Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Johnathan Friedman: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Friedman: Well, it follows on the heels of a number of other threats and investigations taken by the administration. But this time what they’re doing is saying that starting in the next academic year for 2025–26, Harvard won’t be able to enroll any nonimmigrant students in the F or J visa categories. And the vast majority of international students and some scholars come to the United States and Harvard under those visa categories. I think that this could have, if it were enforced and not challenged, just incredible ramifications for a university like Harvard. And as you pointed out, the fact that it’s clearly being done as a threat and warning to other universities is deeply alarming. I don’t know how many more times we could say what the administration is doing this time is unprecedented.
Friedman: Of course it will. When you come to the U.S. as an international student—let’s say you’re coming for a PhD program maybe in the sciences, you could be here for five, seven years doing that program, building a career, advancing knowledge, contributing to the American academia. It’s really global knowledge. There’s a reason why the U.S. has attracted so many of the brightest people in the world to our universities to do work that helps all of humanity. And this is just so incredibly disruptive to all of those students. They’re all going to be asking themselves now: Even if Harvard fights it, how long will it be before Harvard wins? What if this does get enforced in some way?
Sargent: Right. It’s almost like they’re trying to turn the U.S. into a global pariah and ruin all the things that make the U.S. an attractive destination. Can you talk a little bit about the legal justification for this? The letter from Kristi Noem to Harvard lays out a series of demands for information about students. Now, as far as I can gather, Harvard had been resisting giving them all this information that they wanted on foreign students—and rightly so, because it was just a bullshit witch hunt. It was just meant to create the impression that universities are infested with secret terrorists and all sorts of MAGA crap like that. It seems like there are some statutes here that are relevant, in the sense that Harvard and other universities do have to supply some basic information about students—but not an enormous amount like DHS is asking for.
And beyond what was in the initial letter in April, now with the new letter comes an even broader set of demands for all kinds of information from Harvard about any international student there, [like] audio and video records of any time an international student did something illegal or—one of them is so vague—“violated other students’ rights.” What does that even mean? So you’re talking about something, as you mentioned, that is incredibly broad. Twenty-seven percent of the student body, and we’re going to collect every audio and video record that we might have of any of these students at any time? Just imagine the scope of what is being asked to be reported on, and it sends chills. It reminds you of 1984 and things like that. So no wonder Harvard hasn’t really complied—I imagine, not yet fully. But now in response, all we are seeing is the Trump administration escalating its threats to even the more outrageous kinds of things that it can think of doing.
Friedman: Well, I think Harvard has become really at the center of that question because Harvard was the first university to start to stand up—really—to what was being demanded of it in terms of this threat to defund its research. And in the week since, the administration has basically looked through, I guess, all of its mechanisms for putting pressure on the university and tried to activate as many as possible. Every few days now there’s a new investigation of something that is clearly just ongoing retaliation, and it’s like they’re just trying to figure out what kinds of pressure to put on the university to make an example of it.
Sargent: I like your idea of this backfiring. Let’s talk about that. It seems to me that Harvard is going to go into court and try and get this thing blocked, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they do succeed at that. And that, I think, is going to have the ripple effect of encouraging other universities to stand up more. So there’s really a scenario in which they keep overreaching in these obscene ways, these 1984-like ways. They keep getting stopped in court, and that ends up stiffening the resistance. Can you talk about what that scenario looks like?
And my hope is that this courage is contagious. It’s easy to feel, when it’s your institution in the crosshairs, that you are alone and that no one is going to stand with you. But I think what we are starting to see—and what I hope we will see more of—is that there’s a lot more universities, a lot more people in the U.S. than the administration can hope to control with the signature of a pen on an executive order.
Friedman: I tend to agree with that. When I imagine all the people who have sought out higher education and are still doing so right now in community colleges, in a range of different institutions, the vast majority of those institutions aren’t Harvard, but also the vast majority of those institutions do bring in international students. They facilitate greater connection to the world. In higher ed, people meet their spouses. There’s a lot that people value about our universities in this country. And I’m not ready to believe that every American who supported Trump in the last election believes that we shouldn’t have universities in four years or that they shouldn’t have international students.
Sargent: I think the backlash is already underway and I think it’s already backfiring. I have an Associated Press poll here that finds that more than half of Americans, 56 percent, disapprove of Trump’s approach on higher education; 64 percent say that universities make a positive contribution to medical and scientific research; and 63 percent say they make a positive contribution to new ideas and innovative technology. I think what is happening here is that Trump is actually getting people to take another look at our university system and value it. What do you think?
At the end of the day, what is this witch hunt about? It’s about freedom of expression. It’s about these international students who have come to the U.S. and are being accused of being anti-American or they’re accused of being antisemitic. There’s no consideration in any of that, regardless of what all these people think. And I’m sure you cannot group them all as having the same set of narrow ideas about the world, but they’re allowed to have their views; they’re allowed to say what they think; they’re allowed to do their research; they’re allowed to speak out in public. And this idea that we should be trying to clamp down on that and basically cut it off at the knees in any way possible—in this case, take away their visas; in other cases, collecting people and instilling fear and intimidation—that’s what this is about. And that is something that we historically have been against the U.S. Here we are a country that supports the liberty to have ideas, to speak them aloud, to visit, to meet with people, to call for change. That’s what makes the U.S. great and unique. And all of a sudden, it’s clear that the current administration doesn’t believe in any of that.
Friedman: A few years ago, when campus protests started erupting, it was this moment where higher education was at a low point. There have been real challenges with freedom of speech on campuses from the left and the right. The war in the Middle East erupted on campuses in a way that was very disruptive and destabilizing, and the higher ed sector didn’t really know how to band together. They didn’t really know what to get together and say ought to be done, [or] how to fix this. There was a lot of running in different directions.
And if that’s what comes out of this moment—greater public understanding of the value of higher education and what makes our universities something special in the country and in the world—then there will have been a silver lining to all of it.
Friedman: Thanks for having me.
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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