Ashish Jha, dean of the School of Public Health, advised students and faculty to “stay resilient” during a talk hosted by the SPH Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. The event — which was the first of a three-part series on resilience in public health — took place amid recent Trump administration changes to federal research funding.
Since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, he has signed over dozens of executive orders, including the termination of federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The National Institutes of Health also announced they were limiting “indirect costs” of research projects to 15%. Brown, among other higher education institutions, filed a lawsuit against these plans.
Despite the uncertainties from these changes, Jha emphasized the need to “keep calm and carry on.”
“As you see these executive orders coming out, we should all take a deep breath because we don’t actually know which of these things is going to stick,” Jha said.
The Trump administration “uses political theater as part of his political strategy, … to get people who he sees as his opponents to overreact and self-destruct in some ways,” Jha added. “The most important thing we can do is not fall into the trap of overreacting.”
On Thursday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as the secretary of Health and Human Services, which Jha said was “a terrible choice for our country.”
Historically public health progress has come from “applying scientific principles and generating evidence and then putting them into practice,” but “the next health secretary who’s going to get sworn in … is somebody who has ignored that,” Jha said.
The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to The Herald’s request for comment by press time.
Jha advised the audience to “not make significant changes” to their work and to continue projects that they believe are important. He shared that during the first Trump administration, many of his colleagues “stopped writing grants about climate change” and started “writing grants about extreme weather events” — two things that he said were essentially the same thing.
Jha also stressed the continued importance of diversity in public health education.
If “we’re going to build an effective public health school … to take care of all of America, we need a super diverse student body,” he said, adding that diversity can manifest in different ways, from racial to ideological diversity.
According to Jha, “a big part of the ethos of public health” includes focusing on populations who are more vulnerable to bad health outcomes. “While we care about the health of everybody, we want to pay extra attention to people who are traditionally disadvantaged,” he said.
Jha emphasized the importance of “getting out of bubbles” and building relationships with people with “who we may not agree with on everything.”
He added there are “opportunities for engaging with the Trump administration,” and called for a need to build a bipartisan coalition for public health.
“The next few weeks are gonna be hard, the next few months are gonna be hard,” Jha said. “But I think we owe it to ourselves, and we owe it to the people that we serve to focus on being effective at this moment.”
Claire Song is a university news and science & research editor for The Herald. She is a sophomore from California studying Applied Math-Biology. She likes to drink boba in her free time.
