American taxpayers are subsidizing a Columbia University professor who marched in pro-Hamas demonstrations on campus.
Neuropsychologist Jennifer J. Manly participated in a human blockade to prevent administrators from dismantling the unauthorized encampments last April.
In photos taken of the event, Manly is visible wearing an orange vest and standing with fellow Columbia professors as they marched for Gaza, in front of banners reading “Demilitarize education” and “Palestine is Everywhere”; others called for financial boycott of and divestment from Israel.
According to the National Institutes of Health and other publicly accessible databases, Manly has been named in connection with over $100 million in grants over the past 20 years.
Much of her research is based on the so-called “social determinants of health thesis,” which posits that racism, sexism and homophobia can cause brain disease in “Black and Latinx communities” — a thesis that critics have described as pseudo-science.
Manly’s appearance at a pro-Hamas rally, coupled with her activist academic research, raises serious questions about the medical establishment, which has directed large sums of taxpayer dollars to ideologues disguised as professors and to activism disguised as science.
And it gives further grist to officials in the Trump administration, who have argued that funding cuts are necessary to disrupt the pipeline of left-wing radicals.
Manly’s work routinely advances the idea that racism causes physical illness, such as Alzheimer’s disease. She claimed in an interview last year that “we shouldn’t blame people for their lifestyle choices in terms of their brain health.”
Rather, “systems of oppression” and “discriminatory beliefs” cause black people to suffer dementia at disproportionate rates.
“Any biological differences are driven by … racism,” Manly has said, later defining racism as “the pathway through which race is ‘biologized.’ ”
Her academic work reflects these views. One paper Manley co-authored blamed “historical patterns of segregation” for higher rates of dementia among blacks. Another paper blamed “structural sexism” for declining memory, with the effect found to be stronger among black women.
Manly’s work is lavishly funded by taxpayers. Most recently, the National Institutes of Health gave her and her team nearly $700,000 to produce work linking racism to brain disease.
As part of this grant, in January 2025, Manley and colleagues published an article implying that blacks living in states with “high lynching proportions” in the past experienced higher levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a factor associated with greater risk of dementia.
The authors claimed that “racism is associated with inflammation and dementia risk” because it “cumulatively taxes the body resulting in worsening biological and cognitive health.”
Another paper concluded that “racist U.S. policies” had an “influence on cognitive health over time and dementia risk later in life.”
Psychiatrist Kurt Miceli, a critic of wokeness in science and medical director of Do No Harm, says Manly’s research demonstrates why DEI should be struck from the medical field.
Miceli regards her linking of historical lynchings with black dementia rates as “political” as opposed to scientific. He goes on to explain that the marker Manly uses to track her hypothesis of racism-invoked stress — CRP — can rapidly change and is more influenced by health factors such as obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes and high blood pressure.
Manly’s activist-driven research wasted taxpayer money, he argues. “There’s so much else that could be done [instead of] sort of focusing on an argument that … leads to calls for possibly reparations.”
Despite her politicized research and history of defending pro-Hamas activism, Manly continues to help lead a multimillion-dollar government project funded by numerous agencies that tracks brain aging.
She also currently maintains more than $20 million in active grants to support her research at the Gertrude H. Sergievsky Center and the Taub Institute at Columbia.
The Trump administration has shown its determination to slash the National Institutes of Health’s bloated budget. It would be wise to scrutinize the work of professors like Jennifer Manly, who seem to be pursuing ideological research rather than medical science, and terminate funding for projects that don’t meet traditional scholarly standards.
The only way to restore trust in America’s research institutions is to focus on real research — not pro-Hamas radicalism or dubious racialist scholarship.
Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of “America’s Cultural Revolution.” Hannah Grossman is an investigative reporter at the Manhattan Institute.
