John K. Wilson
New Lines Magazine / June 9, 2025
The administration’s attack on Harvard is part of an assault unprecedented in the history of American higher education.
On June 4, President Donald Trump signed a proclamation banning all new international students from Harvard University, and asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio to prohibit all existing foreign students there, which a Harvard spokesperson called “yet another illegal retaliatory step taken by the Administration in violation of Harvard’s First Amendment rights.”
Trump’s attack on Harvard is part of a war on academia unprecedented in the history of American higher education. In this battle against universities, academic freedom and federal funding have been the primary targets, but international students and scholars have become the most vulnerable casualties.
The threats against international students represent the intersection of three lines of attack by the Trump administration: a war on universities, a war on immigrants and a war on dissent.
Trump’s June 4 proclamation followed the administration’s May 22 ban on Harvard’s certification to admit international students. Harvard had immediately sued and obtained a temporary restraining order, prompting Trump officials to withdraw the immediate ban and instead issue a 30-day notice for a future prohibition on international enrolment. But Trump’s new proclamation undermines that legal strategy of pretending to follow due process. Instead, the goal is to punish Harvard by threatening its wealth. Banning foreign students, raising the endowment tax, revoking nonprofit status, and withholding government grants are all part of this financial assault. As Trump threatened on Truth Social, “I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land.”
The Trump administration has escalated its attacks on international students after its efforts to punish individual pro-Palestinian protesters were thwarted, for the moment, by judges issuing injunctions against their imprisonment. On May 22, Republican-appointed U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White issued a nationwide injunction against the government arresting, incarcerating or moving students based solely on their immigration status, unless they are charged with a violent crime.
When Mohsen Mahdawi walked across the stage on May 19 at Columbia University’s commencement ceremony, he received a standing ovation. Mahdawi, a green card holder from the West Bank who was arrested when he appeared for an immigration interview in Vermont, had been released on bail while he fights the Trump administration’s attempt to ban him from attending graduate school at Columbia in the fall.
The video of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University in Boston, being seized off the street by six masked immigration officials on March 25 for writing an op-ed critical of the Israeli government has become a symbol of the Trump administration’s treatment of international students. Numerous civil liberties groups and a coalition of 27 Jewish organizations have objected to Öztürk’s arrest.
The most prominent case was the arrest of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder who supported pro-Palestine protests on campus and remains imprisoned. Khalil represented the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” student protesters in spring 2024 and was a lead negotiator with the Columbia administration, but has never been accused of breaking any laws.
Secretary Rubio announced at a press conference in March that being a “social activist” was grounds for expulsion from the United States: “We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist who tears up our university campuses,” he said.
Rubio declared that he had seized the visas of at least 300 international students, invoking the Immigration and Nationality Act passed in 1952 at the height of McCarthyism, which permits the deportation of noncitizens if the secretary of state “has reasonable ground to believe” the individual’s presence would have “serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” Rubio claimed that allowing Khalil to remain in the country would create a “hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States.”
Legal experts have rejected any possibility that an individual international student joining a mass protest could cause any serious harm to American foreign policy. Even Jonathan Turley — the Fox News contributor and George Washington University law professor who was the only witness called by Republicans to defend Donald Trump during his impeachment — called it a “troubling turn” that Rubio had admitted Khalil’s activities were “otherwise lawful” and that he would be deported “solely on his political views.”
Nonetheless, on April 11, a federal judge in Louisiana agreed with the administration that Khalil can be deported, and he remains imprisoned while his case is appealed to higher courts.
In April, the Trump administration took over the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System (SEVIS) database to target students. Previously, SEVIS was used by colleges to inform the federal government when a foreign student had graduated or left a university. But Trump officials secretly revoked legal status from current students without any due process, making it possible to deport them without warning at any time.
In the past, terminating a SEVIS record only limited the ability of international students to transfer to another U.S. college or return if they left the country, but now the loss of a visa has sometimes become the first step in arrest and deportation.
“Under pressure from ICE, schools have been advising students they are out of status after SEVIS record termination, and in many cases disenrolling them as a result,” Nathan Yaffe, an attorney representing international students, told The Intercept. The Trump administration created pandemonium by convincing colleges that they could not continue to enrol foreign students with a terminated SEVIS record, and pushing those students to leave the country without any legal process.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that more than 4,700 international students had their visas revoked by the Trump administration in the first half of April. When students are informed by the government about the revocation, they are told that if they remain in the U.S. they could face fines, detention and deportation — including being deported to a country other than their home. As a result, many international students have fled America rather than remain and risk arrest.
In late April, more than 50 judges issued restraining orders against the Trump administration, including a Georgia judge who ordered the visas of 133 students restored. To avoid further legal setbacks, Justice Department lawyers announced at an April 25 hearing that some international students would temporarily have their legal status restored until the administration developed “a framework for status record termination.”
On April 30, Trump officials unveiled that framework in a legal filing for an Arizona case. The new policy gives Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “inherent authority” to change the status of international students in the SEVIS system. The rules provide a vague standard of “evidence of failure to comply” with visa terms to justify revocations, which can now proceed without evidence and are not subject to any court challenges, according to administration officials. Even the brief interruption in legal status caused by the Trump administration’s earlier SEVIS changes can now be used under the new framework to justify a visa revocation, so thousands of international students who didn’t sue to have their status restored could be banned from the U.S. on that basis alone.
The April 30 framework thus makes international students vulnerable to any punishment by immigration officials for any reason.
In May, the State Department demanded that colleges report, within one day, the names of any international students accused of “participation in an unauthorized encampment” or “endorsing or espousing terrorist activities,” a term that some Trump administration officials apply to pro-Palestinian protests.
Although pro-Palestinian protesters were the Trump administration’s immediate priority for capture and deportation, the attacks on international students are part of a larger anti-immigrant crusade on the right. The Associated Press has reported that many international students whose visas were revoked had no connection to protests and may have been targeted for minor traffic violations or dismissed cases.
In addition to threatening to shut off the spigot of funds to individual universities in order to force changes on campus, the Trump administration has used its direct control over the immigration process to punish individual protesters and target colleges for a possible ban on all international students.
These tactics and goals represent a radical change from much of the first Trump administration and even Trump’s 2024 campaign, when he promised free speech on campus and declared, “You graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country.” But Trump’s personal promises on behalf of immigrants matter far less than his political embrace of a radical anti-immigrant movement on the right.
To many conservatives, foreigners on campus represent a threat to American students, with some even advocating a total ban on international students. Jared Gould, managing editor of the right-wing National Association of Scholars’ website Minding the Campus, wrote, “Colleges and universities should limit the number of international students they admit — or, better yet, end their dependence on foreign students altogether.”
Even college presidents are responding with alarm to the Trump administration’s actions. Princeton University president Christopher Eisgruber wrote on March 19 that we are facing “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s.” On April 2, the Trump administration froze $210 million in federal grants to Princeton. Columbia’s former President Lee Bollinger said, “We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government.”
Criticism of the Trump administration can lead to retaliation. Cornell University’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, wrote a New York Times op-ed defending “the free exchange of ideas,” and a week later the Trump administration cut off $1 billion in federal funds to Cornell.
But appeasement hasn’t worked as a strategy for universities, either. Columbia was the initial target of the administration’s threats to cut off federal funds, but even harsh restrictions on campus protests and penalties for protesters, along with an explicit agreement to the Trump administration’s demands, have not saved the campus from retaliation. An internal National Institutes of Health memo revealed on April 18 that NIH staffers have been ordered to withhold $250 million in federal grants to Columbia even though it agreed to many of the administration’s demands.
On April 8, the Trump administration imposed a freeze on $790 million in federal grants and contracts to Northwestern University over an ongoing investigation into antisemitism, even though Northwestern officials sought to appease the administration, both by enacting new rules to suppress protests on campus — they formally adopted the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which includes criticism of Israel — and by denying tenure to Steven Thrasher, a journalism professor and the most outspoken critic of Israeli policies on the faculty. On March 31, one day before spring quarter classes began, Northwestern prohibited Thrasher from teaching any courses in the 15 months that remained on his contract.
Republicans have also targeted legal clinics at Northwestern’s law school for providing legal assistance to protesters. Republican Rep. Tim Walberg, chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, declared that legal efforts to protect the rights of protesters somehow violated the university’s obligation “to ensure a safe environment for Jewish students and faculty” and added that to stop legal aid, “all tools are on the table, including compulsory measures.”
Harvard adopted severe restrictions on campus protests and last fall adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism, yet the Trump administration announced it would scrutinize $9 billion in federal funds to the university, prompting a lawsuit by the Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Facing demands to politically purge its faculty and students, Harvard finally rejected the government’s control over discipline, admissions and hiring, and the Trump administration immediately cut off $2.2 billion in federal funds and has since banned all funding for Harvard. The funding cutoffs violate federal law, which requires any funding restrictions to follow a process of notification and negotiation that the Trump administration completely ignored.
Trump posted further threats on social media that violated federal law by demanding an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) investigation: “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’” On May 2, Trump announced the decision without bothering to order an IRS investigation: “We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status.”
The administration demanded that Harvard make extraordinary changes to its policies and procedures — changes that would violate academic freedom, including retroactive punishment of any Harvard faculty members who “incited students to violate Harvard’s rules following October 7.” Another key demand targeted foreign students at Harvard: “The University must reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence.”
This kind of pressure exerted by the federal government against elite universities is prompting widespread acts of anticipatory obedience on the part of colleges across the country that are changing policies and banning controversial speakers to avoid scrutiny and the threat of funds being frozen.
New York University cancelled a March 19 talk by Dr. Joanne Liu, the former international head of Doctors Without Borders, because university officials took the highly unusual step of examining her PowerPoint slides in advance and worried that that slides describing cuts at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) could be viewed as “anti-governmental,” and slides about deaths in Gaza could be deemed “antisemitic.”
“I think it’s minor, to a certain extent, that my lecture was cancelled, but it’s a symptom of something so much bigger,” Liu told The Washington Post. “This assault on academia is massive,” she continued. “We are basically silencing universities on speaking of everything that they should be speaking of.”
On May 18, New York University announced it was withholding the degree of a student, Logan Rozos, pending disciplinary action for criticizing the war in Gaza in a commencement speech. “I want to say that the genocide currently occurring is supported politically and militarily by the United States, is paid for by our tax dollars, and has been livestreamed to our phones for the past 18 months,” Rozos said.
Top administrators at the University of Wisconsin called for UW-Milwaukee professor Rachel Ida Buff to be banned from speaking about academic freedom at a campus retreat in May because of her involvement with Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization that is critical of the Israeli government, and only backed down after sharp criticism from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
The value of higher education has made universities much more vulnerable to federal government control. For most of American history, private universities were small institutions that conducted relatively little scientific research and relied on student tuition and wealthy donors to sustain their operations. That began to change in 1958, with the passage of the National Defense Education Act in the wake of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik rocket launch, which led to widespread panic about America being surpassed on the technological front in the Cold War. Government-funded and university-conducted scientific and medical research came to symbolize America’s technological dominance in the world, and numerous student grant and loan programs allowed Americans to pursue higher education. But these billions in federal dollars gave government officials a new power never exercised against any major university until 2025: the threat to cut off federal funds unless colleges obey the government’s orders.
The Trump administration’s tactic of holding federal money hostage and the congressional hearings against universities over their response to pro-Palestinian protests have had a much greater impact than similar attacks on academic freedom during the McCarthy Era of the 1950s, when the federal government had almost no direct mechanisms to punish colleges.
The chaos sowed by the Trump administration may be almost as destructive as direct repression, and the damage imposed by censorship and budget cuts will threaten America’s status as the home of the world’s leading universities. International students and scholars fearful of being arbitrarily banished from the U.S. for walking near a protest or posting something critical of Donald Trump on social media are already leaving America because of the uncertainty created by Trump’s policies. Students are already choosing to attend universities in other countries, and some top American scholars seeking academic freedom and the opportunity to work with elite colleagues and students may follow. A brain drain could threaten the status of American universities as some of the leading educational institutions in the world.
Despite Trump’s 2024 proposal that every international student should receive a green card with their diploma, because of their role in fuelling innovation in American industry, on May 26 he said of Harvard, “We have Americans who want to go there, and to other places, and they can’t go there because there’s 31% foreigners.” Trump’s policies may thus damage the U.S. economy in the long term, constraining colleges that benefit from foreign students, not only via their tuition dollars but also through their top-notch research and the kind of new thinking that fuels innovation.
The Trump administration has wielded its economic control over university contracts to impose a conservative agenda banning diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and demanding the silencing of pro-Palestinian protesters. International students and scholars are the most vulnerable casualties of this assault on higher education, and the administration’s larger immigration agenda puts all foreign students at risk. The ultimate target is higher education itself. The Trump administration will continue to subject universities it regards as ideological enemies to attacks on their funding and their freedom.
John K. Wilson writes regularly for the Academe blog and is the author of the forthcoming book The Attack on Academia
