After interim Northwestern President Henry Bienen delivered his State of the University address to the Faculty Assembly Wednesday evening, NU faculty, students and staff voiced their concerns Thursday morning regarding recent decisions made by the University’s administration in response to the freezing of $790 million in federal funding last April.
Discussion at the news conference focused on the enforcement of the controversial mandatory bias training, changes to the University’s Enhanced Employee Reduced Tuition benefit and the possibility of University compliance with federal demands.
Members of the NU Postdoctoral Union, NU Graduate Workers, NU American Association of University Professors, Together for Tuition and The University Under Threat were in attendance.
Enforcement of the controversial bias training
Last February, NU announced a mandatory bias training for students titled “Building a Community of Respect and Breaking Down Bias,” prompting mixed reactions.
NU told students who have yet to complete the training in a Sept. 16 email that they risk losing student affiliation, financial aid and access to on-campus housing.
NUGW’s Salma Moustafa, a third-year sociology Ph.D. student, said the University is choosing to capitulate to the Trump administration rather than stand up for students.
Moustafa said one of her colleagues and friends at NU had her student status revoked after refusing to complete the anti-bias training. As a result, her friend had to return to her home country, leaving students on visas worried about what will happen if they try to stand up to their university.
She said mandating NU’s bias training supports the “dominant perspective” without considering the students and faculty who are personally affected by U.S. foreign policy.
“Then years in the future, we start making apologies, or we start doing land acknowledgements, and then we start retroactively thinking about the damage that these institutions have brought,” Moustafa said.
TUUT member and history professor Leslie Harris said academic freedom at NU was already in jeopardy, with the University adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism in its bias training.
Harris said Northwestern’s adoption of the IHRA definition impacts discussion of the Middle East, genocide and the meaning of antisemitism and silences the views of pro-Palestinian students and faculty with an alternate view of the conflict.
Fifth-year philosophy and comparative literary studies Ph.D. candidate and NUGW official Micol Bez visited the West Bank in December 2024, witnessing what she called a “vertiginous project of occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing” that was “more brutal and fast-approaching” than anything she had previously read.
Bez said the University’s bias training erased the suffering she’d witnessed.
“We have to wonder whether we’re working for the kind of institution that actively constructed denialistic and genocidal cultures in the past and what we’re doing to prevent that,” Bez said.
Changes to the Enhanced Employee Reduced Tuition benefit
Feinberg communications specialist and Together for Tuition member Julie Bednark said NU’s decision to revamp treatment of staff regarding access to education was “shameful.”
When Bednark was first hired, she said, NU promised that after three years, qualifying staff could access University courses with 90% tuition coverage and no program limit.
Now, Bednark said tuition benefits do not exceed $12,000 a year, which covers “on average, about one class.” At this rate, she said, earning a degree could take over a decade.
“We are not asking for luxuries. We are asking for fairness. We are asking for what was promised to us as part of compensation at the time we were hired,” said Bednark. “It’s time for Northwestern to make good on its promise.”
In Communication graduate student and research technologist Louis Van Camp’s case, he said the EER benefit allowed him to manage graduate-level enrollment as a part-time student at NU’s School of Communication with full-time employment as a staff member at Feinberg School of Medicine.
With the June 12 email, Van Camp said his five-year plan of work and enrollment “could now be unraveled in months,” he said.
To Van Camp, cost cuts do not justify the decision to alter the EER benefit. Instead, he said NU profits off those who have already put years of their lives into the University.
“University employees are not nameless, soulless automatons,” Van Camp said. “We are not ambitionless, familyless, desireless workers. We are the power of the University and the engine of its spirit. We are not fodder for profit when leadership has its back to the wall.”
University compliance with federal demands
Regarding University relations with the federal government, Bez reiterated that concessions to the Trump administration will only weaken the University in future endeavors. She emphasized that federally encouraged policies impeding worker gender expression should be rejected.
Harris said that universities relinquish their institutional freedom when they appease the Trump administration by allowing attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion programs; limiting their centers of Middle East Studies; and “hiding” services for LGBTQ+ students.
“Like fish, (these institutions) have reached for the dangling worm and latched onto the hook,” Harris said. “Now they struggle and choke as academic freedom and First Amendment freedoms are squeezed out of their institutions.”
Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts postdoctoral fellow and NUPU Bargaining Committee elect Madeline Meier highlighted the danger the University’s current international postdocs — who typically transfer to an H-1B visa to accommodate their project length — face.
She said the proposed changes to H-1B visas, such as extreme fee increases, have created an obstacle for the University’s postdocs in the middle of their work.
“We are at a crucial point in the battle against higher education,” Meier said. “The time to act is now.”
Email: [email protected]
Bluesky: @lucaskubovchik.bsky.social
Related Stories:
— NU Faculty Assembly hears from President Bienen, votes on two resolutions in second-ever quorum
— New required bias training met with boycotts from SJP and JVP, approval from others
— Staff petition for return of unlimited reduced tuition benefit after its elimination
