Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Jeffrey Sachs: Pleasure to be here.
Sachs: No, this is honestly without precedent. The way that the Trump administration has gone after Harvard—and higher ed in general—doesn’t really have any precedent in U.S. history that I know about. The energy, the focus, and frankly, the resourcefulness with which the administration is targeting these institutions is deeply alarming.
Sachs: It really is. And that’s what I wasn’t expecting. For observers like myself and analysts, we were expecting the Civil Rights Office of the Department of Education to be leading the charge because that is the body tasked with investigating universities that, for instance, fail to protect students from discrimination or harassment. We thought that’s where the attack was going to emerge from. Instead, we’re seeing the Department of Justice, the Department of State, and now DHS—the Department of Homeland Security. So we’re really seeing every tentacle, every arrow in the quiver of the government all firing at once at Harvard and institutions like it.
Sachs: OK. This program—the Student and Exchange Visitor Program—lays out certain qualifications and certain information that universities and colleges have to provide to the federal government as a condition of receiving student visa–bearing students. And the issue here is that the government is demanding from Harvard information that they are not required to provide. In fact, the information that the program requires universities to provide are pretty straightforward: things like student’s full name, their address, their academic status—for instance, [whether] they [are] maintaining a full-time or part-time course load. The idea being that if a student is patently not attending class, if they’re using their student visa as a pretext to participate in the workforce, DHS wants to know; if they’re no longer a student in good standing, DHS wants to know. And that would all be above board if that’s what Harvard was being asked to produce.
Sargent: Does the federal government have the power to make Harvard’s ability to receive foreign students contention on this? It seems to me that there’s going to be a major legal challenge here, or at least the potential for one, no?
I’m not going to say it’s not going to happen because there’s been no example where the government has demanded information of this nature. There’s no precedent that we can point to. What I can tell you is that there’s nothing from my read of the statute that would give DHS a right to the information they’re demanding.
Sachs: I would think so, and I hope that they would. I’ve been very impressed by Harvard’s willingness to stand up to the bullies in the government. Over the last 48 hours, we’ve seen some remarkable pushback from Harvard administrators. And here, I think they have a very strong legal footing to continue to push back.
Sachs: Yeah, I don’t think it’s any mistake that he’s picked a high-profile fight. First, obviously, with Columbia, and now with Harvard. He’s trying to send a message to smaller universities that don’t have Harvard’s endowment, its resources, its legal team. And if he can bend Harvard, then the sky’s the limit. He can go after anybody he wants. And you’re right. He’s singled out Harvard. He’s described it as being a hotbed of Marxist brainwashers. He’s described it as pushing political and ideological terrorist-inspired sickness upon people. And the goal, I’m sure, is to browbeat and intimidate Harvard into complying. And if Harvard complies, then every other domino—I’m sure they hope—will fall with every other university.
Sachs: Yeah, I think that the key actor here is Stephen Miller, who is the White House deputy chief of staff and also an advisor in DHS. Miller is somebody who believes passionately in the need to retake what he would call “key cultural institutions”: the Smithsonian, public schools, museums, libraries, and, of course, higher education. Miller is somebody who—in his comments and in his writings, both during the first Trump administration and now in the second—feels that if the right can either shatter these cultural institutions or take them over, the political payoff downstream will be enormous. Miller is somebody who I think is probably pushing this more than Trump himself.
Sargent: Right, the radical authoritarian right is doing their own long march through our institutions, aren’t they?
Sargent: A lot is at stake here. I want to raise one other thing about this Harvard standoff. I think it’s plainly obvious that the administration is setting Harvard up in a certain way. It’s making these demands—like turning over information about any students depriving others of their rights—which are ridiculously vague, and so Trump allies are going to swoop in and say, Look, this conservative student’s rights were violated by that shadowy, dark foreign student over there, and Harvard didn’t report it. It’s going to create this atmosphere where MAGA figures are encouraged to go in and “find” examples of this or invent them: Hey, look, that foreign student did something dangerous. Why didn’t Harvard say anything? Isn’t that the game plan here as well, Jeff?
In this letter that the government sent to Harvard, they require, for instance, that Harvard adopt a strict meritocracy for purposes of hiring and admissions. Then just one paragraph down, they also demanded that the university take active steps to essentially hire more conservatives, to diversify the ideologies of faculty. Now you can’t reconcile those two, right?
Sachs: You can’t, on the one hand, have total meritocracy in hiring and admissions, and then, in the next breath, demand affirmative action for conservatives.
Sachs: I think it gets pretty difficult to satisfy, for the purposes of the court, how these can be reconciled. Again, it makes me wonder if the game here is not so much to get Harvard to capitulate because, again, these demands in the case of this letter three days ago are contradictory; the demands from the letter today from DHS are not legally enforceable, at least from my read of the statute. I’m not sure to what extent what the government is after is to actually prevail in these specific issues so much as it is to bludgeon and demoralize Harvard—to drain it through lengthy legal battles. In a way, gaming out how this finally ends, it might not be with Harvard losing in court. More likely, it’s just going to be an attempt to demoralize, undermine, humiliate, and really—frankly, from the government’s point of view—milk politically this issue as much as possible for as long as possible.
Sachs: Yeah, I don’t disagree. And I was also alarmed by Senator Murkowski’s comments today. If senators can’t stand up and speak their minds, then they’re not representing their constituents and they have no business in office. It’s simultaneously depressing and deeply distressing for her to make those remarks. I don’t know to what extent she is referring to personal threats of violence that she might face, or whether she’s imagining a legal assault or funding cuts for her state.
Sargent: I think Mitt Romney said somewhere that he had to spend a huge amount of money on personal security.
Sargent: Jeff, I want to try to end on a somewhat optimistic note here. I think there’s a chance that they’re really overreaching in a big way. Not just politically, and not just legally, but the whole project is overreaching. You’ve got these law firms right now [that] capitulated to Trump and, of course, predictably, Trump has simply gone back and demanded more. That’s encouraging other law firms to rethink whether they should capitulate. You’ve got Harvard looking at the absolutely ludicrous nature of the demands that Trump made the other day and saying, No, we’re not doing that. And I think that sends a signal to other institutions—not just of higher learning—to start to stand up and take this moment more seriously. So the ludicrous nature of what they’re doing is actually bringing together the resistance in a bigger way than you might’ve thought. What do you think, Jeff? Is that overly optimistic? Can you talk about this possibility?
So, yes, Harvard can stand up; these marquee law firms might be able to push back. But we’re four months into a four-year term, and a lot of pressure can still be expended. I think this only really ends successfully if the political incentives for the White House change. That’s going to mean a broad-based, across-the-board resistance. It’s going to mean diving approval numbers for the White House. It’s going to mean some really humiliating defeats in court. It’ll take a lot, and I just don’t think it’s going to happen overnight.
Sachs: My pleasure, Greg.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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