Northwestern students and faculty protest Trump’s campaign against higher education

Northwestern University students and faculty on Thursday protested President Donald Trump’s attacks on higher education — and demanded that their university leaders stand up for academic freedom, the institution’s independence and for the safety of international students.

“I'm an international Ph.D. student on a visa, so every night before bed, I go through the mental list of my students, friends and colleagues to make sure I've heard from all of them that day because I know that on any given day they could be abducted in broad daylight for reasons that vary from jaywalking to expressing their political views in an op-ed,” said Micol Bez, a graduate student organizer studying philosophy and comparative literature.

Over the past week, federal officials have ended the legal immigration status of more than 1,000 international students without due process or explanation, according to multiple news outlets tracking the terminations. Students at campuses across Illinois have been affected.

Addressing a crowd on Deering Meadow at the Evanston campus, Bez called on Northwestern leaders to protect international students by shielding their personal information and records, by maintaining graduate students’ enrollment regardless of visa status and by providing legal and institutional resources to support students who are the most vulnerable.

The rally was organized by the graduate student workers union as part of a national Day of Action for Higher Education at campuses across the country. The union is also asking administrators to stop cuts to diversity, equity and inclusion programs and to stand up for trans rights.

“A university that concedes to moral and intellectual bankruptcy is left with nothing to defend,” Bez said. “A university that cannot accommodate boldness and courage in its scholars is no university at all. We're asking the university to save itself.”

In response to the students’ demands, Northwestern spokesperson Jon Yates said the university encourages free speech and that officials are monitoring the impacts of federal actions.

Tennyson Dall, a first-year Ph.D. student in anthropology, attended the rally mostly out of concern for the international students in her department.

She said at least half of her academic cohort “could get deported any time for something they said or something they did, or just because they're working on research that you know the government doesn't value.”

Seven students from around the country have filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s termination of their legal standing in the U.S, and attorneys representing more than 100 international students whose visas were revoked have asked a federal judge to temporarily block the terminations.

Trump’s campaign against higher education

Since taking office, Trump has repeatedly tried to control campus policies and teaching at Northwestern and at several other wealthy universities by threatening to withhold federal funding.

For weeks, Northwestern officials responded by taking steps to comply with the president’s executive orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. They took down websites like the page for the campus women’s and LGBTQ+ centers, despite faculty members urging non-cooperation with Trump’s anti-DEI and anti-LGBTQ demands.

Northwestern leaders also rolled out several measures in response to demands from conservative members of Congress and Trump that the college do more to combat antisemitism, including requiring an anti-bias training for undergraduates that some faculty found problematic.

Despite these efforts, federal officials said last week they were withholding $790 million in federal funding for the school. Northwestern receives just over $1 billion in research funding each year, according to a 2024 audited financial report.

Peter Cummings, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Northwestern, said university administrators announced they would fund some of the impacted research that had previously been funded by the Department of Defense. But he said the university had not offered funding for impacted research at Northwestern’s Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing.

Northwestern’s spokesperson referred WBEZ to a statement from the university’s president and board chair stating the university plans to fund research interrupted by last week's stop-work orders or the federal funding freeze, but not projects previously terminated by the federal government.

“Research that I'm involved in … that is focused on improving queer and trans people's lives … would not be supported by this additional funding,” Cummings said. “At this point, my personal research is in limbo and colleagues of mine, whose grants were officially terminated, are potentially losing their jobs. It's really devastating.”

But Cummings said he is taking hope from all the students and faculty from across Northwestern that have come together to resist Trump’s agenda — and also from a handful of other universities, including Harvard, that have joined the fight.

“They do that because people working at those universities stand up and scream and yell,” he said. “And so we're trying to signal to Northwestern that we are doing exactly that here, and we expect them to change their course and continue to defend their morals, their values, and their workers here at Northwestern.”

Lisa Kurian Philip covers higher education for WBEZ, in partnership with Open Campus. Follow her on Twitter @LAPhilip.