A world-renowned Canadian doctor says her talk at New York University (NYU) was cancelled for being ‘anti-government.’
Dr. Joanne Liu, an associate professor at McGill and the Université de Montréal, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Sainte-Justine hospital and who formerly served as the international president of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), told Global News she was left stunned after her scheduled lecture at NYU was abruptly cancelled by the university last week.
She said her lecture was going to discuss humanitarian aid in a time of crises as well as the challenges aid workers have faced in Gaza and other war zones.
Her presentation was also going to address the recent cuts to foreign aid, notably USAID, by President Trump‘s administration.
“[I was told] that discussing the USAID cuts could be perceived as an anti-governmental narrative,” Liu told Global in an interview on Friday. She added that NYU, her alma mater, also said her lecture risked being perceived as antisemitic.
Global News has reached out to NYU for comment and has not heard back.
Liu’s presentation was set to go ahead on March 19. The night before, once she had already arrived in New York, Liu was told by the school’s vice-chair of the education department that it had been cancelled.
She said the vice-chair voiced concerns about some of her slides that cited aid worker databases that showed the number of humanitarian casualties in 2024 in Gaza, as well as the recent massive cuts to USAID, a civilian foreign aid and development assistance agency. She was told both topics could respectively risk being perceived as antisemitic and anti-government, Liu said.
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She offered to make adjustments to the lecture, but NYU elected to cancel the event altogether.
This comes amid the Trump administration’s recent grant cuts to U.S. universities, and Liu says she believes NYU was afraid to suffer the same fate. She added that it reflects the climate of fear American universities are currently living under.
The Trump administration recently pulled $400 million in federal funding to Columbia University, after alleging the institution failed to protect students from “antisemitic harassment.” The university has since restored its funding after it agreed to a set of demands, including placing its Middle Eastern Studies Department under academic oversight.
“Almost a year ago, I was invited to give a scientific lecture at NYU’s Department of Emergency Medicine. I did my fellowship there, my specialty in pediatric emergency medicine in the 1990s,” Liu wrote in an opinion piece published Thursday in Montreal French language newspaper Le Devoir.
“Elite universities are in the crosshairs of presidential cuts,” Liu continued. “I have sympathy for those who feel insecure on campus. And I have just as much sympathy for university administrators who are trying to preserve their funding and, ultimately, their jobs, their research and their teaching.”
She added that academia is currently in a vulnerable state in the United States.
The latest in a deteriorating relationship with the U.S.
This is the latest in an uptick in Canadians saying they are avoiding all travel south of the border.
Iranian-Canadian political science professor at McGill University, Arash Abizadeh, told Global he cancelled three upcoming academic trips to the states.
He explained that while he’s disturbed by Trump’s recent antagonistic rhetoric toward Canadian sovereignty, he’s mostly concerned about the safety of foreigners on U.S. soil.
He cited the incident earlier in March when a French scientist was denied entry to the country after immigration officials at a Houston airport searched his phone and found text messages criticizing the president, which they reportedly said “could be considered terrorism.”
“Who wants to put themselves in a position where they can be arbitrarily detained?” Abizadeh said, speaking about his reticence to enter the U.S.
Daniel Jutras, the rector of the Université de Montréal as well as a lawyer and academic who specializes in civil and comparative law, told Global the current political climate worries him.
He said the university has put out a memo to its entire community warning people to be extra vigilant if they enter the U.S., and reminded its students and staff to declare their trips to the university.
“[There’s quite] some distance from what we have experienced in the past decades in our very close interactions with several research organizations and great universities there,” he said.
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