A prominent public health scholar warned of self-censorship and the chilling of free speech in higher education after New York University administrators in March abruptly canceled her presentation over what she described as concerns that certain material could be perceived as antisemitic and anti-government.
Joanne Liu — a physician, professor at McGill University and former head of the international humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders — said in an op-ed with French newspaper Le Devoir that she had been invited to speak at NYU nearly a year ago on challenges in humanitarian work.
Before the presentation, and after Liu uploaded it to a university platform, a representative at the private university’s health unit reached out to her with concerns from leadership, Liu said in recent media interviews.
Those concerns centered largely on a slide containing a table from the Aid Worker Security Database showing heavy casualties among humanitarian workers in Gaza amid Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas. The administrator shared concerns with Liu that the slide could be viewed as antisemitic, Liu said in her op-ed and media interviews.
Statistics from the database show 163 aid worker fatalities in Gaza in 2023, more than in all other global conflicts combined. The deaths were largely caused by airstrikes, according to AWSD.
In her account, Liu, who completed a medical fellowship at NYU in 1996, was told that the leadership didn’t understand why she discussed only the victims in Gaza.
Those leaders at NYU also raised issues with other slides referencing the Trump administration’s cuts to international aid, as well as a photo included in the presentation of President Donald Trump’s heated Oval Office meeting in February with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, according to Liu. Administrators worried those might be considered anti-government, Liu said.
Liu offered to remove or alter the slides, ultimately offering to take out material that prompted concerns but leave a general slide about humanitarian war casualties.
“As long as I can keep the key, overarching message, I am fine. I can manage that,” Liu recalled in an interview Tuesday with the progressive media outlet Democracy Now!
Hours later, the NYU administrator informed Liu her presentation was canceled.
“I was stunned,” Liu told Democracy Now!, adding that her colleagues had expressed excitement over her talk ahead of it.
In her Le Devoir op-ed, Liu pointed to the Trump administration’s move to cancel $400 million in research grants and contracts at Columbia University on allegations that it allowed antisemitism to spread on campus, which led to major concessions by the Ivy League institution to the administration. Liu also pointed to other universities that the government has targeted.
In a Saturday interview with Canada’s CTV News, she noted a sense of vulnerability and fear among universities. “They are so scared that something could happen to their funds that they preventively over-self-censor themselves,” she said.
She discussed similar themes of chilled speech in the Trump era with Democracy Now!
“I truly and strongly believe that universities are the temple of knowledge, but, as well, of plurality of ideas,” she said. “And if we do not allow that, we are basically killing the essence of what university is about.”
A spokesperson for NYU’s health unit did not respond to Higher Ed Dive’s questions about who made the final decision to cancel Liu’s presentation or the reasons behind it.
“Guest speakers at our institution are given clear guidelines at the outset,” the spokesperson said. “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.”
