Trump vs. Academic Freedom: President Escalates Attacks on Harvard & International Students

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We turn now to President Trump’s escalating war on Harvard University and academia as a whole. On Friday, a federal judge temporarily blocked a move by the Trump administration to bar Harvard from enrolling international students. They make up well over a quarter of Harvard’s student body. A hearing on the case will be held today.

On Monday, Trump threatened to redirect $3 billion in federal grants from Harvard to trade schools. CNN is reporting the Trump administration is also poised to cancel $100 million in federal contracts with Harvard University.

On Monday, Trump slammed Harvard for accepting so many international students and for not handing over detailed personal information about them.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Part of the problem with Harvard is that there are about 31%, almost 31%, of foreigners coming to Harvard. We give them billions of dollars, which is ridiculous. … We have Americans that want to go there and to other places, and they can’t go there because you have 31% foreign. Now, no foreign government contributes money to Harvard. We do. So, why are they doing so many, number one? Number two, we want a list of those foreign students, and we’ll find out whether or not they’re OK. Many will be OK, I assume. And I assume, with Harvard, many will be bad. And then the other thing is they’re very antisemitic.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump is escalating his threats as Harvard resists requests by the federal government to hand over detailed personal information about its international students. On Monday, Trump wrote on Truth Social the information is needed to determine, quote, “how many radicalized lunatics, troublemakers all, should not be let back into our Country,” unquote.

On Monday, Democracy Now! reached Francesco Anselmetti, a British Italian international graduate student in Harvard’s joint Ph.D. program in history and Middle East studies. He’s a member of Harvard’s graduate student union. He responded to Trump’s threats.

FRANCESCO ANSELMETTI: Trump’s revocation of Harvard’s ability to enroll and register international students is — of course, it’s an attack on Harvard’s international community. It’s also, seemingly, one of the largest, perhaps the largest, threat of mass deportation on a unionized workforce in American history. I mean, this is an attack on American academia as it is an attack on American labor. Around 25% of the university’s community, including around 4,000 workers, many of whom do the bulk of teaching at Harvard, many of whom, you know, despite a federal judge blocking the Trump administration’s action, are left in a position of extreme precarity and uncertainty over the short- and medium-term future.

We expect, you know, the Harvard — we expect Harvard to continue fighting for its international students in the courts, but we expect them to do so also in part because it’s in their interest, right? What we aren’t so sure about is whether it is in their interest to truly stand up for the free speech and intellectual autonomy it claims to be defending. In order for it to do so, it would have to seriously consider the claims of various student groups that have been operating on campus over the last two years in solidarity with Palestinian rights, groups which Harvard has had really no trouble in disciplining, in some cases banning. And the irony here is that, of course, these decisions from Harvard have — represent caving to outside pressures, right? These, in many cases, have been decisions that Harvard has been pressured to do in response to right-wing groups, in response to donors who represent, you know, interests that are — that want to eradicate any pro-Palestine sentiment on American university campuses.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Harvard graduate student Francesco Anselmetti speaking to Democracy Now! Harvard’s UAW unions have condemned the Trump administration attacks on graduate student workers.

We’re joined now by Alison Frank Johnson, a professor of history at Harvard University, the chair of the German Department. She’s also a member of the American Association of University Professors, the AAUP.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Professor. If you can start off by talking about what Trump is demanding, what exactly this means, as students who are in Cambridge and are around the world not knowing whether they are being forced to leave as we speak?

ALISON FRANK JOHNSON: That’s right. This is a — these measures are targeting not only the students who haven’t arrived yet, who’ve been admitted but are still at home, packing, planning to go to college, to start their doctoral programs, but also students that are well into programs they’ve already started, some of them supposed to graduate on Thursday, the day after tomorrow, some of them six years into a seven-year Ph.D. program, some of them freshmen and sophomores at college.

Even before these latest measures targeting international students, F-1 and J-1 visa holders were announced, we had already seen the harassment of international students and scholars coming into the United States. I know many international students who were afraid to go and do research, to go to archives, to go accept collaborative grant offers from other universities, which actually do many times fund research that’s being done at Harvard, afraid to leave the country because they didn’t know if they’d be let back in, even before this was happening. So, this is a massive escalation, but it’s not the beginning of the attacks on the embeddedness of the research that we do in a global community.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor, we had a segment last week talking about how the European Union, Canada, the U.K., even Australia have been increasing the amount of money that they’re devoting to scientific research, hoping to lure Americans who are now being targeted by this war on science of the Trump administration. Could you talk, the discussions you’ve been having with your colleagues about whether some of them are considering leaving, going to other countries, and what the long-term impact on America’s lead in science and technology and research would be as a result of this?

ALISON FRANK JOHNSON: Absolutely. So, I’m a historian of modern European history. Three scholars in my field who work at Yale recently very publicly announced that they were leaving for Canada. So far, my colleagues at Harvard and I are trying to prevent that from happening. So, our focus right now is to try to work together to ensure that Harvard continues to be a place where people will want to and be able to do cutting-edge research. And so, we are not yet planning for this mass exodus, but we have — we’re aware that that is one potential outcome, one we very much want to avoid.

The work being done at Harvard where grants have been cut — in fact, I think today the Trump administration announced they were cutting all contracts and all grants with Harvard University — that affects people working on tuberculosis, on ALS, on soft robotics, on diabetes, obviously, on cancer, repairing eye damage, people working on doing things like, you know, translating the Dead Sea Scrolls — that work has already been done — reducing school absenteeism. This is useful research. It’s useful to any country that will host it, and, in fact, it’s useful to the whole world, no matter where it takes place. So, I do understand that there will be attempts to poach some of the best scholars that we have at the university, although, as I said, my colleagues and I right now are trying to — that’s not the outcome that we want. We don’t want to — we don’t want to see people get well-paying jobs and fellowship opportunities elsewhere. We want to save this university.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about the range of demands that the Trump administration has made of Harvard in relation to these foreign students, what exactly they want, the information they want?

ALISON FRANK JOHNSON: Well, for better or for worse, it’s not entirely clear what they want. I think what they want is to destroy Harvard University as a way of destroying independent research and scholarship that they can’t control, intimidating the other universities that they haven’t yet targeted by destroying Harvard. So, whatever Harvard does, it’s not going to be sufficient.

You heard from the graduate student that you already interviewed that the university has actually taken many of the steps that the Trump administration has requested and demanded, including dismissing the director of the Center for Middle East Studies, including providing lots of information about our international students and accepting a definition of “antisemitism” that the regime favors. They also provided all legally required information related to the visa program that is being canceled, you know, SEVP. They did that.

So, when the Trump administration says that they haven’t provided the information that’s required, it’s not clear what exactly it is that Harvard even legally could provide that they still want. So, Harvard does have an obligation to protect the privacy of its students — I think, to a lesser extent, of its employees, but certainly of its students. It can’t just divulge anything to anyone. The federal government is the entity that has issued every single one of these students their visas, so, presumably, they already have access to the names and countries of origin of all of the students whose visas they have approved.

I think that whatever their demands are — and they certainly extend beyond what the law requires — even if Harvard were to meet them, they would come up with a new set of demands that it hadn’t met. It’s very clear that what they want to do is run the university into the ground.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we go, I wanted to ask you two quick questions. You talked about some of the grants and what would be shut down. What about the grants around scientific research? I mean, you have the situation where the Harvard School of Public Health, apparently, The Wall Street Journal is reporting, that they are cutting funding for the School of Public Health, laying off people, also reducing graduate student admissions. What about other schools? And also, Trump’s comments when he says, “We are still waiting for the Foreign Student Lists from Harvard” — as you point out, they already have the list, because they give them the visas; they know who’s there, unless they want much more personal information — but Trump says, “so that we can determine, after a ridiculous expenditure of BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, how many radicalized lunatics, troublemakers all, should not be let back into our Country.” What this means, not only for your school, but for the universities around the country?

ALISON FRANK JOHNSON: Yes, I think that Harvard is being made an example of, but Harvard is not really the target here. It’s the independent scholarship that’s being produced by universities, universities that work also to solve medical problems that aren’t very profitable, universities that are answerable to the truth and to future generations rather than to shareholders. And those universities do things like work on cures for cancer and work on cures for tuberculosis and work on cures for diabetes, and that work is obviously very — it’s obviously essential.

But we also do things like talk about climate change, right? We also do things like talk about the impact of income inequality. We also do things like talk about the importance of recognizing people’s identities, their sexual and gender-based identities, for their own mental health. We also talk about things like the segment that you aired before about what’s happening right now in Gaza. And those messages, whether it’s that vaccines work or that there is human-caused climate change or that we need to attend to the terrible tragedy that’s occurring in the Middle East, are messages that the administration doesn’t like, right? Universities, not only Harvard, do this work because they care about the truth. They don’t just care about what’s politically expedient for the current administration.

And I think that the assertion that the administration should decide which students are allowed to come to Harvard, which scholars are allowed to come to Harvard, whose ideas are dangerous — dangerous to whom? Right? Dangerous to an administration that isn’t interested in admitting that vaccines work, that isn’t interested in admitting that there’s climate change, that we should be reducing our dependency on fossil fuels? Dangerous to an administration whose foreign policy seems to run on friendships with bullies? That’s the kind of control that they want to have, and Harvard can’t let them have it, because we won’t be the last one they try to get it from.

AMY GOODMAN: Alison Frank Johnson, I want to thank you for being with us. We’ll follow what happens with the hearing today and beyond, not only at Harvard, but at schools all over the country right now. Professor of history at Harvard University, chair of the German Department, speaking to us from Munich, Germany. She’s also a member of the American Association of University Professors.

Up next, we go to Georgia, where a pregnant woman who’s been declared brain dead has been kept on life support for over three months, against the wishes of her family, because of Georgia’s six-week abortion ban. Back in 30 seconds.

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