Hundreds of Northwestern students, faculty and staff members flooded the McCormick Foundation Center Forum seats for a panel titled “The University Under Threat” on Thursday night. Some had to sit on the floor.
“It was important to have this event because I feel that there has been so much silence for students and staff and faculty from the administration around why they have been making the decisions they are,” said English Prof. Daisy Hernández, part of the faculty organizing team. “I would really have hoped to see our university administration really stand up in a forceful way.”
The event, moderated by Medill Prof. Peter Slevin, featured five faculty members and one graduate student — SESP Prof. Megan Bang, Psychology Prof. Michael Kraus, History Prof. Leslie Harris, Molecular Biosciences Prof. Sadie Wignall, Feinberg Prof. Peter Sporn and psychology PhD student Peter Cummings. Bang joined remotely.
The event was held in response to President Donald Trump’s recent efforts to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as funding cuts and the two recent investigations from the Department of Education and the Department of Justice.
“How bad could it be? It’s safe to say, no one knows,” Slevin said at the start of the event. “We’re here in a spirit of truth telling, of sharing (and) of trying to reach a deeper understanding of what is known, what is going on, maybe even perhaps what we collectively might do about it.”
After the panelists discussed their concerns, they answered questions written by some attendees on notecards and chosen by the faculty organizers.
Harris said that higher education has a major influence on employment, “critical knowledge” and the economy — and it’s experiencing backlash due to current political orders.
“The threat we face today is part of a nearly 100-year struggle to make the University more representative of the world we live in and a place to plan the world we want to live in,” Harris said.
Harris also said that the executive orders create “an existential threat” for faculty members. She added that NU is trying to recover from the staffing loss caused by the pandemic to support the University’s work.
Harris and Sporn encouraged students to email letters to University administrators directly, specifically University President Michael Schill and Provost Kathleen Hagerty.
“What will happen if now we fire or cancel all the programs that have taken decades to build in the modern research university, if all of these knowledge systems are disrupted by the elimination of faculty, the cutting of programs that educate students, and not least the release the disemployment of staff who are the foundation for all we do?” Harris said. “It will not take just three to five years to recover. It could well take another 50 years to a century.”
Bang — whose projects recognize the systemic absence of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous peoples’ knowledge, how the U.S. was formed and the ongoing erasure and genocide of Indigenous peoples — said that diversity of knowledge is especially important now.
She also said that K-12 education and the pathways to making knowledge systems available to all people are being targeted.
“I think that often people think this is politics, but it actually has life and death consequences for Indigenous people,” Bang said. “What I think is exciting is that it is clearly such a ‘threat’ that we are seeing this severe attack, and I mean that as an invitation to everyone to recognize that we are making important progress.”
The Trump administration has ordered layoffs across the National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration and other federal organizations. Sporn’s lab, focused on respiratory infections in chronic lung conditions and clinical programs for Sarcoidosis patients, relies on grants from the NIH, Department of Veterans Affairs and FDA.
“These are threats that could derail all of the work that we do,” Sporn said. “It means that the young Black woman who comes to see me for her newly diagnosed Sarcoidosis, the condition I specialize in, will not have the opportunity to be treated with a new therapy that could potentially prevent lung damage that might progress and cut her life short due to respiratory failure.”
Sporn said that faculty must stand together with students to demand that NU leaders not comply with the orders advising universities to dismantle access to DEI programs.
“I don’t know whether our institutional leaders are listening today, but I do know this — the decisions we make and the actions we take in the face of the current crisis will have long standing consequences, and history will judge us,” Sporn said. “It will judge us all by what we do or do not do and what we say or do not say.”
A previous version of this story misquoted Leslie Harris. Additionally, the story misrepresented the number of people that attended the event. The Daily regrets these errors.
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