Following a rainy, dreary morning, the clouds had cleared just enough to let the sun out, illuminating a growing crowd of students, faculty, staff, and Iowa City community members who had all gathered on the Pentacrest midday to participate in the Teach-In and Speak-Out protest.
The protest was hosted by the University of Iowa graduate student union, the Campaign to Organize Graduate Students, or COGS, and the UI’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP.
Members from both groups filtered through the crowd, passing out note cards for participants to write questions that would be answered at the end of the protest, as well as flyers with a QR code, allowing participants to donate funds to support the five UI international students whose student visas had been revoked.
The protest was described by flyers hanging up across campus as being in support of academic freedom and science in higher education, and also spoke out against the violation of international students’ civil rights by revoking student visas as a consequence of attending protests.
“These actions represent a threat of crisis proportions to our universities, which are intertwined with America’s science and research capacities,” Kitty Buckwalter, a distinguished nursing professor at UI who is also a member of the National Academy of Medicine, a nonprofit organization seeking to advance health for all, said as she opened her testimony.
Following the reassignments of at least five National Institutes of Health directors, whose institutes focused on child health, nursing, allergy and infectious diseases, genome research, and the health of minorities, Buckwalter felt it was important to focus on why the Trump administration was targeting nursing.
“Perhaps it’s because three of the focal areas that drove the research agenda at NINR [National Institute of Nursing Research] were firearm injury prevention, health disparities, and social determinants of health,” Buckwalter said.
Social determinants of health, as explained by NINR, are nonmedical factors that can affect a person’s health. These can include economic stability, education, access to health care, and the quality of health care, and environmental and social factors, which Buckwalter explained are “key aspects of health, which the current administration clearly doesn’t feel are important.”
“Nurses can and must advocate in practice settings within our professional organizations and with civic leaders, legislators and policymakers, to insist that health policies follow science,” Buckwalter said. “And most of all, we must continue to provide supportive and welcoming care to all patients that affirm their humanity.”
And while the science community has faced defunding and budget cuts under the current presidential administration, the arts and humanities have faced cuts as well, including UI’s International Writing Program, or IWP, which lost nearly $1 million in federal funding in February.
Christopher Merrill has been the director of the program for the last 25 years and stepped up the marble steps of the Old Capitol building to talk about what this loss of funding, cuts to the IWP, and the devaluation of the humanities mean.
“What we lose when we don’t have these is the chance to learn something about other cultures, to see how different writers in different places testify to what goes on in their lives,” Merrill said. “Over these years, I can’t tell you how many writers we’ve hosted who come from authoritarian lands, and from them we have learned how to write in the most extraordinary circumstances.”
Merrill also expressed his anxiety about the future of arts in the U.S., especially as Trump elected himself the chair of the board of trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, writing on his social media that, “We are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN.”
“The arts, culture, that’s what individual artists make around the world, and we do it really well in this city of writing,” Merrill said. “I hope that our voices can be raised enough to give us a way to stand back up, reclaim our heritage, and make this country sane again.”
As Merrill stepped down, protestors walked around with signs that read “U of I works because we do,” “Trump’s great American Brain Drain Tour 2025,” “we teach, we research, we work,” and “Trump doesn’t want you educated, he wants you to obey.”
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Jeff Murray stepped up to speak, and as he did, two protestors unrolled a large sign that read “defend our public universities,” and stood beside speakers for the remainder of the protest as Murray continued the discussion of budget cuts and the elimination of NIH institutes.
“Beyond just the immediate impact on research funding that is taking place and beyond the tragedy for each individual who lost a job that may have been a lifetime dream, is the impact it has on the graduate students, the undergraduate students, as fellows, who’ve long dreamed of a career in the sciences and now see that may be an impossibility,” Murray said.
Murray is a professor of pediatrics at the UI and continued to discuss the impact that funding cuts will have on future students and acknowledged how this stress is elevated for international students, who now worry about losing their student visa or being deported for their involvement in protests, as was seen by a judge ruling that Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil could be deported for his role in pro-Palestinian protests.
“If you’re a graduate student or a postdoctoral fellow here or even an undergraduate, you’re seeing a very chilling environment right now for what you might have viewed as an exciting and promising career,” Murray said. “And if you’re a foreign student, you may not even be here because of a fear of being photographed in an audience at a rally like this that might lead to ICE showing up at your door.”
Murray called for attendees to participate in midterm elections, stating that people like U.S. Rep. Marianette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa, needed to be voted out of office, causing the crowd to erupt in cheers that continued until Jerry Schnoor, a professor of civil environmental engineering at UI, stepped up to speak.
Schnoor continued by discussing how international students have had their First Amendment rights violated by the current administration, and how this has followed previous initiatives by Trump to censor and flag terms related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, in government documents.
“I have a list here of 253 words which are flagged or banned or removed from our research articles and reports,” Schnoor said.
These included terms such as “woman,” “Black,” “social justice,” “diversity,” “LGBTQ,” and “climate crisis.”
“George Orwell, I’m telling you, would blush at the breath of this newspeak and doublethink,” Schnoor said, and concluded his testimony with a call to action, referencing the classic dystopian novel “1984.” “We have to push back in every way we can. When science gets censored, we lose.”
The protest concluded with comments from representatives from COGS, who spoke about how the administration is no longer just targeting student funding but students themselves and creating a culture of anxiety and fear. This culture means that many international students chose not to attend the protest out of fear of persecution, which all representatives acknowledged.
To remedy this, COGS gathered anonymous comments from international students, providing these students with the space to address their concerns and express their feelings about recent decisions and actions. The comments express anxiety around censorship, feelings of fear while being out in public, and frustration at the government and their complicity.
“What should be a celebratory time for my accomplishments, as I graduate, has been completely overshadowed by attacks against my racial, gendered, transnational, and sexual orientation-related identities,” a comment from an undergraduate in the humanities read. “I am tired, but I will continue to work hard until the very end of this damn degree.”