I am dying of cancer.
To add insult to personal tragedy, my country’s government has decided to use my illness and that of so many other cancer patients as leverage in the current administration’s battle against higher education.
Hundreds of millions of cancer research dollars have been canceled or delayed because our government has decided that associated universities’ cultures are not conservative enough, are antisemitic, or have diversity, equity and inclusion policies that the Trump administration finds objectionable.
The magnitude of such fiscal cuts inevitably results in terminated research programs, operational disruptions, faculty cutbacks, hiring freezes, suspension of new Ph.D. student admissions and ultimately more cancer deaths and suffering. Hundreds of organizations and university research programs have lost or risk losing cancer research grants.
This is not a future problem — these funding cuts are having major impacts across the country right now. Rachael Sirianni, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School who researches pediatric brain cancer, recently told The New York Times that National Institutes of Health grant applications she submitted to continue her research were not funded, resulting in the suspension of her work and the layoff of a postdoctoral researcher. A recent “60 Minutes” segment examined the impact on Harvard’s cancer research programs, including the disruption to Joan Brugge’s work on breast cancer prevention, Don Ingber’s research on “organs-on-chips” and David Liu’s development of gene-editing tools that can correct and rewrite defective genes — research that led to lifesaving experimental treatment of a 13-year-old leukemia patient.
Some universities, most recently Cornell University, have succumbed to government pressure and reached an agreement to restore funding. Harvard, however, sued and secured an order to reinstate funding by successfully challenging the First Amendment constitutionality of the government’s actions. In a Sept. 3 decision, U.S. District Court Judge Allison Burroughs concluded that “ … Defendants used antisemitism as a smoke screen for a targeted, ideologically motivated assault on this country’s premier universities, and did so in a way that runs afoul of the APA (Administrative Procedure Act), the First Amendment and Title VI (of the Civil Rights Act).” The Trump administration is expected to appeal and block future funding to Harvard.
From a patient’s perspective, the immorality of holding cancer research funding hostage in a political battle over campus culture is much more troubling than the constitutional illegality found by the court. Whether a university settles or fights for its academic independence is somewhat beside the point. Putting cancer research at risk for political reasons is simply wrong.
Cancer research is neither conservative nor liberal. Cancer sees no color, race, religion or sexual orientation. No family who suffers with this awful disease should be used as a cudgel to seek revenge or retribution because of political differences. To diminish my life, my hopes and my dreams, as well as the lives, hopes and dreams of so many cancer patients, just to advance a political agenda is simply cruel.
Those politicians who allow — or worse, promote — limiting, and in extreme cases, terminating, critical cancer research to punish universities are not representing their constituents, so many of whom suffer from this disease. Instead, they are allowing revenge on innocents to make a point that they can and will cause more human suffering unless university educators submit. It raises the question: What kind of government puts the lives of its own citizens at risk?
If you must challenge an educational philosophy, then do so by challenging the educational programs that you deem unfairly progressive, not the research programs that have no political component. If you are convinced that a cancer research program is administratively bloated or worse, is fraudulently expending taxpayer dollars, then legally audit those expenditures and recoup those funds.
Don’t make my life and the lives of so many other cancer patients, along with the research programs we depend on, collateral damage.
