Friday is the final day for classes this semester at the University of Iowa, but the fight of faculty members and students, along with supportive members of the broader community, to protect science from sudden, arbitrary funding cuts and other hostile actions by the Trump administration continues. As part of the fight, Stand Up for Science Iowa (SUSI) is holding a rally on Friday evening.
The 90-minute “Stand Up with Us” rally starts at 4:30 p.m. on the Pentacrest. At 5 p.m., a series of speakers will address the issues researchers and educators are facing as Trump’s appointees and the DOGE operatives recruited by Elon Musk continue to cut research budgets, declare that certain topics — like any research related to transgender people or anything they might tag as DEI — won’t receive federal funding, and try to restrict what can be taught in schools and universities. There will also be live music from One More Hour.
Stand Up for Science is a nationwide grassroots organization, with chapters at colleges and universities across the country. It was inspired by the March for Science in 2017, itself inspired by the March for Women and other popular movements launched in the early days of the first Trump administration to oppose its regressive policies. The new organization came together to plan a series of pro-science rallies across the country on March 7.
“It was a really grassroots event that was put together in very short order by a handful of graduate students and faculty at the University of Iowa,” SUSI’s Ben Kelvington, a UI grad student doing research on molecular mechanisms involved with neurodevelopmental disorders, told Little Village.
Iowa City was one of more than 30 cities around the country that had a Stand Up for Science rally on March 7. Well over 100 people gathered on the Pentacrest for Iowa City’s rally.
“Since then, we’ve really worked hard to expand beyond the university into the Iowa City community and around the state,” Kelvington said.
SUSI has set up information tables at other Iowa City protests, such as “Hands Off!” on April 5 and the April 19 Day of Action. This weekend, SUSI members will participate in NAMIWalks, a 5K fundraising walk organized by the Johnson and Linn County chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. The walk starts at Terry Trueblood Recreation Area in Iowa City at 10 a.m. on Saturday.
“We’re really trying to connect with people, meet them where they are,” Kelvington said.
A poll published this week shows there remains a lot of work to be done raising public awareness of the importance of federally funded science currently under threat. The poll conducted by the Association of Science and Technology Centers found that even though 90 percent of Americans rely on information produced by federally funded research on a daily basis — from weather forecasts to food safety warnings to economic analysis — only 10 percent realized the role of federal support in producing that information.
