Analysts see 'immense' impact as Trump ratchets up pressure on Harvard

The Manila Times

Analysts see 'immense' impact as Trump ratchets up pressure on Harvard  A US judge on Friday, May 23, temporarily blocked the Trump administration from revoking Harvard University's ability to enroll foreign students, a policy the White House says is a reaction to antisemitism at the Ivy League school. Harvard says the move is part of President Donald Trump's broader effort to retaliate against it for refusing to "surrender its academic independence."  The order provides temporary relief to thousands of international students who were faced with being forced to transfer under a policy that the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based university called a "blatant violation" of the US Constitution and other federal laws, and said would have an "immediate and devastating effect" on the university and more than 7,000 visa holders.  REUTERS / STRINGR.COM / US NETWORK POOL / UNRESTRICTED POOL / SOCIAL MEDIA WEBSITE VIDEO  Subscribe to The Manila Times Channel - https://tmt.ph/YTSubscribe   Visit our website at https://www.manilatimes.net   Follow us:  Facebook - https://tmt.ph/facebook  Instagram - https://tmt.ph/instagram  Twitter - https://tmt.ph/twitter  DailyMotion - https://tmt.ph/dailymotion   Subscribe to our Digital Edition - https://tmt.ph/digital   Check out our Podcasts:  Spotify - https://tmt.ph/spotify  Apple Podcasts - https://tmt.ph/applepodcasts  Amazon Music - https://tmt.ph/amazonmusic  Deezer: https://tmt.ph/deezer  Tune In: https://tmt.ph/tunein  #TheManilaTimes #worldnews  #harvarduniversity  #donaldtrump

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00:00Pandemic freedom! Protects! Protects! The core mission! The core mission! Protects! Protects! The vulnerable! Protects! Protects! Our core mission! Our core mission! Tell me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like! I'm a union co-chair for Greenwood, so...

00:18Why are they there? And then you see those same people picketing and screaming at the United States and screaming at, you know, they're anti-Semitic or they're something. We don't want troublemakers here.

00:29So how is this going to impact Harvard? Immensely. Almost a quarter, 25% of their enrollment is international students. And Secretary Noem pointed out that Harvard is very wealthy and that they will be fine without this tuition to, as she put it, pad their endowment.

00:51So I just want to make clear that tuition dollars don't go into endowments. Tuition money is used for things like student aid, student programs, payroll, paying staff, paying faculty.

01:05And so the loss of tuition is not going to hurt Harvard's endowment. It's going to hurt their ability to take care of the students, faculty, and staff that they have.

01:16Right. So Secretary Noem, either in her letter or in a recent statement, has said, I'm not quoting directly, but that Harvard is a hotbed of dissent, of anti-Semitism, and it somehow harbors future terrorists, perhaps.

01:34And so they're using that. This is why it's coming through Homeland Security and not another agency.

01:40They're saying that the international students at Harvard are somehow a threat to the security of the United States.

01:47This has absolutely no precedent.

01:51Obviously, schools have had their SEVIS registration terminated, but it's usually for fraud or they just don't keep records.

01:59They've never done it for anything remotely like this, which basically is, we don't like the fact that you're not listening to about who you should hire, so we're going to terminate it.

02:09That's what they did here.

02:10But perhaps this was not necessarily just about Harvard.

02:13However, this was a message to all of higher education, that you have to come into line with the thinking of what this administration thinks higher education should be.

02:25We're going to see, clearly what we're going to see, is a massive drop-off in foreign students coming to the United States starting in September.

02:33Well, I think a lot of the administration sees universities as a hotbed of liberals, progressives, people that are aligned against the principles of MAGA.

02:41And to them, it's a breeding ground.

02:44They see it as a breeding ground.

02:46So if you can disrupt the breeding ground, you won't have as many progressive, i.e. educated people, who oppose the administration's nationalism and nativism.

02:56But what's also going to happen is the students and the researchers that have been coming to the United States since the end of World War II are now being courted by France.

03:07They're being courted by Germany.

03:08They're being courted by Canada.

03:09They're being courted by China.

03:10Hey, why go to the United States?

03:13Those people are crazy over there.

03:14We will fund your research in France.

03:16We will fund your research in China.

03:18Come here.

03:19But overall, there's 1.2 million students in the United States.

03:22I mean, there's a lot of foreign students there, many of them keeping schools afloat.

03:27You know, not only do foreign students bring to the campus, university, this international interaction with American citizen students that are there, but they also provide massive funding because they all pay full tuition.

03:37So, you know, tuition will go up for U.S. citizens at almost every university if we didn't have foreign students.

03:45It will 100% go up.

03:47Another action that the administration is trying to take against Harvard is to revoke their tax-exempt status, which, again, based on their very large endowment, would cause Harvard to then owe a tremendous amount of money in taxes, again, hampering research.

04:03But tax-exempt status, I mean, it's a privilege.

04:06It's really a privilege.

04:08And it's been abused by a lot more than Harvard, too.

04:12By a lot more than Harvard.

04:13So we'll see how that all works out.

04:15Just the requests that they're making of Harvard and other universities doing what are called viewpoint surveys on both faculty and students, trying to find out ideological beliefs, any sort of political activities, those have not been seen in the United States for quite some time.

04:37Certainly, during McCarthyism and the Red Scare, people were more inquisitive, to put it nicely, about people's political views and activities.

04:48But, you know, McCarthy faced a tremendous amount of backlash.

04:53And for the rest of the Cold War and most of the 21st century, America has prided itself on freedom of speech, freedom of thought, right?

05:02And in a recent report, Harvard did admit that there's been a problem with anti-Semitism on their campus, and they are looking into ways to mitigate that.

05:13Of course, nobody wants anti-Semitism.

05:16There's no place for that in the United States, right?

05:19So they've recently, I think the number is about $2.75 billion that they have immediately taken from Harvard.

05:28Harvard, of course, is requesting that they be allowed to keep those funds.

05:33You know, faculty at Harvard are very concerned, talking about how the revocation of that amount of funds, what that's going to do is essentially shut down some of their labs.

05:45We've talked about how universities in America are vital for all kinds of research, but particularly scientific research that leads to medical discoveries, advances in technology.

05:55And so revoking those funds without a very clear reason or without a very clear process is incredibly harmful to Harvard.

06:40You are welcome.

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