NYU, ever the ethical beacon, had suspended her for protesting segregation.

“My having gone to Columbia was the greatest blessing that ever happened to me professionally,” she told the National Science and Technology Medals Foundation in 2016. She wasn’t sure she’d have been a National Medal of Science laureate, she said, “if New York University hadn’t decided that I was a bad girl in 1941.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/science/evelyn-m-witkin-dead.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Obituaries