The government is robbing Americans of the research and treatments they deserve, a University of Pittsburgh laboratory manager said during a rally Thursday in Schenley Plaza.
Diversity, equity and inclusion aren’t mere buzzwords, said an associate dean from Pitt.
This was the sentiment from Pittsburgh-based professors, leaders and union members as they convened in Schenley Plaza at lunchtime to rally for National Day of Action for Higher Education in front of a crowd that grew to over 200 people.
The day of action was organized by the Coalition for Action in Higher Education and the American Association of University Professors with goals of growing union membership, calling on local university administrations to protect academic freedom and mobilizing community members.
As a mother of two boys, Megan Atherton, lab research manager at Pitt’s School of Medicine and member of the Pitt staff union, said she has experienced the miracle of research.
When President Donald Trump’s administration guts research funding and uses National Institutes of Health grants as “blackmail to demand obedience from our universities,” it hurts all Americans, she said.
Shortly after one of her sons was born — at about 8 weeks old — he got sick with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and had to be rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night.
“I just remember his little body being on this stupidly large hospital gurney, tubes coming out of his nose and wires all around, and just looking up at the doctor and asking, ‘What can we do?’” Atherton said. “They had a plan. He was able to fight off the virus, and we went home.”
In her work in Pitt’s cancer research lab, she said, she thinks about that experience often, especially how much work from researchers, professors and students over the past few decades informed her son’s doctors on how to handle his care.
“That is how research works: It’s for each of us when we need it the most, but it needs the input and the commitment of each of us,” Atherton said. “Today, there is a vaccine against the same RSV that threatened to kill my son.
“That is what research is for.”
Kyaien Conner is director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center on Race & Social Problems and associate dean for justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. He advocated for the continuation of DEI programs across the country in higher education.
“These are our values,” said Conner, who is a professor and researcher at Pitt. “These are principles that lay the foundation, the very bedrock of what a just and equitable society is and should be.”
Amid “growing threats to academic freedom, to science and to DEI,” Conner said she wants to correct false narratives that have permeated society. Specifically, while some people claim DEI programs lower standards, she said they are strategic initiatives meant to combat discrimination.
“The voices of truth need to be louder than the voices of lies,” she said. “But in today’s current environment, silence is complicity. We can no longer sit back and be silent.”
Conner said the Trump administration is relying on universities to weigh the cost of speaking out versus losing federal funding.
“Some major institutions have succumbed to preemptive obedience. … Most other institutions have just said nothing,” she said. “They … hope that we will prioritize federal funding over our values.”
As of this week, some institutions have begun to take a stand and put billions of dollars of federal funding on the line, Conner said.
She cited Harvard University’s rejection of what it called unlawful demands to overhaul academic programs or lose federal grants.
In retaliation, Trump threatened Tuesday to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status, saying the university should apologize.
Both Ellen Lee and Michael Goodhart helped to organize Thursday’s rally.
“It’s really easy to see all this stuff happening around you and feel afraid when you’re by yourself. But, in fact, when we all kind of gather together, that fear turns into something we can do something with: It turns into action,” said Lee, chair of United Steelworkers Local 1088’s civil and human rights committee and teaching associate professor at Pitt’s Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.
Goodhart, with the AAUP at Pitt and a political science professor in the Pitt Dietrich School, said the Trump administration has been trying to use its financial levers to “control and restrict what universities can teach and what kind of protests can happen.”
“We think that’s a dangerous threat to the values of the university and to the spirit of free inquiry and debate and research that made our country great,” he said.
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‘Stand up, fight back’
Tyler Bickford is a professor in the English department at Pitt teaching children’s literature courses and the president of United Steelworkers Local 1088-04, the union that represents about 3,500 faculty members.
“Our members are under attack,” he said. “Our jobs are threatened by the Trump administration by these attacks on federal research funding, attacks on DEI.”
And effects are already being seen on campus, according to Bickford, as research contracts have been terminated.
“We’ve already seen some of those labs being shut down and people being laid off,” he said. “Even if that money does eventually come through, you can’t just snap your fingers and restart a lab that’s been closed.”
Graduate students are “under attack” at Pitt as well, according to Michaela Cushing-Daniels, member of the organizing committee and now the bargaining committee of the Pitt grad workers union and a grad student in Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
“I have heard from hundreds of my co-workers,” she said, who are looking to feel protection from the union. “They are feeling vulnerable — they are feeling alone.”
Bickford said he was heartened to see so many people show up to Schenley Plaza in support of higher education.
“Everyone who works at Pitt has a really personal interest in this,” he said. “I think the work we do is really important — it’s connected to our whole community — and again, if we don’t stand up and fight back, then we’ve already lost.”
A lot of the Pitt faculty union members are scared for their physical safety, Bickford said, as well as job security since many people’s salaries are directly dependent on research grants and contracts.
“Pitt employs a large number of people who are here on visas, and the administration is right now disappearing people who are here on visas for arbitrary and random reasons,” he said. “And if those contracts go away … people’s salaries are at risk. People’s jobs are at risk.”
Because Bickford is not in the U.S. on a visa, he wasn’t worried about showing up to Thursday’s rally. He said the turnout was encouraging. Students across the country are having visas revoked by the Trump administration.
“I think the only way any of us is individually safe is if we all actually come out together and protect each other,” he said. “You’re actually sort of safest, I think, when you’re in a group with other people.”
U.S. Rep. Summer Lee, a Swissvale Democrat, spoke at Thursday’s rally, arguing that anyone attacking education — which she called the “cornerstone of democracy” — doesn’t believe in democracy.
“Why would anybody who believes in America being great say that we don’t believe in research — we don’t believe in America being at the forefront of curing cancer or Alzheimer’s or creating the next societies?”