The Cosmic Watchdog

The night before Dr. Joanne Liu was scheduled to deliver a long-planned speech at N.Y.U. Langone Health, the hospital affiliated with her alma mater, she received a call that stunned her. Her presentation on humanitarian crises was being canceled, the university official on the other end of the line said.

The reason, Dr. Liu said she was told, was that her presentation could be perceived as antigovernment and antisemitic.

To Dr. Liu, a professor at McGill University in Montreal and a pediatric emergency physician at Sainte-Justine hospital, the cancellation underscored the fear among leaders of U.S. universities of upsetting the Trump administration amid its crackdown on higher education.

Dr. Liu had already traveled to New York from Montreal for the speech, scheduled for March 19, when she got the call, she said in an interview on Monday. After she arrived, a university official raised concerns about the presentation’s reference to U.S.A.I.D. cuts and about the inclusion of a chart that detailed the number of aid workers killed around the world, including in Gaza, South Sudan and Sudan, she said.

The official, whom Dr. Liu declined to name, said that the slide “could be perceived as antisemitic” because it mentioned aid worker casualties in Gaza but not in Israel, said Dr. Liu, who was international president of Doctors Without Borders from 2013 to 2019.

Dr. Liu offered to change the three slides that posed concerns, she said. But three hours later, she was told the speech would be canceled.

The incident unfolded against the backdrop of a slew of executive orders and policy dictates from President Trump that have set off self-censoring at institutions fearful of government funding being revoked. The president has targeted universities early in his second term, pushing a vision for higher education that he says defends “the American tradition and Western civilization” and prepares people for the work force while limiting protests and research.

With threats of targeted executive orders and canceled funding, Mr. Trump has extracted concessions from elite universities, as well as law firms and other institutions that he perceives as his enemies.

The Trump administration has, in recent weeks, pulled hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. On Monday, the administration said it would review about $9 billion in contracts and multiyear grants at Harvard University, accusing it of failing to protect Jewish students and promoting “divisive ideologies over free inquiry.”

And in late February, lawyers for NYU Langone Health, where Dr. Liu was set to give her speech, proposed eliminating references to “diverse students” and removing the word “marginalized” from websites and policy statements, according to a PowerPoint presentation obtained by The New York Times.

A spokesman for NYU Langone Health, a leading hospital system in Manhattan with an affiliated medical school, did not respond to questions about why Dr. Liu’s speech was canceled last month.

The spokesman, Steve Ritea, said in a statement that guest speakers are given clear guidelines. “Per our policy, we cannot host speakers who don’t comply,” he said. “In this case, we did fully compensate this guest for her travel and time.” He did not provide any details about the guidelines when asked.

Dr. Liu, who said she had been invited to give the speech at N.Y.U. a year ago, described the official who rescinded her invitation to speak as emotional and apologetic. She said the cancellation of her presentation was a reflection of the climate of fear inside U.S. universities.

Dr. Liu said she had sympathy for the struggle of faculty members to maintain their funding, adding, “At the end of the day, that’s their job, their teaching, their life, their research.” She said she was speaking out about what happened to her, including in an essay in Le Devoir, a French-language newspaper in Montreal, to “tell people where we are going.” Universities, she said, should remain sanctuaries of knowledge and places where students go to be exposed to different ways of thinking.

Mr. Trump’s pressure on universities has led at least one professor to leave the country. Jason Stanley, a professor at Yale University, said in an interview with NPR that aired on Tuesday that he was leaving to take a position at the University of Toronto. Dr. Stanley, a philosophy professor, said that the Trump administration was following a classic fascist playbook in targeting intellectuals, and that concessions by elite universities set a dangerous precedent.

Dr. Stanley said in the interview that by cracking down on universities, ostensibly in the name of protecting Jews, the Trump administration was fomenting antisemitism among the public. “It’s going to create mass popular anger against Jewish people,” he said. “If universities want to fight antisemitism, they need to stand up and say, ‘No, we are not threats to American Jews. You are threatening American Jews.’”