NYU canceled talk on USAID cuts for being ‘anti-governmental’, doctor says

The former international head of Doctors Without Borders says she was left “stunned” after New York University canceled her presentation because some of her slides discussing cuts at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) could be viewed as “anti-governmental”.

Dr Joanne Liu, a pediatric emergency physician at Sainte-Justine hospital and a professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who also served as the former international president of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), told CTV News last week that she was scheduled on 19 March to give a presentation at her alma mater on challenges in humanitarian crises.

The night before her presentation, she said she received a call from the school’s vice-chair of the education department, who voiced concerns about the content of some of her slides, including those mentioning casualties in Gaza as a result of the Israel-Hamas war, and those discussing cuts at USAID.

Joanne Liu addresses the security council on 3 May 2016. Photograph: Pacific Press/LightRocket/Getty Images

Liu, who said she was already in New York when she received the call, told CTV News that she was told that the slides about Gaza “could be perceived as antisemitic” and that the USAID slides might be perceived as “anti-governmental”.

Liu said she offered to make edits, but that three hours later the university apologized and said they had to cancel her presentation, leaving her “stunned”.

NYU Langone Health did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but a spokesperson told CTV News that “guest speakers at our institution are given clear guidelines at the outset.”

“Per our policy we cannot host speakers who don’t comply,” the spokesperson said, adding: “In this case we did fully compensate this guest for her travel and time.”

Liu told CTV News that she believes the cancellation of her presentation reflects the “climate of fear” that US universities are currently living under, where they pre-emptively “self-censor” 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 on Thursday.

Earlier this month Columbia University, which has been targeted by the Trump administration over pro-Palestinian protests on its campus last year, gave in to pressure from the White House and agreed to a series of changes in order to restore $400m in federal funding the government pulled after citing allegations that the school failed to protect students from antisemitic harassment.

Last week the school’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, announced that she was stepping down.

In an opinion article published on Thursday in Le Devoir, Liu wrote that US universities are now “in the crosshairs of presidential cuts”.

“I have sympathy for those who feel insecure on campus,” she wrote. “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.”