On the front lines of Harvard’s resistance to Trump: ‘The first thing authoritarians do is attack universities’

The Friday of end of semester dawned cold and overcast at Harvard. The campus looked strangely empty; the only crowd consisted of tourists taking pictures by the worn shoe of the John Harvard statue, the first benefactor of Harvard University, the oldest in the United States and the richest in the world. Many students and professors were already on vacation. Others would return the following week for graduation ceremonies.

María, a 33-year-old Peruvian doctoral student in Social Sciences, walked slowly through Cambridge Common, the usually lively heart of the campus. She is one of the 6,800 international students whose future was thrown into uncertainty by the Donald Trump administration’s decision to suspend the international student program. Given the situation, she prefers not to reveal her real identity, so “María” is a fictitious name.

María doesn’t know if her F-1 visa has suddenly become meaningless, or if she’ll have to pack up and return to her country. Such an outcome, she fears, would mean losing “everything I’ve invested.” “It’s an injustice, but if I have to leave, I’ll go,” she says. “There’s a lot of worry, a lot of frustration. They’re trying to do to the academic community what they’ve done to migrants. It’s like they’re telling us: you’re not welcome here.”

The blow struck María and the rest of the students and researchers from 140 countries (who make up 27% of the student body) on Thursday when Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem sent a letter to Harvard. In it, Noem informed university officials that she was revoking their authority to enrol more international students. Those already enrolled were thrown into a legal limbo “effective immediately,” and given two options: find another university or face possible deportation.

Emily Carrero, a doctoral student and founder of the Cuban American Student Association, explained Friday that the announcement caught almost everyone “by surprise.” “Shock” was the most frequently heard word in conversations with a dozen students, researchers, and professors who spoke with EL PAÍS, many of them anonymously for fear of reprisals, both on campus and from their home countries. Carrero, a U.S. citizen, says she knows classmates with F-1 visas who had plans to visit family over the summer but decided “not to risk leaving the country for fear of not being able to return.”

That’s the dilemma faced by Madrid-based musicologist Álvaro Torrente, who had planned a two-part research stay: the first ended in April and the second was set to begin in October. But given the uncertainty, he doesn’t know if it’s worth beginning the visa process now.

And Gonzalo Arana, a “part-time researcher” who considers himself “lucky” because he has a job in Spain and “not as much to lose” as others whose health insurance — and that of their families — depends on their work permits.

Arana studies what causes some countries to grow and others not. “The hardest thing is attracting talent and concentrating it in a specific place,” he explains in a phone call from Spain. “It’s crazy that the United States, which had already achieved this, is giving it up.”

The response, in less than 24 hours

Fears began to ease somewhat last Friday. Harvard took less than 24 hours to file a lawsuit against the government in response to what its lawyers described as “clear retaliation” for the university’s refusal to yield to the White House’s attempts to “control Harvard‘s governance, curriculum, and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students.” “Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard,” read the lawsuit. By late morning, a federal judge in Boston had issued a temporary injunction blocking the DHS order.

The sequence of events, along with the publication of a letter from Harvard President Alan Garber in which he pledged to stand up for those affected, brought some relief — at least temporarily. Still, it remains unclear how this looming threat will affect the willingness of prospective students to apply to Harvard.

The episode also reaffirmed the university’s resolve to resist Trump’s attacks. In his bid to bring the institution to heel, the administration has frozen nearly $3 billion in federal funding and threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status, citing a wide range of reasons — from combating antisemitism to, as claimed Friday from the White House, accusing Harvard of sneaking in students “who can’t even add 2 + 2.”

Philosopher Michael Sandel, one of Harvard‘s most respected and well-known professors, believes the president has targeted the university because “he wants to expand his executive power and subjugate three key institutions of civil society: law firms, the media, and elite universities as independent sources of moral authority associated with knowledge.” “Harvard is a symbol,” says Sandel, who is more concerned about last week’s “attack” on its character as an international university than about the budget cuts.

At the center of this latest dispute is an April request that Harvard share data on its international students, especially those who had taken part in “dangerous” or “illegal” activities. That threat to suspend the exchange program materialized Thursday alongside a new demand: Noem — who accuses the university of “fostering violence and antisemitism and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party” — wants Harvard to hand over video and audio recordings of those students, obtained both on and off campus.

For Will Creeley of FIRE, a free speech advocacy group, that demand represents, as he wrote in an email, a “flagrant violation of the First Amendment” of the Constitution, which guarantees that freedom.

Sandel doesn’t see resistance to those demands as an act of heroism, arguing the university had no other option. “What the Trump administration was seeking was so extreme, so contrary to the fundamental principles of academic freedom, that the university had no choice but to oppose it,” the thinker explained Friday in a video conference from Europe.

Also working in Harvard‘s favor are its exceptionally strong finances — even in the face of potentially losing the tuition revenue from international students, which is the highest. The university’s endowment stands at $53 billion.

Those who defend Trump’s decisions argue that, amid Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza, antisemitism is “out of control” in elite U.S. institutions — perhaps overlooking the fact that the latest measure threatens to expel around a hundred Israelis, as well as students who opposed pro-Palestinian protests during the past academic year.

These attacks are also justified as a reaction to decades of left-wing dominance on elite campuses — from the political correctness of the 1990s to what Trump calls “woke ideology,” referring to diversity policies and the recognition of trans rights, among other things. In MAGA circles, the possibility of replacing these students with Americans is celebrated.

Regarding the accusation of tolerance for antisemitism, Harvard‘s president acknowledged in an open letter in April that it is — along with anti-Muslim sentiment — “a critical problem” on campus, and admitted the university’s initial response to Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attacks could have been stronger.

Lack of ideological diversity

On the broader debate around U.S. higher education, there is some bipartisan consensus on the need for more ideological diversity among both faculty and students to enrich campus life. There is also consensus that the crusade against Harvard is unprecedented.

In its Saturday editorial, the conservative Wall Street Journal, which has been a leading critic of the Ivy League’s intellectual monoculture, called the suspension of the exchange program “a short-sighted attack on one of America’s great competitive strengths: Its ability to attract the world‘s best and brightest.”

Harvard‘s suspicion that this is an act of retaliation is reinforced by a 2021 speech from Vice President J.D. Vance at a Republican conference, in which he said that achieving the goals of U.S. conservatism would require “honestly and aggressively attacking the universities.”

“It’s well known that one of the first objectives of authoritarian regimes is to target higher education,” warns Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political science professor and co-author of the influential book How Democracies Die. “Trump’s is an authoritarian government. In a free-market economy like ours, the two most effective ways to go after a powerful private institution are by cutting funding and interfering in visa programs. Targeting international students also satisfies a nationalist impulse.”

After the news broke Thursday, Harvard‘s International Office (HIO) — which welcomes and supports students and researchers from abroad — held a large Zoom meeting to explain the situation and assure them that the university would fight back in court. Representatives from all departments were in attendance, including those with high numbers of foreign students such as the prestigious Kennedy School of Government (59% international students), the T.H. Chan School of Public Health (40%), and Harvard Business School (35%).

The number of international students at Harvard has grown by 19.7% since 2010. Ricardo Maldonado, who witnessed that growth during his tenure at the HIO before retiring, believes that no matter how long the legal battle takes, “the damage, unfortunately, is already done.” “Studying at a university is an investment in your future. If you can lose your rights overnight, that investment becomes a risky one.” Maldonado also wonders how long it will take for European and Chinese institutions to attract the talent driven away by Trump.

The five countries with the largest student enrollments are, in this order, China, Canada, India, South Korea, and the United Kingdom, according to university data. Chinese students are at the center of another of the Trump administration’s arguments to justify the crackdown on Harvard. In a statement, the DHS went so far on Thursday as to argue that the university “facilitated, and engaged in coordinated activity with the Chinese Communist Party, including hosting and training members of a Chinese Communist Party paramilitary group complicit in the Uyghur genocide.

Hearing the government’s list of allegations, Levitsky loses patience: “Just listening to the list tells you they’re a joke, pure pretexts.”

International education is one of the most competitive U.S. exports; it generated $56 billion in 2024, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. That did not stop Noem from extending in her Thursday letter her warning beyond Harvard: “Consequences must follow to send a clear signal to Harvard and all universities that want to enjoy the privilege of enrolling foreign students,” she wrote. Harvard doesn’t even rank among the top 10 in terms of percentage of international students, a ranking led by Illinois Institute of Technology (51%) in Chicago, Stevens Institute of Technology (42%) in New York, and Carnegie Mellon University (44%) in Pittsburgh, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

In sixth place is New York’s Columbia University (40%), the first to be targeted by Trump and, for the U.S. academic world, the shameful opposite of Harvard’s resistant stance, for having yielded to the White House’s demands.

Since the October 7 attack, Columbia has had three different presidents. It was the symbol of pro-Palestinian protests on campuses last academic year and the target of right-wing criticism for tolerating antisemitism. It has also seen police repression to suppress those demonstrations.

In March, the government froze $400 million in federal research funds and sent immigration agents to arrest activist students, the most famous of whom, Mahmoud Khalil, is still in jail. Meanwhile, the university hasn’t benefited much from accepting demands such as stricter rules for protesting, the ban on face masks, or the Department of Near Eastern Studies’ external intervention.

When asked why elite universities haven’t united in defense of Columbia, anticipating that others might be next, Sandel attributes it to the “mixed public-private” system of U.S. higher education, which makes agreement difficult. “They compete fiercely for students, for better rankings, amd for private donations,” he warns. The philosopher believes this “strict prestige hierarchy” distracts “higher education from its civic mission to serve the public good.”

For now, the most urgent fight is in the courts, where Harvard already filed a lawsuit against the president last month. It’s an important fight, warned Henry Pahlow, a Wisconsin student at the Kennedy School, who expressed pride — like others who spoke to EL PAÍS — in the university’s response: “We all know that Trump and his cronies play on fear. They believe that if they can subdue Harvard students, the rest of academia will follow.”

They’re not the only ones who believe this. Professors, students, and the rest of the vibrant ecosystem of this country’s sprawling higher education system (with more than 4,500 universities) know their future depends on whether Harvard — the apex of the U.S. academic jungle — can continue to resist Trump’s attacks.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition