World-renowned Canadian doctor says NYU cancelled talk for being ‘anti-government’

Dr. Joanne Liu, a world-renowned pediatric physician from Montreal, says NYU abruptly cancelled a scheduled talk. Liu says fear of political reprisals prompted the cancellation.

A world-renowned Canadian doctor says her talk at New York University (NYU) was cancelled for being anti-government and antisemitic.

Dr. Joanne Liu, an associate professor at McGill and the Université de Montréal, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Sainte-Justine hospital and who formerly served as the international president of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), told Global News she was left stunned after her scheduled lecture at NYU was abruptly cancelled by the university last week.

She said her lecture was going to discuss humanitarian aid in a time of crises as well as the challenges aid workers have faced in Gaza and other war zones.

Her presentation was also going to address the recent cuts to foreign aid, notably USAID, by President Trump‘s administration.

Global News has reached out to NYU for comment and has not heard back.

Liu’s presentation was set to go ahead on March 19. The night before, once she had already arrived in New York, Liu was told by the school’s vice-chair of the education department that it had been cancelled.

She said the vice-chair voiced concerns about some of her slides that cited aid worker databases that showed the number of humanitarian casualties in 2024 in Gaza, as well as the recent massive cuts to USAID, a civilian foreign aid and development assistance agency. She was told both topics could respectively risk being perceived as antisemitic and anti-government, Liu said.

She offered to make adjustments to the lecture, but NYU elected to cancel the event altogether.