the board
“The only way that they won’t completely capitulate is if there is a mass organization, if people form a mass movement,” said Sporn. “This is the hope for the future, you and us, and we have to figure out how to make it happen together.”
He said, “The decisions we make and the actions we take in the face of the current crisis will have longstanding consequences, and history will judge us. It will judge us all by what we do or do not do, and what we say or do not say.”
Sporn ended on a key point, that Schill, Hagerty and other administrators are all employed by Northwestern’s Board of Trustees. If students and faculty really want to make a difference, he said, they have to put pressure on the board.
“They will be fired by the Board of Trustees if the Board of Trustees decides that it’s time for them to go. And that might happen soon,” he said. “That’s really where the power lies.”
‘History will judge us’: NU community sounds alarm about Trump threats is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.