The Brooklyn Rail

Dr. Joanne Liu, a Canadian pediatric emergency medicine physician, Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Montreal, and the former international president of Médicins sans frontières/Doctors Without Borders, was invited to give a scientific lecture at New York University, where Dr. Liu had completed her fellowship specializing in pediatric emergency medicine in the 1990s.

When Dr. Liu arrived in New York last week, the vice-president of education at NYU asked to see Dr. Liu’s PowerPoint images before her lecture. One of the slides presented a table indicating the high numbers of humanitarian aid workers who have been killed in Gaza. After viewing that slide and others, the VP said “We think those slides could be perceived as anti-Semitic.” The VP also said “management” thought the slide showing the meeting between Presidents Zelensky and Trump in the White House “could be perceived as anti-government.” NYU then cancelled Dr. Liu’s talk on the basis of her PowerPoint.

After the cancellation, back in Canada, Dr. Liu said this about the incident:

The Trump administration's threat on March 7th to withdraw $400 million in funding from Columbia University in retaliation for a response deemed insufficient to protect the Jewish community on its campus in recent months is likely not unrelated to this decision to cancel my presentation. Other elite universities are also in the crosshairs of presidential cuts. I have sympathy for those who feel unsafe on campus. And I have just as much sympathy for university administrators trying to preserve their funding and, ultimately, their jobs, their research, their teaching.

But how far should we go?

Columbia University has completely abdicated. In hopes of regaining federal funding, it has acquiesced to the Trump administration’s demands, including revising its protest and security rules, appointing a vice chair for the Department of Middle Eastern Studies—an addition some see as a form of judicial administration—and hiring 36 special officers who will have the power to remove people from campus or even arrest them. Again, there are no perfect solutions when so much is at stake.

But returning to NYU, I remain astonished by the institution’s posture of preemptive over-obedience, which seeks to ensure it won’t be caught out. The University doesn’t want to stick its neck out only to be beaten back. The new American government uses the notorious method of deterrence through negative example. It even goes so far as to break existing rules. After that, all it takes is to raise an arm without striking for a retreat to occur.

The rule of law is a bit like health; you only realize its great value when you lose it.

The cascading incidents of university trustees and law partners at major law firms giving in to Trump’s demands before they are adjudicated is disturbing, but not surprising given the history of autocratic takeovers around the world. This is how it works. If you can get people in positions of power to acquiesce to your demands before being attacked, you can move much more quickly to curtail future resistance. This is another way that the rule of law is like personal health. If you give up at the first sign of infection, the virus moves faster and does more damage to the immune system.

Wired reported on March 28 that Elon Musk’s DOGE is planning to shift the computer system of the Social Security Administration from the old programming language it now uses, COBOL, to a new system. Although previous estimates to make such an overhaul ran to about five years, Musk and DOGE are saying they can do it in a few months, using generative AI. MFABT.

More than 72 million people currently receive Social Security benefits. DOGE has already announced reductions of 7000 to the workforce of SSA and begun to close down field offices around the country. The potential for many people not getting their benefits on time or at all will increase exponentially with a rushed software transplant. Since Musk now says that he plans to step away from DOGE in May, at the end of the 130-day cap on a “special government employee”’s allowed term of service, he may not be around when the entire Social Security system collapses.

The rule of law and the social safety net are a bit like health. You only realize their great value when you lose them.