From Berkely in the 1960s to Bates and Brown today, the US has long shown great tolerance for home-grown campus activists. But when it comes to foreign students here on visas, president Trump has clearly signalled he is unwilling to put up with much more nonsense.
Since the Oct 7 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, students and radical activists, united by hatred of Israel or fervor for the Palestinian cause (which are often hard to separate), have vandalised, rioted, assaulted, and disrupted college campuses and big cities across America.
The long list of outrages is bad enough, but the reaction of university administrators has been scandalous. Far from seeing the clear danger to their own interests of allowing entitled student protesters free rein, the adults seemed eager to protect them from true discipline.
Summoned to testify before an angry Congress last May, the presidents of Northwestern, Rutgers, and UCLA admitted that very few students had been disciplined for anti-Semitic acts. Two of the three later resigned. One of their replacements, UCLA’s Julio Frenk, seems to be taking things more seriously. He recently suspended the UCLA chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a group behind many protests nationwide.
One reason college leaders were reluctant to act against student malfeasance is that faculties and administrators in American higher education are overwhelmingly Left of centre, and many sympathise with or even support protests against Israel.
Another reason was self-interest: with a declining college-age population in the US, students are a commodity that universities are loath to lose – and foreign ones usually pay full freight. Over half the students at Columbia University in New York City, home to some of the worst campus violence and vandalism, are foreign. The president of MIT, approximately 40 per cent of whose graduate students are foreign, admitted that “collateral consequences for the students, such as visa issues” had caused them to go easier on foreign students involved in campus demonstrations.
But venality doesn’t excuse a pathetic unwillingness to tackle anti-Semitism that manifests in vandalism, aggression, and other acts that are at worst illegal and at best against college rules.
Perhaps nowhere was student behaviour, and faculty leadership, worse than at Columbia. Student Khymani James was at the forefront of anti-Israel activism there and recorded himself saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live”. Columbia had its own “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” last year. Students and outside activists took over buildings, vandalised property, assaulted Jewish students, glorified the now-deceased Hamas leader who was the architect of the October 7 massacre, and made life generally miserable for those wanting to get on with learning.
But there were anti-Israel demonstrations all over the country, including Emerson College, George Mason University, Georgetown, Princeton, and the University of Michigan.
At Cornell, professor Russell Rickford told student demonstrators he felt “exhilarated” by the barbaric October 7 attacks. Little wonder then that Cornell doctoral student Momodou Taal, a UK resident of Gambian origin, felt safe participating in protests and declaring his “solidarity with the armed resistance in Palestine”.
Taal is a foreign student, here on a visa. Cornell decided not to disenroll him, likely because that would have required them to notify US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which controls a national Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) database. Losing student status in SEVIS removes a foreigner’s legal means to remain in the US.
But students can also be deported for violating US immigration law, under which “Any alien – who endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization … is inadmissible” to the United States. That means they not only should not get a visa in the first place, but if they misbehave after they get one, they can be arrested and put into deportation proceedings.
On Jan 29, president Trump gave an executive order titled Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism. He tasked federal agencies with “familiarizing institutions of higher education with the grounds for inadmissibility” of foreign students, “so that such institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff” and “if warranted” take action resulting in their deportation.
Most US colleges and universities are dependent on federal money for research grants, student loans, and other subsidies. If Trump means business, they stand to lose this gravy train if they fail to police their campuses. American donors, and perhaps parents, will also be watching carefully. Universities that fail to act are risking their futures.
Simon Hankinson is senior research fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation
From Berkely in the 1960s to Bates and Brown today, the US has long shown great tolerance for home-grown campus activists. But when it comes to foreign students here on visas, president Trump has clearly signalled he is unwilling to put up with much more nonsense.
Since the Oct 7 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, students and radical activists, united by hatred of Israel or fervor for the Palestinian cause (which are often hard to separate), have vandalised, rioted, assaulted, and disrupted college campuses and big cities across America.
The long list of outrages is bad enough, but the reaction of university administrators has been scandalous. Far from seeing the clear danger to their own interests of allowing entitled student protesters free rein, the adults seemed eager to protect them from true discipline.
Summoned to testify before an angry Congress last May, the presidents of Northwestern, Rutgers, and UCLA admitted that very few students had been disciplined for anti-Semitic acts. Two of the three later resigned. One of their replacements, UCLA’s Julio Frenk, seems to be taking things more seriously. He recently suspended the UCLA chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a group behind many protests nationwide.
One reason college leaders were reluctant to act against student malfeasance is that faculties and administrators in American higher education are overwhelmingly Left of centre, and many sympathise with or even support protests against Israel.
Another reason was self-interest: with a declining college-age population in the US, students are a commodity that universities are loath to lose – and foreign ones usually pay full freight. Over half the students at Columbia University in New York City, home to some of the worst campus violence and vandalism, are foreign. The president of MIT, approximately 40 per cent of whose graduate students are foreign, admitted that “collateral consequences for the students, such as visa issues” had caused them to go easier on foreign students involved in campus demonstrations.
But venality doesn’t excuse a pathetic unwillingness to tackle anti-Semitism that manifests in vandalism, aggression, and other acts that are at worst illegal and at best against college rules.
Perhaps nowhere was student behaviour, and faculty leadership, worse than at Columbia. Student Khymani James was at the forefront of anti-Israel activism there and recorded himself saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live”. Columbia had its own “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” last year. Students and outside activists took over buildings, vandalised property, assaulted Jewish students, glorified the now-deceased Hamas leader who was the architect of the October 7 massacre, and made life generally miserable for those wanting to get on with learning.
But there were anti-Israel demonstrations all over the country, including Emerson College, George Mason University, Georgetown, Princeton, and the University of Michigan.
At Cornell, professor Russell Rickford told student demonstrators he felt “exhilarated” by the barbaric October 7 attacks. Little wonder then that Cornell doctoral student Momodou Taal, a UK resident of Gambian origin, felt safe participating in protests and declaring his “solidarity with the armed resistance in Palestine”.
Taal is a foreign student, here on a visa. Cornell decided not to disenroll him, likely because that would have required them to notify US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which controls a national Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) database. Losing student status in SEVIS removes a foreigner’s legal means to remain in the US.
But students can also be deported for violating US immigration law, under which “Any alien – who endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization … is inadmissible” to the United States. That means they not only should not get a visa in the first place, but if they misbehave after they get one, they can be arrested and put into deportation proceedings.
On Jan 29, president Trump gave an executive order titled Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism. He tasked federal agencies with “familiarizing institutions of higher education with the grounds for inadmissibility” of foreign students, “so that such institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff” and “if warranted” take action resulting in their deportation.
Most US colleges and universities are dependent on federal money for research grants, student loans, and other subsidies. If Trump means business, they stand to lose this gravy train if they fail to police their campuses. American donors, and perhaps parents, will also be watching carefully. Universities that fail to act are risking their futures.
Simon Hankinson is senior research fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation