Nothing much new happening today, a short summary of what is going on follows. I will be traveling the next ten days or so, likely much less posting.
On the visa front, a court stopped Trump from his plan to remove Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students. The Trump people now say they will do “enhanced vetting” of all Harvard visas to look for “histories of anti-Semitic harassment and violence” (and these days criticizing Israel’s genocide in Gaza is often considered “anti-Semitic harassment”). Unable to shut down visas to Harvard, they’re going after all student visas: pausing new appointments for all visa applications and threatening Chinese students in particular, based on connections to the Communist Party or working in certain research areas. For all of this, hard to know at this point if they intend to massively deny student visas or not. Probably they don’t know.
Stand Columbia, as part of its ongoing campaign to make the case that Columbia needs to bend the knee, has a long analysis of the foreign student situation at Columbia.
The current situation of Trump’s war with the universities is described in Universities quietly negotiating with White House aide to try to avoid Harvard’s fate, source says at CNN. Harvard won’t negotiate, so it’s war and the Trump is trying to find every means, legal and illegal, to destroy Harvard. But Harvard has a lot of money, influence and lawyers. May end up with another TACO.
The source familiar with the higher education response questioned the appetite to proceed at an aggressive pace.
“If you go after Harvard, how hard can you keep going? The universities are being played like a yo-yo for weeks and weeks and weeks. My guess is, at some point, the White House will lose interest in that. Once you’ve taken down Harvard, where are you going to go – Emory? They’re just as conscious of the brands as anybody else,” the source said.
Ultimately, the source added, the market rules: “What’s going to happen to Harvard or Columbia? Record applicants, record yield. I would bet you that if you talked to MAGA voters at Charlotte Country Day School or The Westminster Schools – they may have voted for Trump, but are they turning away from the Ivy League? Hell no. The schools are having record demand.”
The overall goal is “We have to bring these universities to their knees”, more specifically
“They want a name-brand university to make a deal like the law firms made a deal that covers not just antisemitism and protests, but DEI and intellectual diversity,”
Columbia has gone part-way with this, caving in on the “antisemitism and protests” front, with one factor influential pro-Israel trustees who were happy with that part of the demands. On the “DEI and intellectual diversity” front though, the Harvard demand letter shows that the Trump people are trying to get control not just of admissions and hiring, but also imposing MAGA students, faculty and staff on an institution. In response to this, supposedly many universities are “negotiating”. This includes Columbia, but our negotiating tactic is described as “playing dead”. For the rest
Asked if any of the schools are inclined to make such a deal, the source said, “Nobody wants to be the first, but the financial pressures are getting real.”
One problem for this effort (besides being completely illegal…) is that there’s now an ongoing campaign to destroy all universities, so it’s very unclear what caving-in to Trump would actually get you. The proposed budget has massive cuts in all grant funding everywhere, so getting your right to apply for grants restored at a time there aren’t any anymore is not much of an inducement. The attack on foreign students is on all of them, the proposed endowment tax is on all of them, etc. By starting on a campaign to destroy all universities, Trump has made it a lot harder to pressure any particular one. Who knows, the universities might even get together, join Harvard, and fight for a TACO.
I suppose I am now displaying my stupidity, but how can the Trump people do “enhanced vetting” of all Harvard visas to look for “histories of anti-Semitic harassment and violence” without the discrimination of other populations in the United States? I can imagine that a nation’s executive branch can act against “histories of harassment and violence” but not that it’s authorized to give one population group that privilege. If a government wants to combat “anti-Semitic harassment and violence,” surely it should do the same for anti-Palestinian, anti-Irish, etc. “harassment” and “violence”?
Peter,
I think the US government has wide latitude to decide how they treat people applying for visas to come here. They’re not US citizens and they’re not in the US, so no constitutional rights. There has been previous argument here about this I don’t want to start up again.
The problem with this as with a lot of Trump actions against universities is that what he says he’s doing makes little sense, it’s all a weird excuse to try to do some bullying. In this case, the number of people with actual “histories of anti-Semitic harassment and violence” coming to study or work at Harvard is essentially zero. So this is all a sort of “we’re going to make life difficult for you” intimidation tactic. Harvard can just ignore it, maybe it’s another TACO. If a significant number of their people do have trouble getting visas, with this as a bogus excuse, then maybe they can do something (yes, I have a vocal commentator who keeps telling me they can’t do anything about anything, but I don’t believe this…). Trump often makes this very easy by publicly stating that the official reason for something is an excuse, announcing publicly that his administration is lying, that he’s really doing it to retaliate against Harvard.
We’ll see what happens. Harvard is not a weak and defenseless institution that can easily be bullied. Don’t bet against the TACO.
Perhaps I was not clear, but I was indeed talking about American citizens and they have constitutional protections. Trump’s measure clearly seeks to protect American Jews. A government that does not discriminate is obligated to give the same protection to all American populations, including Americans of Irish, Palestinian and even Belgian origin.
Peter,
The government’s position here I guess would be that it investigates all visa applicants to make sure they’re not terrible, violent people who plan to come here to do terrible, violent things. It has discovered that Harvard is a center of antisemitism, and is recruiting terrible, violent people from other countries to come here and perform terrible, violent acts of antisemitism. So, it needs to pay special attention to look for these terrible, violent, Harvard-recruited people. Of course, like everything else they do, this is a lie, and that might or might not turn out to be a problem for them in court.