New York (AP)-as President Donald Trump, for the treatment of student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, the funding of $ 400 million canceled to Columbia University, fell a immense part of the financial pain on the researchers who were working on a training trip from the school campus and the hardship of cancer and studying the effects of covid-19 on children.
The urgency of saving ongoing research projects in the laboratory of the university and the world -famous medical center of the university was a factor for the decision Columbia last week to bow to the unprecedented requirements of republican administration as a condition for the restoration of the funds.
The Ivy League University announced on Friday that it would revise their disciplinary process for students, prohibit demonstrators to wear masks, to carry demonstrations from academic buildings, to say goodbye to a fresh definition of anti -Semitism and their program to supervise a vice -profit, which has a say in the curriculum and attitude, underlines the program of the nearby east.
The decision of the university of being accessible to almost all of the Trump government’s demands have outraged some faculty members who say that Columbia has sacrificed academic freedom. The American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers, which represented members of the Faculty in Colombia, submitted a lawsuit on Tuesday in which he violated the reason for the financing taxation against the laws of expression.
Scientific and medical researchers are horrified that their work was first drawn into the debate.
“There is simply no legitimate connection for the federal government to bring this type of research into the fire line in order to alleviate anti -Semitism in another place,” said Dr. Dani Dumitriu, a pediatric researcher who studied Babies during the Pandemy of Covid-19, said from the office in Midtown Manhattan.
Dr. Andrew Lassman, specialist for brain cancer and deputy director of clinical studies at the Columbia Cancer Center, said that the researchers have to make complex decisions when the cuts are. These decisions could be the prioritization of experimental cancer treatments on which they will concentrate and how many patients can treat them.
“This is real, not theoretical research,” said Lassman, who works at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and is about 2.5 miles north of the university’s main campus. “Young, old, black and white, Republican, Democrat – Cancer does not take care of it.”
The US Education Minister Linda McMahon said that the university was “on the right track” after announcing the changes on Friday but has not yet stated whether the financing could be restored.
The interim president of Columbia, Katrina Armstrong, described the political changes to the school on Tuesday as “right for columbia”.
“The implementation of these measures is of fundamental importance for the maintenance of our academic mission without disturbance and the security of students and campus in Colombia,” she said in a statement and added that she was committed to restoring the partnership between the university and the federal government.
On the main campus in Columbia, Benjamin Bostick, an environmental scientist whose research on the water quality of rural water in Arizona, Oklahoma and the Dakotas was among the financial resources, expressed the deciding of the university to agree to the Trump government’s demands.
He said the school was brought into a position in which it couldn’t do much to defend herself. “But I really don’t like it that the institution is effectively shared and the attention of the fact that research activities are suspended by external powers,” said Bostick.
“From my point of view, the government tells me that they are not interested in people who have these problems or how they can speak,” he said, referring to the research of water quality.
At the Columbia’s Teachers College, the cuts reached a program that graduates trained to become a teacher for deaf and listening listen. Elaine Smolen, the co-director of the program, said that the grant of the Ministry of Education made lessons support, living costs and professional development.
“There are no arguments with the extreme lack and the need for the kind of work that we do,” she said. “The longer deaf or difficult to hear that children are waiting for services, the worse their results are.”
In Dumitrius office, the funding cuts have forced their team to end the implementation and analysis of brain scans for participants in the study who wanted to pursue the long-term health of children whose mothers had merged with Covid-19 while they were pregnant.
“We learned and hoped to continue to pursue these babies until their adulthood,” she said.
Casandra Almonte, a mother from New Jersey, who takes part in the study with her son, said that the drawing of the financing “makes no sense”.
She said the additional tests and regular checks with Dumitrius Team had calmed her that her son Oliver, now 2 years aged, had developed correctly.
“It is completely unfair to take the financing of science because people practice freedom of speech,” said Almonte.
According to Dumitriu, a immense part of her team’s work can continue to apply other funds, since the National Institutes of Health Grant suspended the Trump administration of about a quarter of his budget. She hopes to make an appeal against the decision while her office is looking for other grants.
“We are somehow alive at the moment,” said Dumitriu. “It’s a really difficult time to do good.”
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Follow Philip Marcelo at Twitter.com/philmarcelo.
