Anna Schapiro

Columbia. Harvard. UPenn. George Mason. UVA. UCLA.

One by one, universities are being attacked—financially, politically, ideologically.

Faculty & staff: don’t wait for it to hit your campus. Join the national movement defending higher ed.

standtogetherhighered.org (sign up on homepage)

Be a Brain Scientist for an Evening - A Philadelphia Teach-In University of Pennsylvania's new MindCORE Neuroimaging Facility contains a next–generation fMRI machine, offering a groundbreaking tool for researchers to delve deeper into the mind–brain connection. ...

Ever wondered how the brain works, or how language is related to identity?

If you answered 'yes' to either question, join us for an evening of brain and language science at @upenn.edu @pennmindcore.bsky.social's Neuroimaging Facility at Pennovation!

actionnetwork.org/events/be-a-...

Wow. A group of top scholars at Harvard just sent a letter to its president, Alan Garber, warning against surrendering to Trump.

Signatories include Steven Levitsky, Dani Rodrik, Ryan Enos, Theda Skocpol, and Steven Walt.

Someone forwarded it to me. Read it here:

DOJ Declares Slew of DEI Practices Unlawful in Memo The nine-page memo builds on the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

The DOJ now says many DEI practices in higher ed are “unlawful,” threatening federal funding for schools that don’t comply. This puts most equity initiatives at risk. www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

a cartoon of a man and a dog with the words now 's the time for action written on the bottom ALT: a cartoon of a man and a dog with the words now 's the time for action written on the bottom

IMPORTANT UPDATE IMPORTANT UPDATE

Regarding APHU/ACLU et al. vs. NIH Lawsuit

The Human Toll The US is undergoing rapid social, economic, and policy change. If you've been impacted, we want to hear your story! To participate, visit: https://tinyurl.com/thehumantoll Study sponsored under University of Wisconsin-Madison IRB Protocol #2025-1096. PI: Dr. Jessica Calarco Participants must be at least 18 years of age and reside in the US [image of a person with their face in their hands]

How have you been impacted by the changes we've seen under the current administration? What would you want to say to those in charge?

I'm launching a new research initiative to collect and share anonymous stories of the human toll. And I'd be very grateful for your help.

tinyurl.com/thehumantoll

Let's please keep the remaining staff at NIH, NSF, etc in our thoughts even as you lose sleep over your own lab and scientific career.

They are enduring pure chaos to try to hold the fort.

See snapshot from wapo.st/4feKKuu (gift 🔗) saying they are "barely holding it together"

NYU Application Support Group Matching Form Dear Prospective Neuroscience & Psychology PhD Students, We are a group of current NYU Neuroscience & Psychology PhD students who would like to help you with your PhD applications. We want to support...

Thinking of applying to US-based Ph.D. programs in neuroscience, psychology, or cognitive science? We’ve got your back! NYU’s Application Support Group is a student-led, free mentorship program offering 1-on-1 support and guidance. Apply now! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

This is unfortunate:
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...
I wrote to the president of Harvard. I hope other faculty will speak their conscience, even if it means more struggle ahead.

Bullying Universities

Heres my analysis of what Trump is doing to US universities. He is attacking every source of higher ed funding and holding academic freedom hostage for ransom. verfassungsblog.de/trump-univer...

Congrats Cody!! It’s an awesome paper!!

My first, first author paper, comparing the properties of memory-augmented large language models and human episodic memory, out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social!

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lV174sIRv...

Here’s a quick 🧵(1/n)

Looking for Columbia researchers to talk to for a Nature story on the university’s recent settlement! If you/anyone you know might want to share their experiences, please message me!

Holy - and I cannot emphasize this enough - shit.

Also, this guy was a senior project 2025 organizer.

Exclusive | White House Seeks Payments From Other Universities—Including Harvard—After Columbia Deal Sets Precedent The Trump administration is in talks with several schools about future funding following allegations of antisemitism.

"The administration is in talks with several universities, including Cornell, Duke, Northwestern and Brown... The White House hopes to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from Harvard, in a deal that would make Columbia’s $200 million payment look like peanuts"

If you wanna check in on the nation's cancer researchers, we're doin' bad. Real bad. No single post/article fully captures the depth and breadth of it.
We may be the first to feel this, but every single person in the country will feel it eventually.
Cancer. Does. Not. Discriminate.

Recent grads interested in cog neuro of memory, amazing job opportunity!! 👇

My view is that KKK parading with nooses is not comparable to protestors shouting river to the sea. I know that some hear those words as a call for genocide of Jews, but I do not, and I do not think that the vast majority of the protestors have that intention.

I don't know the right way to combat antisemitism, but I am not optimistic about the current approach. What do you have in mind when you say that these institutions agreed with the discrimination?

Open letter in response to federal funding cuts at Columbia 10 March 2025 Open letter in response to federal funding cuts at Columbia On March 7th, the Trump administration announced the immediate cancellation of approximately $400 million in federal grants a...

But the Jewish colleagues I know at Columbia feel they are being hurt, not helped, by this situation. Not all Jews see it the same way, of course, but this is my perspective. I love the articulation here: docs.google.com/document/d/1... (2/2)

Open letter in response to federal funding cuts at Columbia 10 March 2025 Open letter in response to federal funding cuts at Columbia On March 7th, the Trump administration announced the immediate cancellation of approximately $400 million in federal grants a...

While there have certainly been extremely concerning acts of antisemitism at Columbia and elsewhere, I do not feel that the Trump administration's chosen actions protect or benefit Jews. I would never want Jewish students to feel unsafe. I am Jewish myself, descendent from holocaust survivors. (1/2)

I do have thoughts. I am open to having a respectful dialog about it if you are interested in hearing them.

"Whatever onerous terms the school has agreed to will be deemed to have been broken in the face of a campus protest, an edgy syllabus, a leaked classroom discussion or even an acerbic student opinion piece. New civil rights violations will be imagined, ... and the attacks will continue."

Opinion | Columbia’s Administrators Are Fooling Themselves

"this deal is unlikely to end the attacks. The federal government, and this administration, is simply too powerful and too arbitrary to be credibly bargained with."

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/o...

“With these considerations, we expect to fund through the 4th percentile.”

There it is, in black and white, the destruction of cancer research in the US.

Opinion | I Watched It Happen in Hungary. Now It’s Happening Here.

"To the stewards of our nation’s great cultural and commercial institutions: Don’t dupe yourselves. The illusion that... you’ll outmaneuver him with silent cleverness, is just that — an illusion. Now, more than ever, your principled leadership matters."

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/o...

Quick thread on the recent IMO results and the relationship between symbol manipulation, reasoning, and intelligence in machines and humans:

Please help us build a following for Stand Together for Higher Ed! We are helping build a national movement to defend against attempts to dismantle, defund, and disparage the greatest #highered system in the world! Please follow, re-post, share widely on other sites. www.standtogetherhighered.org

Super excited to share this one!! Meta-learning sparsity and learning rate gives rise to brain-like gradients of complementary learning systems. So complementary learning systems emerge organically through behavior optimization, and it's not just two of them!!

This is so good