After freezing $2.2 billion in funding, the Trump administration has also singled out Harvard in other key ways: It threatened the university’s nonprofit status and its ability to host international students and faculty, who comprise roughly a quarter of the student body and help fuel research in every part of the school.
Some faculty expressed concern that Harvard would no longer be able to attract top talent. “This is the United States saying to the best and brightest minds around the world that you are not welcome,” said Tarek Masoud, a professor of democracy and governance at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Abdullah Shahid Sial, the undergraduate student body co-president, came to Cambridge from Lahore, Pakistan, hoping to work with the “greatest professors in the world.” Now, he’s written an op-ed to run in The Harvard Crimson in case he is deported for speaking out. “If at any point they want me out, then I would rather go in a much more dignified manner,” he said.
One Harvard scientist was detained and at least 11 other people affiliated with the university have lost their visas in recent weeks, though some were restored by the government on Friday.
In an interview Wednesday, two days after the university filed suit to try to win back its federal funding, Harvard President Alan Garber stood by the school’s decision to take a stand.
“It’s bigger than Harvard,” Garber told “NBC Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt. “We are defending what I believe is one of the most important linchpins of the American economy and way of life — our universities.”
Harrison Fields, a White House spokesperson, criticized the university’s response. “Colleges are hooked on federal cash, and Mr. Garber’s public outburst only fuels the push to shut off the taxpayer money propping up their institution,” he said.
With final exams and graduation now looming, many are bracing for a prolonged battle that could have reverberations for years to come.
Steven Pinker, a well-known psychology professor, co-founded the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard to promote “free inquiry, intellectual diversity and civil discourse.” He agrees with criticism that Harvard needs more viewpoint diversity but thinks the government’s demands go way too far, he said.
Harvard was told, among other demands in an April 11 letter, to increase viewpoint diversity among faculty and students (subject to the government’s approval), submit its hiring to a federal audit for more than three years, and use an ideological test on admissions for international students.
“I just don’t think Donald Trump has the statutory power to force his vision of viewpoint diversity on private universities,” Pinker said. “Could that mean that we have to have anti-vaxxers in the medical school? Does it mean we have to have ‘Stop the Steal’ theorists in the history department? MAGA theorists in political science programs? You just don’t want to give the government the power to make those decisions.”
When Harvard refused to comply, the Trump administration doubled down. In a letter sent April 16, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security demanded that Harvard provide the names of all international students who have “participated in protests” and their “disciplinary records,” with a deadline of April 30, after which it threatened to revoke Harvard’s ability to host international students.
Harvard has not yet said how it will respond and didn’t reply to questions about its plans.
Some international students feel caught in the crossfire between Harvard and the Trump administration.
“We’re being used as poker chips in a battle with the White House,” said Leo Gerdén, a senior from Stockholm, Sweden. “None of us wanted to take this fight.”
Sial, the student body co-president, is now working with administrators to ensure summer housing on campus for the increased number of international students planning to bunker down in Cambridge out of fear they’ll be prevented from re-entering the country.
Several other international students spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid threatening their student visa status. They described this moment at Harvard as a doubly difficult: Already under threat of losing their visas — like more than 1,800 international students and recent graduates reportedly have nationwide, prior to the administration’s reversal this week — they’re also at the school that Trump is most closely scrutinizing.
One international law student said she won’t walk near protests, has taken down her social media profiles or made them private and looked into finishing her degree abroad. She keeps emergency hotline numbers and her passport with her at all times in case she is approached.
“I have no disciplinary record. I have no criminal record. I have nothing. And I’m a good student,” she said. “And, sure, I care about things, but that’s why you come to law school.”
An international environmental studies student said they now plan to leave the country once they finish their degree.
“I’m just trying to protect rivers and waterways and the environment,” they said, “and I don’t feel particularly wanted here.”
They regularly have to visit different states to conduct surveys but say they are now more fearful of travel.
“Just having the Harvard international student label on me,” they said, “it makes me a lot more anxious about being around airports or being around security.”
An undergraduate international student who attended last year’s Harvard encampment and got doxed for their pro-Palestinian activism said they moved off campus and stopped attending classes in person for two weeks, triggered by the detention of Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk. They have canceled an academic trip to Europe and skipped out on iftars during Ramadan — communal meals where Muslims break their fast during the Islamic holy month — worried that ICE might target such gatherings.
“I don’t feel safe at all being around protests and voices, which actually kills me from the inside, because I want to go there, and I want to voice my opinion,” they said.
Though some students applauded Harvard’s stand against Trump, others have mixed feelings about the school’s response thus far.
Three students said the university had already acquiesced to some extent, even before the April 11 letter. They pointed to the firing of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies’ faculty heads, suspending the Harvard Divinity School’s long-standing Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative, and pausing the School of Public Health’s research partnership with a Palestinian university.
Harvard didn’t respond to questions about these concerns. But Masoud, of the Harvard Kennedy School, said he thought those changes would have happened even if Trump hadn’t been elected.
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