For whatever reason, the Trump gang has decided to attack research and higher education. One form this has taken is to cut research grants and overhead charges that fund research programs and upend the review processes that go into awarding the grants. In addition, it seems to have decided that international students are undesirable and should be pressured to leave. It is doing this by harassing them with detentions and deportations and annulling their visas for the flimsiest of reasons.
It has also threatened universities with funding cuts if they do not kowtow to the administration’s demands. You would think that elite universities would hold out but one of them, Columbia University, was one of the first to buckle under with almost no protest. And yet despite its cravenness, it has still been subjected to large funding cuts.
But some other elite universities are now starting to fight back through the courts, with Harvard leading the way. This has clearly infuriated the Trump gang and they are lashing out. Secretary of the department of Homeland Security and puppy-murderer Kristi Noem, is someone so ignorant that she thinks that habeas corpus, the basic law to prevent arbitrary arrest and detention, is something that gives the president the power to deport people. She has informed Harvard that if they do no comply with their demands, the visas of their international students will be canceled immediately and that Harvard will not be able to enroll new international students.
The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, posted a copy of the letter on X, formerly known as Twitter. In it Noem said: “I am writing to inform you that effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked.”
“The revocation of your Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification means that Harvard is prohibited from having any aliens on F- or J-nonimmigrant status for the 2025-2026 academic school year. This decertification also means that existing aliens on F- or J- nonimmigrant status must transfer to another university in order to maintain their nonimmigrant status,” Noem continued.
Her idea that Harvard’s international students can simply pack their bags and move overnight to another university shows that she is divorced from reality, which seems to be the case with most of the Trump people. Even at the best of times, transferring from one university to another, even for domestic students with no visa issues, is a complicated matter, involving finding a place in another university that has funding to support you, transferring credits, finding housing, and so on. If you are in a graduate research program, it becomes even worse since these programs are in highly specialized niche areas and few other places will be doing anything similar. So the whole thing is a cruel hoax. But what else can you expect from the bunch of sociopaths that make up the Trump administration?
Harvard promptly sued and a federal judge almost immediately placed a temporary on that move.
US district judge Allison Burroughs in Boston issued the temporary restraining order late on Friday morning, freezing the policy that had been abruptly imposed on the university, based in nearby Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Thursday.
You can read moree about the legal battle here.
Noem’s looniness does not end with her ignorance of habeas corpus. “The former governor of South Dakota also accused Harvard of “fostering violence, antisemitism and coordinating with the Chinese Communist party on its campus”.”
It is clear that the Trump gang views making the charge of antisemitism as giving it a pass to do anything it wants against anyone. It is particularly rich coming from a Trump administration that has been supported by, and is supportive of, white supremacists and neo-Nazis, where Trump himself expressed sympathy for the tiki-torch carrying neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville in 2017 chanting “Jews will not replace us!”
The idea that Harvard is a hotbed of violence and antisemitism is absurd on its face but to accuse it of coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party has taken this to the level of farce.
Given this deep hostility to research and international collaborations, is it any surprise that not only international students, but also graduate researchers, and even faculty, will start looking to other countries? This is not only a loss of brain power, it is also going to cost a lot of money.
It’s important to remember that with all the talk in Washington about trade deficits, “We have a trade surplus on services,” said Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
In fact, it was a $294 billion surplus in 2024, according to the commerce department. ”And a big chunk of that is the foreign students. This $56 billion that we get from foreign students coming here,” said Baker.
Money they spend on tuition and fees, housing and food.
“The best students from places like China, from Europe, from India, they want to come to Harvard. And it’s not just Harvard, but they have enormous respect for U.S. universities in general,” said Baker.
But with students getting visas revoked, and potential enrollment bans like Harvard is facing, foreign students are starting to look elsewhere.
“We saw that just with the spring sort of enrollment and intake, there was a 13% decline in enrollment of graduate students in the United States,” said Fanta Aw, CEO of NAFSA, Association of International Educators. “And we know the spring semester has a smaller intake. The majority of intake for universities are in the fall.”
NAFSA’s research shows foreign college students and the money they spend while they are here translates into more than 300,000 jobs.
What exactly does Trump hope to gain by gutting research and higher education? There is not much money to be saved in the short term and the long term costs are going to be immense. I am truly baffled by this.
wait, isn’t making chinese universities massively more appealing than ours a kind of collaboration with the chinese communist party? white still black with these creeps.
From what I’ve read, keeping most of the populace ignorant is right out of the tyrant’s playbook.
I kinda feel this just falls inline with the classic fascist playbook…
Pick an oppressed minority or two to scapegoat, demonize, and use to consolidate the base against some perceived threat/enemy (LBTQ folk, undocumented people), and then use that political/social capital/energy to start fighting the groups institutions that are actually capable of fighting back against fascism (Universities, Trade Unions, etc.)
🙁
I learned a lot of things at university (a long time ago now, but some things don’t change much). Among these things were:
1. there are a fair proportion of students there who did NOT get the academic results I did, people who not only didn’t seem fit to be doing the courses they were on, but furthermore people who struggled to function unaided in adult life.
2. there was a surprisingly high proportion of people there who were privately educated (given that only 7% of the school age population in the UK is privately educated) and whose parents were, to me, literally unimaginably rich.
3. the overlap between categories (1) & (2) was almost 100%.
4. none of these people ever dropped out or were thrown out, no matter how badly they seemed to be misunderstanding the course content. They ALL graduated. And they ALL had jobs by graduation day (in the pit of a recession I might add).
5. a surprisingly (to me) large number of the students at the university were from abroad.
6. while UK students’ fees were paid for by the taxpayer (it was the 80s…) and came to someting like £10k, foreign students’ fees were often triple that or more. The university made WAY more money taking in foreign students than domestic. Foreign students were pretty much vital to making the university’s budgets work.
7. students are, in no particular order, passionate, naive, opinionated about politics, ignorant, cossetted and economically the opposite of productive. One thing that was popular when I was there were student “strikes” as a form of protest, surely the most pointless action imaginable. It always reminded me of the scene in Blazing Saddles where the sheriff holds HIMSELF hostage and everyone backs off. If students (or lecturers/professors for that matter) complain about something -- who gives a shit? It’s not like they’re driving the trains or emptying the bins or running the local hospital or anything.
So… I think it’s safe to assume, looking at them and their performances, that Trump’s coterie are drawn from “graduates” of the stripe I encountered and described in points 1-4.
It’s also safe to assume that in all the time they were… doing whatever it was they were doing at university, they noticed (5), but never heard about (6). It seems remarkable that nobody has told them since.
And as for targetting universities -- I can sort of see the point, to an extent. Those troublesome youngsters are going to come out of uni at some point and turn into troublesome adults. I do think it’s crediting Trump’s regime with too much wit to imagine they’re thinking that far ahead. I’d be amazed if Trump gives a shit about anything that happens 41 months from right now. (Then again… he has publicly floated the idea of a third term, and I wouldn’t put it past him, so maybe he is breaking the American stereotype and thinking about something other than the immediate future. Only time will tell.)
Has Bari Weiss said anything about this naked attack on academic freedom yet?
Harvard should offer Trump a honorary doctorate.
Boh bah who can say, there’s so much chaos… I’d venture to mention some components of this latest boondoggle:
-- yes, fascists straight HATE culture as they hate anything that’s better than themselves (so basically they hate the universe entire). Plus, uni people, profs or students as they may be, tend to use their brains at least a little and they hate that. Plus plus, sometimes they even say what they think, using words with more than one syllable and that’s the ultimate crime. Every authoritarian movement ever existed has had higher learning in their sights, this will never change.
-- second, it may be that the toddler-in-chief was triggered by something he heard or was whispered into his foul ear. His decomposing brain dimly realizes them unis are full of furinners and so off he goes.
In conclusion, there may be no need to invoke specific plans or any kind of coordination, it’s obvious that every action of this “administration” is caused by the brainfarts of an Alzheimer sufferer, plus the occasional meddling of his rancid handlers.
Good show indeed.
The university’s senior managers do. It’s bad for the institution’s reputation, hence for recruitment of future students, particularly those lucrative foreign students. Since those are the people students and lecturers generally want to pressure into doing/not doing something, such strikes make perfect sense.
In general that makes (authoritarian) sense, but in Trump’s case, he’s clearly been spending his political capital at a furious rate ever since his inaugauration. Of course the MAGAt base has been impressed by all the sound and fury and performative cruelty, but the extremely rich and the big corporations, not so much. That’s who the budget bill is for, but he hasn’t got it through yet, and even that has its downside for the corporations, if it sends the cost of borrowing up sharply. And the cuts will hit a lot of MAGAts, although they may be fooled into blaming the usual scapegoats rather than the author of their misery. On the whole, if one can attribute any rational motive to Trump’s attack on Harvard, it’s probably that he thinks of it as part of shoring up his base by attacking a symbol of the “liberal elite”.
I have read several people speculate that Trump’s fury about Harvard specifically is because Barron Trump applied and was rejected. Trump made claims about Barron being accepted at lots of universities. He ended up being accepted at NYU, not a low prestige school but nowhere near the top 10 either.
There also appears to be something of an organized policy against universities and science. It’s likely that the Project 2025 people have a hand in this. They are effectively fascists and as a group have long disliked US education for not enforcing a conservative point of view. They understand that the only way to get their point of view into universities is to control the universities.
Yes, I’d say a lot of the fight against Universities in particular is coming from the Project 2025 side of things… the religious right has long been upset with Universities ‘ruining’ their children by teaching them actual facts rather than the Revealed Truth.
It’s not just ‘fascists wanting to keep everybody too stupid to notice what’s happening’, it’s also ‘authoritarian parents not wanting their children to be less stupid than they are’. As long as the next generation is kept from realizing there are other options, they’ll be a lot less likely to rebel.
I think something a bit related to several of the takes above, but from a different angle. I don’t think you need a big reason for Trump & his supporting cast of clowns to hate universities because they already hate educated people.
One basic thing a lot of education teaches you is how to find information. You don’t need a degree in Library Sciences to do this, just about any degree or even a high school diploma/GED will give you that if you pay attention. That’s bad if your go-to response to screwing up is to lie about it.
Trump is incredibly inept. He’s not very good at much of anything. The yes men he’s surrounded himself with aren’t much better. Trump actively avoided skilled, knowledgeable people around him because last time they kept reminding him that he didn’t know what he was doing. His ego obviously didn’t handle that well. All the incompetent bunglers he’s surrounded himself with seem to have the same visceral reaction.
What they’re doing is tremendously harmful to the country as a whole and it’ll take decades to dig ourselves out of the pits he’s digging under us. But that doesn’t concern Trump or his backup clowns. I don’t think Trump sees his job as being the President of the United States, not the way any of us would view that job and its responsibilities. To Trump, being POTUS seems to just be a label. You can tell because he’s blithely unconcerned about his incompetence around tarrifs and how it has casually shaved trillions of dollars of worth from the stock market. Even now he’s more concerned with the appearance of admitting to a mistake than he is the continuing damage he’s doing. It’s the same with his other policies. And this one as well.