Trump continues to go after Harvard, ostensibly because of its pervasive antisemitism (granted, President Alan Garber says that the climate is still antisemitic and he himself has been a victim). However, Trump is punishing the wrong people for Harvard’s presumed crimes, and those include researchers whose grants have been cut or rescinded.
Now he’s taken an even more egregious step: threatening to ban the school’s ability to accept international students unless it coughs up a pile of information about all of Harvard’s foreign students. Click the headline from April 17 below to read, or find the article archived here:
An excerpt:
The Trump administration on Thursday said it would halt Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, taking aim at a crucial funding source for the nation’s oldest and wealthiest college in a major escalation of the administration’s efforts to pressure the elite school to fall in line with the president’s agenda.
The administration notified Harvard about the decision — which could affect about a quarter of the school’s student body — after a back-and-forth in recent weeks over the legality of a sprawling records request as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s investigation, according to three people with knowledge of the negotiations. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
The latest move intensifies the administration’s attempt to upend the culture of higher education by directly subverting the ability of one of the nation’s premier universities to attract the best and brightest students from all over the world. That capability, across all of academia, has long been one of the greatest sources of academic, economic and scientific strength in America.
It is also likely to prompt a second legal challenge from Harvard, according to another person familiar with the school’s thinking who insisted on anonymity to discuss private deliberations. The university sued the Trump administration last month over the government’s attempt to impose changes to its curriculum, admissions policies and hiring practices.
“I am writing to inform you that effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked,” a letter to the university from Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said. A copy of the letter was obtained by The New York Times.
The Department of Homeland Security said the action applied to current and future students.
“Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status,” the department said in a news release after Ms. Noem posted the administration’s letter on social media later on Thursday.
Not only that, but current foreign students have to find another place to study, pronto. Do you think that’s easy? And of course Trump has a way to enforce this plan: all he has to do is revoke the visas of foreign students.
Granted, a lot of dosh is involved, as foreign students tend to pay full fare:
The administration’s decision is likely to have a significant effect on the university’s bottom line. Tuition at Harvard is $59,320 for the 2025-26 school year, and costs can rise to nearly $87,000 when room and board are included. International students tend to pay larger shares of education costs compared with other students. (Harvard notes it is need-blind for all students, regardless of nationality.)
You can read the letter from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem here, which lays out what Harvard has to cough up to prevent loss of its foreign students. It was apparently sent to the school
I don’t think Harvard responded by the April 30 deadline, and they have responded this way:
Harvard relayed those concerns to the administration on April 30. On the same day, the university’s executive vice president, Meredith Weenick, issued a public letter that vowed the school would provide the administration only with information “required by law” and urged students to “stay as focused as possible on your academic pursuits.”
The administration responded the following week, notifying Harvard that the school’s response did not satisfy Ms. Noem’s request, the people said. In the same message, the administration appeared to narrow its request by asking for information on international students who met any one of four criteria.
Noem then disqualified Harvard from the student visa program. I have just learned that Harvard has filed a lawsuit over this latest action and has filed a restraining order against the government (you can read the new suit here). I haven’t read it yet, and though I’m not a lawyer, I think the university has a good case. Harvard is being singled out among all American universities in this way (some are even more antisemitic than Harvard) and the government’s dismissing of foreign applicants has never been done before. I’m not sure whether selective enforcement is grounds to sue, but you can be sure that Harvard will mount a case.
One quarter of Harvard’s students are foreign, and they are essential to Harvard being Harvard. Further, it’s inimical to scholarship to prevent students who want to study at Harvard from coming here, denying the world the ability to send people to an American university renowned for producing brilliant foreign scholars.
This morning, Steve Pinker published a long op-ed in the NYT on the “Harvard derangement syndrome” of the administration. Click on the headline below to read it, or find it archived here:
An excerpt (Steve first mentions all the pieces he’s written criticizing Harvard):
So I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged. According to its critics, Harvard is a “national disgrace,” a “woke madrasa,” a “Maoist indoctrination camp,” a “ship of fools,” a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” a “cesspool of extremist riots” and an “Islamist outpost” in which the “dominant view on campus” is “destroy the Jews, and you’ve destroyed the root of Western civilization.”
And that’s before we get to President Trump’s opinion that Harvard is “an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution,” a “Liberal mess” and a “threat to Democracy,” which has been “hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called future leaders.”
This is not just trash talk. On top of its savage slashing of research funding across the board, the Trump administration has singled out Harvard to receive no federal grants at all. Not satisfied with these punishments, the administration just forbade Harvard from enrolling foreign students and has threatened to multiply the tax on its endowment as much as 15-fold, as well as to remove its tax-free nonprofit status.
Call it Harvard Derangement Syndrome. As the country’s oldest, richest and most famous university, Harvard has always attracted outsize attention. In the public imagination the university is both the epitome of higher learning and a natural magnet for grievances against elites.
He admits that Harvard still has problems:
Yet some of the enmity against Harvard has been earned. My colleagues and I have worried for years about the erosion of academic freedom here, exemplified by some notorious persecutions. In 2021 the biologist Carole Hooven was demonized and ostracized, effectively driving her out of Harvard, for explaining in an interview how biology defines male and female. Her cancellation was the last straw that led us to create the academic freedom council, but it was neither the first nor the last.
. . .The most painful indictment of Harvard is its alleged antisemitism — not the old-money WASP snobbery of Oliver Barrett III, but a spillover of anti-Zionist zealotry. A recent, long-awaited report detailed many troubling incidents. Jewish students have felt intimidated by anti-Israel protests that have disrupted classes, ceremonies and everyday campus life, often met with a confused response by the university. Members of the teaching staff have gratuitously injected pro-Palestinian activism into courses or university programming. Many Jewish students, particularly Israelis, reported being ostracized or demonized by their peers.
As with its other maladies, Harvard’s antisemitism has to be considered with a modicum of discernment. Yes, the problems are genuine. But “a bastion of rampant anti-Jew hatred” with the aim of “destroying the Jews as a first step to destroying Western civilization”? Oy gevalt!
I’m glad there’s some Yiddish in there. He notes that withholding grant money hurts Jews than other groups, and is hypocritical given Trump’s past statements:
Just as clear is what won’twork: the Trump administration’s punitive defunding of science at Harvard. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service — namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country. The grant pays for the people and equipment needed to carry out that research, which would not be done otherwise.
Mr. Trump’s strangling of this support will harm Jews more than any president in my lifetime. Many practicing and aspiring scientists are Jewish, and his funding embargo has them watching in horror as they are laid off, their labs are shut down or their dreams of a career in science go up in smoke. This is immensely more harmful than walking past a “Globalize the Intifada” sign. Worse still is the effect on the far larger number of gentiles in science, who are being told that their labs and careers are being snuffed out to advance Jewish interests. Likewise for the current patients whose experimental treatments will be halted, and the future patients who may be deprived of cures. None of this is good for the Jews.
The concern for Jews is patently disingenuous, given Mr. Trump’s sympathy for Holocaust deniers and Hitler fans. The obvious motivation is to cripple civil society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch. As JD Vance put it in the title of a 2021 speech: “The Universities Are the Enemy.”
Indeed. It’s natural that a populist and delusional President will go after America’s most elite university.
. . . . Why does this matter? For all its foibles, Harvard (together with other universities) has made the world a better place, significantly so. Fifty-two faculty members have won Nobel Prizes and more than 5,800 patents are held by Harvard. Its researchers invented baking powder, the first organ transplant, the programmable computer, the defibrillator, the syphilis test and oral rehydration therapy (a cheap treatment that has saved tens of millions of lives). They developed the theory of nuclear stability that has saved the world from Armageddon. They invented the golf tee and the catcher’s mask. Harvard spawned “Sesame Street,” The National Lampoon, “The Simpsons,” Microsoft and Facebook.
Ongoing research at Harvard includes methane-tracking satellites, robotic catheters, next-generation batteries and wearable robotics for stroke victims. Federal grants are supporting research on metastasis, tumor suppression, radiation and chemotherapy in children, multidrug-resistant infections, pandemic prevention, dementia, anesthesia, toxin reduction in firefighting and the military, the physiological effects of spaceflight and battlefield wound care. Harvard’s technologists are pushing innovations in quantum computing, A.I., nanomaterials, biomechanics, foldable bridges for the military, hack-resistant computer networks and smart living environments for the elderly. One lab has developed what may be a cure for Type 1 diabetes.
Pinker feels that Harvard is capable of reforming itself, and in fact is now doing so. But even if some of the reforms coincide with those demanded by the Trump administration, it’s simply bad for the government to mold universities to its liking. Withholding grants and revoking the visas of foreign students will not cure Harvard of antisemitism.
Trump is violating the third of Haidt and Lukianoff’s “great untruths” which, ironically, are supposed to motivate young people, not universities:
“Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”
Read the whole op-ed, written with Pinker’s typical panache; he concludes that, for Harvard, the “appropriate treatment (as with other imperfect institutions) is to diagnose which parts need which remedies, not to cut its carotid and watch it bleed out.” Sadly, Trump has already wielded the knife.
h/t Greg Mayer
Pinker can certainly write – some glorious turns of phrase!
“The concern for Jews is patently disingenuous” is probably true and underscores a problem that has been little mentioned: the Trump administration’s campaign against Harvard may fuel both latent and uncloseted antisemites to believe—and act—as if the problems befalling our universities are caused by the Jews.
While Harvard seems to have good legal cases in defense against the administration’s vendetta, the cost of defending the cases will be large (and a big waste of money) and the reputational damage to Harvard will be great whether they win their lawsuits or not.
Thank you for the archived version of Steve Pinker’s Op-Ed. Prof Pinker seems to consistently recognize where his university has shortcomings, analyze them, and then, most importantly, make recommendations or design processes for improvement. I look forward to reading it today, perhaps as an antidote to Dr. Haque’s very grim assessment from January of last year that I pointed to in my comment in this morning’s Hili.
I agree with everything Pinker wrote. Brilliant. Of course Harvard and other universities are not universally or even mostly woke madrassas etc.
But his essay falls short in explaining why Harvard is being persecuted in these ways (research grants, international students). Pinker cites the speech by JD Vance “The Universities Are the Enemy”, calls the Trump actions disingenuous, and says that instead “The obvious motivation is to cripple civil society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch.”
This is too simple. The motivation is to attack Trump’s political enemies, who universities have actively embraced, recruited, and promoted. Harvard is singled out not because of derangement, or because it is more anti-Semitic than Yale or Columbia, but because it’s “the country’s oldest, richest and most famous university”. This is ~all symbolic politics.
Universities earned this unwanted and unhinged attention from convervative politicians via decades of progressive political activism. It’s all awful, and I agree with everything Pinker wrote about the net positive qualities of Harvard and other great universities. I work in one (well ok my university is not great, but it’s good!). But the stupid wholesale cutting of Harvard’s funding is a self-inflicted wound, a consequence of decades of universities’ careless partisan activism. The activists are a tiny part of the university community, as Pinker notes, but like a tumour the whole body doesn’t have to become cancerous for it to become very sick. The funding cuts are like a badly designed chemotherapy that attacks the whole institution as well as the tumourous “studies” departments. Of course the problem with that metaphor is that Trump isn’t an oncologist, and he’s not trying to make Harvard well, he just hates the cancer.
[edit to add: I listened to the Vance speech, it ~fully explains the current attacks on Harvard]
The idea that Harvard is a ‘woke Madrassa’ actually come from Pinker. Let me quote from The Crimson and Pinker
“CRIMSON: Were President Summers’ remarks within the pale of legitimate academic discourse?
PINKER: Good grief, shouldn’t everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That’s the difference between a university and a madrassa.”
Pinker is not saying that Harvard is a woke Madrassa in the quote you provided, not even close.
If they can successfully attack Harvard, then other universities are more likely to fall into line.
Barbara Piper and I had a productive (well, for me, anyway) exchange about this in the Comments under 4. Cransdale on yesterday’s Part 3 academic freedom homily. It is now too deeply indented for me to respond so I will thank her here.
Several of the questions asked of Harvard are about crimes and civil rights violations that may have been committed by foreign students. Is anyone here arguing that the government does not have a legitimate interest in monitoring this? Or that Harvard has no obligation whatsoever to report such matters? Before deciding that it is the government that is entirely in the wrong (it does appear, once again, to be guilty of overreach), I would want to know how Harvard responded. I would also like to know whether the government has evidence that Harvard’s response was factually incorrect or intentionally deceptive.
ISTM associating a criminal act with a specific perpetrator is a function of the criminal justice system and its due processes. An alleged criminal is not necessarily a criminal. That this needs pointing out is IMO a symptom of the derangement, of some individuals, institutions, and of society as a whole.
If “J’accuse!” is to be the standard for justice then let’s go all the way and start burning witches.¹
……….
¹ Yes, I do know that no alleged witches were actually burned in the American colonies; they were hung. It’s a metaphor.
I’ll add my kudos to Dr Pinker’s article. He is such a good writer. I am not a Harvard alum, but I feel for those who are and are so concerned by what has become of it. I hope that Dr Pinker’s OP-ED will be read by all at Harvard, taken to heart, and begin to repair the damage.
I am not a lawyer, but even I can see that singling out Harvard is not going to fly in the courts. I feel Harvard will prevail, as it should.
I was impressed with Pinker’s article. I thought he acknowledged weaknesses but on balance noted that there are more strengths.
Yeah, I agree. Pinker showed again that he’s a brilliant guy, but he did minimize a bit the craziness at Harvard. I think that minimization was done for tactical purposes, because Harvard had, sensing the brewing storm (and also because there are other people similar to Pinker at Harvard, who got their act together to engage in collective action in favor of restoring Harvard to an academic as opposed to a social justice institution), already launched reform to eradicate the most egregious woke nonsense, like diversity statements, and so on.
Now if only Harvard’s president Alan Garber could give an official (institutional) apology to Carole Hooven and offer her reinstatement in her old position – now that really would be a public relations coup!!!
Because what happened to Hooven really was crazy, madrasa-style bullshit.
Agree.
Yes. I also agree with Peter’s take. Particularly important was the collective faculty action spearheaded by Prof Pinker and his colleagues.
Harvard’s ability and desire to reform without external pressure is very much in doubt. Consider the Claudine Gay fiasco. Harvard selected her. She was kicked out only after outside persons attacked Harvard and her.
Would Harvard (on it’s own) ever removed her? Given that she wasn’t qualified in the first place, that is rather doubtful.
No, the Harvard Corporation (Harvard’s board) would not have pushed her out of her job as president without external pressure.
So external pressure is needed but that does not mean a sledgehammer should be taken to the institution.
For example, why does the Trump admin not go after some of the people at American universities who engaged in hiring discrimination along racial lines? We know that this happened. I think that would be a lot more effective than fairly indiscriminately cutting research funding.
In a number of states, state legislation and/or popular referenda like Cal.’s prop 209 have explicitly prohibited racial admissions preferences of the kind disguised by the euphemism “affirmative action”. Yet, it is an open secret that many higher education institutions have been evading/circumventing these prohibitions for decades. It seems likely that these tricks have fueled antipathy toward the higher ed establishment, of which Harvard Derangement Syndrome is one symptom.
Professor Pinker is showing his age by name-dropping Oliver Barrett III. I doubt that anyone under 60 knows who that is.
Kids these days….
I think you underestimate the role that foreign money plays in supporting many fields, particularly in areas of study like economics, political science, and so on. Although you say that this allows places like Harvard to “attract the best and brightest,” what it really means is that Americans are squeezed out of areas that often have direct impact on policy, on behalf of people who are there on the basis of being wealthy and connected rather than on their intellect. So I don’t buy the notion that this is what allows Harvard, or anywhere else, to be more intellectually fertile. In fact, it’s arguably quite the reverse: spots reserved for foreign students paying full freight may be better given, intellectually, to native born students.
I agree that the Trump administration’s interest in Harvard is mostly a culture-war spillover, due to seeing top universities as organs of the political left. At the same time, Harvard is plainly in violation if the 1964 Civil Rights Act with respect to its admission and hiring policies. They are also plainly applying a double standard in their attitude towards racial abuse on campus, letting students, faculty and staff treat Jews in a way they would never tolerate if the targets were black. Those things should incur judicial remedy of some kind, even if Trump is ill suited to pursue it.
JKR and Marcus Evans are just wrong. The moral of the King Canute story is that he (King Canute) believed that the waves were controlled by a higher power (God), not any Earthly power.
These students bring talent, global perspectives, and yes, massive tuition dollars. What exactly is the goal here? Punishing excellence?
Pinker calling it “Harvard Derangement Syndrome” might sound dramatic, but honestly, it fits. There seems to be this deep-rooted resentment in some circles toward elite institutions, especially ones perceived as liberal. But using international students as leverage in that culture war? That’s just wrong.
I read Pinker’s op-ed and thought it was one of the more reasoned takes on the whole mess. He’s not just defending Harvard—he’s defending the broader idea that higher education shouldn’t be politicized to this extent. Students from abroad don’t come here to play politics; they come to learn, research, and contribute.
Also, let’s be real: the U.S. needs international talent, especially in STEM. Turning them away to prove a point is a losing strategy long-term.