In mid-April, as he hit his stride in his first year at Harvard, Alfred Williamson felt a stirring of unease. The Trump administration’s latest threats against his university were now focused on blocking international students from attending it.
Mr. Williamson, from Wales, consulted his American friends: Should he be worried?
“They said, ‘There’s no way he would do that,’” Mr. Williamson, 20, recalled in an interview. “They said it was just a scare tactic. But they were wrong.”
Five weeks later, just after the end of the spring semester, Mr. Williamson, now at a summer abroad program, picked up his phone and saw a pileup of missed calls and messages. The threat his friends had dismissed had become a searing reality: The federal government had effectively blocked Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students — abruptly thrusting Mr. Williamson and others into an excruciating limbo.
As anxious messages pinged on his phone, Mr. Williamson scrolled through texts from worried family members (“I hope you’re OK”) and from classmates unmoored by uncertainty (“What are we going to do?”). He spoke to one close friend who called him in tears, devastated at the potential loss of financial help from Harvard — money that had not been matched by British universities and that had put college within reach.
A judge has issued temporary restraining orders pausing the Trump administration’s efforts. But Mr. Williamson and thousands of other international students are still dogged by uncertainty, wondering what will come next.
In the country’s raging debates over immigration, someone with Mr. Williamson’s profile — a white, British man in the United States to study science — would not usually be the focus of debate. But like all kinds of students from all over the world, he, too, has been swept up in the Trump administration’s fight over higher education.
Looking back at his chaotic year on campus, Mr. Williamson said that he knew Harvard would change him. But he could not have imagined how much his first year — and his own evolving values and politics — would be shaped by the incoming U.S. president, and his administration’s determination to bend Harvard to its will.
He had begun as an aspiring physics major; by spring, he would be an outspoken advocate for international students.
“I came to America to study because I deeply believed in its values, and I wanted to pursue opportunities that can’t be found anywhere else in the world,” he said. “I never expected to become a critic of the government.”
A Great and Terrible Year
Mr. Williamson had not considered attending college in the United States until an Austrian friend at Harvard encouraged him to apply. He had struggled to believe it when he got in, with a generous offer of financial aid, making him the first person from his school to win acceptance to an Ivy League college and the first in his family to study in the United States.
He had arrived in Cambridge, Mass., intent on studying physics, drawn to its broad range of useful applications in other sciences. Then, during his first semester, he found a new passion — in a politics course taught by Steven Levitsky, the author of the best-selling book “How Democracies Die,” that featured a deep dive into authoritarianism. After that, Mr. Williamson planned to become a double major in physics and government. Maybe someday, he thought, he would make his own foray into politics or public service.
“It was the best year of my life,” he said.
But as he reveled in the opportunity before him, Harvard was coming under tremendous pressure.
After President Trump took office in January, his administration turned its attention to elite universities like Harvard, determined to force change at institutions that it regarded as captured by liberal orthodoxy, dismissive of antisemitism and too coddling of entitled, radicalized students.
The government began by focusing on campus protesters, detaining Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia, and others who had spoken out about the war in Gaza. But the administration also widened its net and soon dialed in on Harvard.
The university had already been heavily criticized for its handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and for allowing antisemitism to seep into campus life. Harvard’s own task force on antisemitism detailed in a report the “bias, suspicion, intimidation, alienation, shunning, contempt, and sometimes effective exclusion” Jewish students had suffered.
But despite these admissions and vows to change, by mid-April, the Trump administration and the university were in an all-out legal war. Harvard rebuffed administration demands to have a say in its curriculum and its hiring and admissions practices. In response, the administration said it would freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to Harvard.
And in an April 16 letter to Harvard, Kristi Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, issued new demands for detailed information about every international student: their illegal and “dangerous” activity; their coursework and discipline records; their history of “obstruction of the school’s learning environment.”
Mr. Williamson could see that change at Harvard was needed. Some of his best friends at school were Jewish, he said, and had experienced antisemitism. Some had told him they did not feel safe on campus. He agreed, too, that more effort was needed to open campus dialogue to more diverse viewpoints.
But he said he did not believe that the Trump administration’s tactics were motivated by concern for Jewish students. Instead, he said, the government seemed set on undermining academic freedom.
He recognized the strategy, he said, from his politics classes. “I think the administration understands that resistance will come from the universities,” he said. “It always does.”
His own life provided lessons. In South Wales, where he grew up in a working-class former mining town, Mr. Williamson’s mother worked as a family therapist; his father taught at a university, specializing in government policies affecting young people. Mr. Williamson said he had been riveted when his mother, who is Danish, told stories passed down through her family about the Nazi occupation of Denmark during World War II.
“It helped me understand how easily democracy can erode,” he said.
Memories of those stories flooded his mind in April, as he faced a decision. His friends had asked him to speak at a rally, to protest Homeland Security’s demands for information on Harvard’s international students.
Friends and family urged him not to speak out publicly, warning that he could end up a target. Mr. Williamson shared their concern. But as the protest neared, he felt a growing clarity, and he told his friends that he would speak.
“I knew I would regret it if I didn’t,” he said. “I have friends from Pakistan, from Palestine — as soon as one of them gets deported, I would feel guilty.”
He said he had stayed up all night to draft a speech. The next evening on a broad paved plaza, he stepped up onto a narrow bench, white button-down slightly rumpled, and took the microphone.
“In my mind,” he said in a recent interview, “I thought it could be the last thing of significance I ever did at Harvard.”
One of his friends, Abdullah Shahid Sial, from Pakistan, said he had been astounded by the depth of the fear that had seized international students. “I had imagined Harvard to be a political space where people would stand by their position no matter what,” he said, adding that he understood why many stayed silent.
Mr. Sial, then a sophomore, said he had found himself begging foreign classmates to speak out and to join a new group he had started with a handful of others, Harvard Students for Freedom. At a protest in Harvard Yard in mid-April, Mr. Sial said, he watched as 200 or so of the 500 protesters suddenly slipped away when a rumor swept the crowd that ICE agents were present.
He gave his speech anyway. (The rumor turned out to be false.)
“It’s a weird feeling, when people are saying it took courage, and to me it seemed like the bare minimum,” said Mr. Sial, who is one of Harvard’s two undergraduate student body presidents.
Dr. Levitsky, the political science professor whose class last fall enthralled Mr. Williamson, said he had been struck by the risks taken by some international students.
“Noncitizens no longer have a right to free speech — they can’t write a college newspaper op-ed and know they’re safe,” he said. “It’s easy for me to mouth off, a tenured professor and citizen, but for those kids, it’s truly brave behavior.”
When the conflict continued to escalate in late May, Mr. Williamson spoke out again, this time to the news media. “We’re being used like pawns in some game we have no control over,” he told a Times reporter on May 22, after the Trump administration effectively blocked Harvard’s ability to admit international students.
A friend messaged him emphatically afterward: “bro delete” all the video “of u speaking at the protest like immediately.”
Mr. Williamson marveled at how surreal the moment felt, like a page from one of his history textbooks. But he did not delete the video.
If he was on a list somewhere, he thought, it was too late to get off it now.
From Protest to the Unknown
Mr. Williamson’s last weeks on the Harvard campus had brought a growing sense that he belonged there. Spring had finally come to Cambridge, bringing T-shirt weather and canopies of green leaves. He had finished the year with a 3.9 grade point average, had begun work on a startup technology business and had enrolled in a summer program in Copenhagen, to study how democracy evolved in Denmark.
Harvard and the Trump administration continued to duel in court. On May 23, a federal judge in Boston issued a temporary restraining order, halting the Trump administration’s attempts to block international students from attending Harvard University. Another, similar court order was issued on May 29.
The news gave Mr. Williamson a flicker of hope. But after months of dismissing the administration’s threats as impossibilities, he had arrived, overnight, at a different understanding: Anything could happen, implausible or not.
This week, Mr. Trump tried another tactic, and directly blocked the entry of foreign Harvard students to the United States. He further urged Secretary of State Marco Rubio to consider revoking current visas for Harvard students.
The proclamation condemned Harvard for denying opportunities to “hardworking Americans” and instead admitting students from “nations that seek the destruction of the United States and its allies, or the extermination of entire peoples.”
That order, too, was temporarily blocked.
Students in Copenhagen have asked Mr. Williamson about his backup plan for the fall. So far, he doesn’t have one — partly because deadlines to transfer to other universities have already passed, but for another reason, too.
“It’s my longing to hang onto Harvard,” he said, “that makes me reluctant to make another plan.”
Jenna Russell is the lead reporter covering New England for The Times. She is based near Boston.
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