The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 23 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Donald Trump has now gone full tin-pot tyrant in his war on Harvard University. In an extraordinary abuse of power, Trump has now ended Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students, something that will almost certainly be met by a lawsuit in response. But buried in the announcement of this move was a stark warning. The Department of Homeland Security explicitly said that it is designed as a shot across the bow of other universities, meaning that they should think twice before angering the president going forward. This substantially ups the stakes. Harvard absolutely has to fight this now, and other institutions and stakeholders absolutely must rally to this cause—or the long-term consequences will be dire. We’re talking about all of this with one of our favorite commentators on free speech and academic issues, PEN America’s Jonathan Friedman. Thanks for coming back on, Jonathan.
Johnathan Friedman: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Sargent: So DHS Secretary Kristi Noem just sent a letter to Harvard revoking the school’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program, which is a government program that monitors whether particular schools can receive foreign students. The letter said Harvard had failed to comply with DHS’s previous requests for information about foreign students. And those requests were themselves abuses of power. Harvard wasn’t really complying, so Trump took this step. Jonathan, can you explain what the administration did here?
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.
Sargent: According to the Times, 6,800 foreign students attended Harvard in this school year, which is around 27 percent of the student body. So this is an enormous blow to the school, a major cudgel against it. And DHS also said the following, “This means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.” That’s amazing. It seems to mean that any foreign students currently getting an education at Harvard must uproot everything. Can you talk about the collateral damage here? This will rupture a lot of lives, won’t it?
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?
If you’re a student also on some of these visa programs, there are very strict rules about when you can come and go and when you have to report for certain categories to be continued. It’s already designed to be a system that is highly regulated and includes a degree of—I don’t know if we could call it “surveillance”—but a degree of monitoring of when you’re coming and going from the country. This is also going to make it just all the more difficult for these people who are here in the U.S. to make decisions about when they should travel home for the holidays. If we’re trying to make American universities as unwelcoming as possible, this is a pretty good step.
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.
Friedman: There are certainly legal channels that exist for monitoring and sharing information between universities and the federal government with regard to international students. These have long existed. They’re pretty routine. I guess occasionally there are circumstances where the federal government has to request information about particular students, but none of that is what’s happening here. It is not proper legal channels for the administration to send a letter to Harvard asking for information about every international student there.
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.
Sargent: I want to read a line from the Homeland Security press release announcing this move, “Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country.” John, that’s as clear as day. What this is really about is letting all other universities know that the power of the state will be brought down on them if they don’t bend the knee to Donald Trump. How do you think this will be received by other universities? Will they take it as a warning and become less likely to resist the administration, as Trump clearly hopes, or will they rally behind this cause in some sense?
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.
The more they do that, and the more Harvard stands up, actually, I think it backfires on the administration—because it starts to show that you can challenge these things in court. You can stand up to them. You don’t need to obey in advance. It’s like the more you try and tell a kid what to do, the more the kid wants to rebel. I have that image in mind. I’m thinking about that now with, What choice does Harvard have in the light of something that is so without precedent? The idea that you would tell Harvard that it can’t have any international students at all. Just think of the ramifications to all the people who’ve come to Harvard in the past, many of whom were seeking refuge from persecution around the world. We’re just undermining the reputation. We are undermining those traditions. And it’s very clear what’s happening here. I don’t think anybody looks at this and thinks that there’s a legitimate basis for this.
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?
Friedman: Well, I think there are only two ways ultimately that we see the next few years go, and this is the fork in the road. Is there a stiffened resistance, or is it just a steady stream of institutions complying? And I think that what we are starting to see now is a stiffening of that backbone as more and more people come out in support of these institutions and those institutions support one another. Do you know how many people, in the wake of news of Harvard losing its research funding from the federal government, [said] they donated to Harvard for the first time or that they wanted to support Harvard? Who knew that Harvard could convince a huge number of Americans to start giving it funding in the face of this threat from Trump? That’s an incredible development that I think nobody could have predicted.
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.
Sargent: So I think Stephen Miller and some of the people who think the way he does around Trump almost certainly think that this is a winning political issue for them. They think to themselves, Well, everybody just sees this as Trump, the champion of the people, fighting against pinheaded academic elites. And I think that’s just bullshit. I think the way most Americans look at this is as an abuse of power. They’re not going to say to themselves, Yay, Trump is crushing the foreign students and the universities who cater to them. They’re going to see this as an assault on American institutions, and I predict a political backlash to it.
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.
I think something that Harvard has done really well is start to lean into communicating what is being lost in terms of their groundbreaking research: the science that [they] aren’t going to be able to do, the research into real diseases and health problems that was being undertaken that’s all been undermined. I think what people often don’t appreciate about some of these laboratories that do this work is that a lot of the individuals—foreign born or here on visas or whatnot—have in their heads the ways to do specialized techniques to study phenomenon. It’s not so easy to just roll over and replace all this. It’s not all written in textbooks. That’s how scientific knowledge production works. If you threaten all of those people and you force them to leave the country, you’re undermining our ability to generate cures and scientific advances in such a vast array of fields. And that’s what seems to be happening and without any care for ramifications. It’s this wrecking ball approach—and I think, as you pointed out, at a certain point, that wrecking ball swings back. It swings back at the people who are wielding it.
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?
Friedman: I think that’s absolutely the case. I’m reminded all the time of an executive order that Trump signed in his first term, which demanded that universities uphold free speech or else he, at the time, threatened to take away some of their federal funding and research funding. And I think this Trump—I don’t know—needs to take a page out of the old one’s book a little bit, because at least that one was talking about free speech and seemed at least inclined to somewhat support these principles. This one seems to have forgotten all of that work altogether and day by day is continuing to just try to erode that.
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.
Sargent: Trump and MAGA hate the things that make America great. Just to wrap this up, can we talk about the broader project? I doubt Trump has any idea what actually goes on at universities, but some of the people around him who are genuine fascists definitely have a bigger goal in mind. They want to cripple liberal America, destroy liberal institutions, do their own long march through our institutions and take them over. But this seems to me to make it more urgent that universities band together here and not let themselves get pushed into bending the knee. How do you see this all playing out? I think it’s backfiring already. What’s your prediction?
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.
Right now, I see something different. I see more and more universities saying to one another, How can we support each other? How can we speak out in public in favor of one another? How can we make clear that we are united against this attack? And my hope is that we also don’t miss the opportunity entirely, and that these universities also remember that the American public does have a high expectation around them. We put a lot of our hopes and expectations about our futures as Americans in colleges and universities. And even as they are fighting this threat, they have to remember the importance of living up to that dream. They have to remember that there’s a compact: When students come to get degrees, they want to be employable afterward. What universities have to do is ensure that as they are standing up to Trump, they’re doing so with the public; they’re doing so by demonstrating their value to the public.
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.
Sargent: And I think it’s already happening. Jonathan Friedman, it’s always a great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.
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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