Stand Up for Science aims to revive a movement that started in 2017, but with an all-new team and a more focused vision.
On Feb. 8, Colette Delawalla, a graduate student in psychology at Emory University, nervously announced to the online world that she was planning a national protest in defense of science. “I’ve never done this before, but we gotta be the change we want to see in the world,” she wrote in a post on Bluesky, a social media platform.
A team of scientists quickly coalesced around her and formed a plan: a rally on the National Mall, satellite protests across the country, March 7. They threw together a website so rudimentary, initially, that visitors had to type the “www” manually, or else the web address raised an error. Within days, the (improved) site received so much traffic that it crashed.
The event, dubbed Stand Up For Science, is something of a revitalization of the March for Science that took place in cities around the world in April 2017, not long into President Trump’s first term. But this time, in a greatly sharpened political climate and a post-Covid world, the protests are being organized by a completely different team, and with a distinct vision.
“The spirit of it is the same,” Ms. Delawalla said. But, she added, “now we are in a position of being on defense as opposed to offense.”
Many of the threats that mobilized scientists during the first Trump administration, such as the widespread deletion of federal databases and deep slashes to the science budget, never came to pass. But this time, within weeks of the presidential inauguration, Mr. Trump has already reshaped much of the federal scientific enterprise, which funds a significant chunk of academic research.