Universities that toe the Trump administration’s line need not worry of losing federal funding for academic research, said Education Secretary Linda McMahon Wednesday evening.
“Universities should continue to be able to do research as long as they’re in sync,” with the administration’s goals, McMahon said.
Harvard University is currently on the outs with the president, who has criticized it as being “pro-terrorist,” liberally biased, and home to too many international students, who, the president says, are skewing admittance opportunities against Americans. International students comprise 28% of Harvard’s student body.
As punishment, the president is seeking to cancel $100 million in government contracts with the university as well as ban it from enrolling international students and require current international students to leave the school.
Across the country, the Trump administration has frozen billions of dollars designated for higher education, stalling programs primarily concentrated on STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
In the last few weeks, the visas of more than 1,000 foreign exchange students, both graduate and undergraduate, have been revoked.
Students who have participated in demonstrations against the Israel-Hamas war are particularly vulnerable, which is worth drawing out, considering more than 54,000 innocent Palestinian civilians living in Gaza have been killed in the 19-month war.
To sympathize with the Palestinians’ plight does not inherently mean one is antisemitic.
The Trump administration says otherwise.
Earlier this year, the president signed an executive order declaring demonstrations against the war as “unlawful anti-Semitic harassment,” and any foreign exchange students caught participating are “inadmissible aliens.”
For students detained for such acts, their chances of a defense are grim. Earlier this month, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, said the administration is considering suspending habeas corpus, the constitutional right to challenge detention.
The upshot of these administrative decisions is both immediate and far-reaching.
Freedom of speech rights afforded to Americans are on shaky ground for those here on student or work visas, casting a pall of censorship over both campuses and their communities.
Rumeysa Ozturk, a student from Turkey seeking her doctorate in childhood behavior at Boston’s Tuft University, is an example of that crackdown.
For more than six weeks, Ozturk was held in a Louisiana detention center for co-writing an opinion piece about the Israel-Hamas war. The piece, which appeared in the school newspaper more than a year ago, decried the well-established human rights abuses being committed against Palestinians trapped in Gaza.
In March, six masked officers swarmed and handcuffed the 30-year-old outside of her apartment and took her into custody. (Google her name and you can watch the horrifying video of her capture.)
