The Trump administration’s ban on Harvard enroling foreign students represents a rare meaningful consequence for US higher education’s complicity with extremism and anti-Semitism.
While the backlash is seeing Donald Trump accused of trying to wreck what is routinely ranked as one of the finest universities in the world, it is Harvard’s indulgence and enabling of foreign radicals and their militant ideologies which has given the president this opening.
Kristi Noem, Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary, has revoked the certification of the university’s Student and Exchange Visitor Programme, meaning Harvard must cease matriculating international students and those already studying there must transfer to another institution or lose their leave to remain in the United States. This includes any Britons currently attending or planning to attend the college in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Noem took the decision in response to Harvard allegedly “fostering violence, anti-Semitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus.”
It follows her move last month to cancel $2.7m in departmental grants. Harvard says Noem’s order is unlawful. That will be for the courts to decide, but the legality of the remedy does not change the nature of the disease.
Noem charges that the Ivy League university has enabled “an unsafe campus environment by permitting anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators to harass and physically assault individuals, including many Jewish students”.
October 7 broke Harvard. The terrorist attack on Israel and, later, Israel’s military response, prompted student encampments, demonstrations, the blocking of access to parts of campus and other acts of disruption and intimidation.
Administrators have been accused of repeatedly failing to heed pleas from Jewish and Israeli students who were the main targets of this campaign. An internal Harvard report found that almost 60 per cent of Jewish students had experienced “discrimination, stereotyping or negative bias”, while one in four reported feeling physically unsafe.
Since October 7, they had been subjected to “social shunning, verbal abuse, intimidation, and bullying”, witnessed the “defacing of hostage posters around campus with antisemitic slogans” and had begun to “conceal their Jewish identity from classmates”. The report documented instances of Jewish students turning down admissions offers, leaving PhD programmes and, in the case of medicine, avoiding residencies at Harvard hospitals because of “deep politicisation” and an academic climate “unfriendly to Jews’. It took another century, but President Lowell finally got his way.
American higher education places great emphasis on academic freedom, and many in that field believe they are under unprecedented attack in the Trump II era. Some have gone so far as to leave the United States in a protest against “fascism”, though they have tended to flee to Canada or the UK, two jurisdictions not exactly known for liberality when it comes to free expression.
Yet in all this puffed-up indignation, there is little reflection on the academic freedom of Jewish and Israeli students and faculty. What effect has almost two years of living, studying and working in a hostile environment had on their liberty to express themselves, engage in scholarship and participate fully in campus life?
University administrations are on a hair-trigger when it comes to microaggressions, but there is nothing micro about what Jews have faced at Harvard and other major American campuses since October 7. Then again, Jews are the asterisk in the diversity, equity and inclusion ideology, forever stuck at the bottom of the intersectionality totem pole to appease the prejudices of more favoured minorities.
Harvard is now in the finding out stages of a self-imposed crisis. It has trashed its reputation like so many august bodies because it lost the institutional confidence to impose standards upon its students, especially those from overseas.
They belonged to the “Global South”, after all, which placed them above reproach from privileged white liberals. (Their hefty tuition payments also helped in that regard.)
Harvard enabled a campus culture in which righteous victims were allowed to victimise other students simply for being Jewish or Israeli. Kristi Noem is doing what the university was too feckless and permissive to do with its most extreme students: putting her foot down.
The Trump administration’s ban on Harvard enroling foreign students represents a rare meaningful consequence for US higher education’s complicity with extremism and anti-Semitism.
While the backlash is seeing Donald Trump accused of trying to wreck what is routinely ranked as one of the finest universities in the world, it is Harvard’s indulgence and enabling of foreign radicals and their militant ideologies which has given the president this opening.
Kristi Noem, Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary, has revoked the certification of the university’s Student and Exchange Visitor Programme, meaning Harvard must cease matriculating international students and those already studying there must transfer to another institution or lose their leave to remain in the United States. This includes any Britons currently attending or planning to attend the college in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Noem took the decision in response to Harvard allegedly “fostering violence, anti-Semitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus.”
It follows her move last month to cancel $2.7m in departmental grants. Harvard says Noem’s order is unlawful. That will be for the courts to decide, but the legality of the remedy does not change the nature of the disease.
Noem charges that the Ivy League university has enabled “an unsafe campus environment by permitting anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators to harass and physically assault individuals, including many Jewish students”.
October 7 broke Harvard. The terrorist attack on Israel and, later, Israel’s military response, prompted student encampments, demonstrations, the blocking of access to parts of campus and other acts of disruption and intimidation.
Administrators have been accused of repeatedly failing to heed pleas from Jewish and Israeli students who were the main targets of this campaign. An internal Harvard report found that almost 60 per cent of Jewish students had experienced “discrimination, stereotyping or negative bias”, while one in four reported feeling physically unsafe.
Since October 7, they had been subjected to “social shunning, verbal abuse, intimidation, and bullying”, witnessed the “defacing of hostage posters around campus with antisemitic slogans” and had begun to “conceal their Jewish identity from classmates”. The report documented instances of Jewish students turning down admissions offers, leaving PhD programmes and, in the case of medicine, avoiding residencies at Harvard hospitals because of “deep politicisation” and an academic climate “unfriendly to Jews’. It took another century, but President Lowell finally got his way.
American higher education places great emphasis on academic freedom, and many in that field believe they are under unprecedented attack in the Trump II era. Some have gone so far as to leave the United States in a protest against “fascism”, though they have tended to flee to Canada or the UK, two jurisdictions not exactly known for liberality when it comes to free expression.
Yet in all this puffed-up indignation, there is little reflection on the academic freedom of Jewish and Israeli students and faculty. What effect has almost two years of living, studying and working in a hostile environment had on their liberty to express themselves, engage in scholarship and participate fully in campus life?
University administrations are on a hair-trigger when it comes to microaggressions, but there is nothing micro about what Jews have faced at Harvard and other major American campuses since October 7. Then again, Jews are the asterisk in the diversity, equity and inclusion ideology, forever stuck at the bottom of the intersectionality totem pole to appease the prejudices of more favoured minorities.
Harvard is now in the finding out stages of a self-imposed crisis. It has trashed its reputation like so many august bodies because it lost the institutional confidence to impose standards upon its students, especially those from overseas.
They belonged to the “Global South”, after all, which placed them above reproach from privileged white liberals. (Their hefty tuition payments also helped in that regard.)
Harvard enabled a campus culture in which righteous victims were allowed to victimise other students simply for being Jewish or Israeli. Kristi Noem is doing what the university was too feckless and permissive to do with its most extreme students: putting her foot down.