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    Obama condemns Trump’s $2.3bn Harvard funding freeze as ‘unlawful and ham-handed’ – US politics live

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    Good morning and welcome to our US politics blog.Former US president Barack Obama has condemned the education department for freezing $2.3bn in federal funds to Harvard University after the elite college rejected a list of demands from the White House.In some of his most vocal criticism of this Trump administration, Obama praised Harvard, the country’s oldest university, for setting an example for other higher education institutions to reject federal overreach into its governance practices.He wrote in a post on X:
    Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions – rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. Let’s hope other institutions follow suit.
    His comments came after Harvard decided to fight the White House’s demands that it crack down on alleged antisemitism and civil rights violations. It is the first major US university to defy pressure from the White House to change its policies.In a letter to Harvard on Friday, the administration called for broad government and leadership reforms, a requirement that Harvard institute what it calls “merit-based” admissions and hiring policies as well as conduct an audit of the study body, faculty and leadership on their views about diversity.The demands, which are an update from an earlier letter, also call for a ban on face masks, which appeared to target pro-Palestinian protesters; close its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which it says teach students and staff “to make snap judgments about each other based on crude race and identity stereotypes”; and pressured the university to stop recognizing or funding “any student group or club that endorses or promotes criminal activity, illegal violence, or illegal harassment”.The administration also demanded that Harvard cooperate with federal immigration authorities.Harvard’s president said in a letter that the university would not comply with the Trump administration’s demands to dismantle its diversity programming and to limit student protests in exchange for its federal funding.“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Alan Garber, the university president, wrote, adding that Harvard had taken extensive reforms to address antisemitism.The department of education announced in March that it had opened an investigation into 60 colleges and universities for alleged “anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination”. It came after protests against Israel’s war on Gaza were put on across campuses last year, demonstrations that many Republicans framed as antisemitic.Harvard’s response to the White House’s demands was in sharp contrast to the approach taken by Columbia University, the epicentre of last year’s protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza.The Trump administration cut $400m in grants to the private New York school, accusing it of failing to protect Jewish students from harassment. The school caved in to demands and responded by agreeing to reform student disciplinary procedures and hiring 36 officers to expand its security team.Stay with us throughout the day as we have more reaction to this story and many others.Hugo Lowell is a reporter in the Washington bureau of the Guardian covering Donald Trump and the Justice DepartmentThe Trump administration on Monday misrepresented a US supreme court decision that compelled it to return a man wrongly deported to El Salvador, using tortured readings of the order to justify taking no actions to secure his release.The supreme court last week unanimously ordered the administration to “facilitate” the release of Kilmar Abrego García, who was supposed to have been protected from deportation to El Salvador regardless of whether he was a member of the MS-13 gang.But at an Oval Office meeting between Trump and El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, Trump deferred to officials who gave extraordinary readings of the supreme court order and claimed the US was powerless to return Abrego García to US soil.“The ruling solely stated that if this individual at El Salvador’s sole discretion was sent back to our country, we could deport him a second time,” said Trump’s policy chief Stephen Miller, about an order that, in fact, upheld a lower court’s directive to return Abrego García…The remarks at the Oval Office meeting marked an escalation in the Trump administration’s attempts to claim uncertainty with court orders to avoid having to take actions it dislikes. In Abrego García’s case, officials appeared to manufacture uncertainty in particularly blatant fashion.And the fact that the US is paying El Salvador to detain deportees it sends to the notorious Cecot prison undercut the notion that the administration lacked the power to return Abrego García into US custody.The case started when Abrego García was detained by police in 2019 in Maryland, outside a Home Depot, with several other men, and asked about a murder. He denied knowledge of a crime and repeatedly denied that he was part of a gang.Abrego García was subsequently put in immigration proceedings, where officials argued they believed he was part of the MS-13 gang in New York based on his Chicago Bulls gear and on the word of a confidential informant.The case went before a US immigration judge, who suggested that Abrego García could be a member of MS-13 and agreed to a deportation order but shielded him from being sent to El Salvador because he was likely to face persecution there by a local gang.The Trump administration did not appeal against that decision, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement has since said in a court filing that Abrego García’s deportation to El Salvador was an “administrative error”. The supreme court also called his removal illegal.You can read the full story here:One of China’s lead officials overseeing Hong Kong has condemned punitive US tariffs on China as “shameless” and attacked American “hillbillies” amid a continuing trade war between Beijing and Washington that has caused turmoil in global markets.Xia Baolong, director of the Hong Kong and Macao Work Office, said Hong Kong has never levied taxes on imports and that the US enjoyed a $272 bn trade surplus in the city over the past decade.US President Donald Trump has increased the levies imposed on China to 145%, while Beijing has set a retaliatory 125 percent toll on American imports – a move not followed by Hong Kong.Imposing tariffs on the city is “hegemonic and shameless in the extreme”, and shows that the US does not want Hong Kong to thrive, Baolong said in a pre-recorded speech at an event to mark the 10th iteration of China’s annual national security education day.He said the US “is the greatest culprit in undermining Hong Kong’s human rights, freedom, rule of law, prosperity and stability.”“It is not after our tariffs – it wants to take our lives,” Baolong was quoted as saying.He added that the sweeping US tariffs would not shake the determination of Beijing and Hong Kong governments and that “victory must belong to the great Chinese people”.“Let those American ’hillbillies’ wail before the 5,000-year-old civilisation of the Chinese nation” he said, adding that anyone seeking to bring China into poverty was an “enemy”.Hong Kong is a former British colony that became a special administrative region of China in 1997. In theory, it is governed under a system known as “one country, two systems”, a constitutional arrangement that promised Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy and rights protections.But it is widely seen to have reneged on the deal, crushing pro-democracy protests and imposing a national security law in 2020 – targeting secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces – which has in effect silenced opposition voices among Hong Kong’s once-vibrant civil society.Hong Kong is subject to the high US tariffs imposed on China as it is no longer considered a separate trading entity by Washington so means is not entitled to favourable trading terms anymore. Trump ended Hong Kong’s preferential trade status following China’s security crackdown on Hong Kong in 2020.As my colleague Martin Belam reports in our UK politics live blog, JD Vance has said the US is optimistic it can negotiate a “great” trade deal with the UK.In an interview with online outlet Unherd, the US vice president told Sohrab Ahmari:
    We’re certainly working very hard with Keir Starmer’s government. The president really loves the UK. He loved the queen. He admires and loves the king. It is a very important relationship. And he’s a businessman and has a number of important business relationships in [the UK].
    But I think it’s much deeper than that. There’s a real cultural affinity. And of course, fundamentally America is an Anglo country. I think there’s a good chance that, yes, we’ll come to a great agreement that’s in the best interest of both countries.
    Unlike China, Britain was spared the most punitive treatment in Trump’s initial tariff announcement on 2 April, but British imports in the US still incur a 10% charge while its steel and car sectors incur a rate of 25%.The UK government has been hopeful of a deal to exempt the UK from Trump’s tariffs.The UK’s chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will aim to continue negotiations for an economic deal with the US later this month when she travels to Washington to attend the International Monetary Fund’s spring meetings with other finance ministers. You can read more about Vance’s comments today in this article by my colleague Rachel Hall.South Korea has announced plans to invest an additional $4.9bn in the country’s semiconductor industry, citing “growing uncertainty” over US tariffs.“An aggressive fiscal investment plan has been devised to help local firms navigate mounting challenges in the global semiconductor race,” the finance ministry said.“To foster a dynamic, private sector-led ecosystem for semiconductor innovation and growth, the government will increase its investment in the sector from 26 trillion won ($18.2bn) to 33 trillion won,” the ministry added.Semiconductors are tiny chips that power just about everything, including computers, mobile phones and cars. They are central to the global economy. The UK, the US, Europe and China rely heavily on Taiwan for semiconductors.But South Korea – Asia’s fourth largest economy – is also a major exporter to the US and concerns about the semiconductor sector have hit the Seoul-listed shares of the world’s largest memory chip maker Samsung, and largest memory chip supplier SK Hynix.The statement of extra investment from South Korea’s finance ministry comes after the Trump administration launched investigations into imports of pharmaceuticals and semiconductors on national security grounds.These industries – so far exempt from the 10% US import charges that began on 5 April – may face tariffs after the probes are complete.US President Donald Trump has directed the US commerce department to conduct a three-week investigation into the imports, during which time public comments on the issue will be heard before a decision is made.Trump said on Sunday he would be announcing a tariff rate on imported semiconductors over the next week, adding that there would be flexibility with some companies in the sector.On 2 April, Trump announced sweeping tariffs on global trading partners, including the 25 percent on South Korean goods, before backtracking and suspending their implementation for 90 days.Even so, “duties targeting specific sectors such as semiconductors and pharmaceuticals, remain on the horizon”, finance minister Choi Sang-mok said during a meeting.“This grace period offers a crucial window to strengthen the competitiveness of South Korean companies amid intensifying global trade tensions,” he added.Good morning and welcome to our US politics blog.Former US president Barack Obama has condemned the education department for freezing $2.3bn in federal funds to Harvard University after the elite college rejected a list of demands from the White House.In some of his most vocal criticism of this Trump administration, Obama praised Harvard, the country’s oldest university, for setting an example for other higher education institutions to reject federal overreach into its governance practices.He wrote in a post on X:
    Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions – rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. Let’s hope other institutions follow suit.
    His comments came after Harvard decided to fight the White House’s demands that it crack down on alleged antisemitism and civil rights violations. It is the first major US university to defy pressure from the White House to change its policies.In a letter to Harvard on Friday, the administration called for broad government and leadership reforms, a requirement that Harvard institute what it calls “merit-based” admissions and hiring policies as well as conduct an audit of the study body, faculty and leadership on their views about diversity.The demands, which are an update from an earlier letter, also call for a ban on face masks, which appeared to target pro-Palestinian protesters; close its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which it says teach students and staff “to make snap judgments about each other based on crude race and identity stereotypes”; and pressured the university to stop recognizing or funding “any student group or club that endorses or promotes criminal activity, illegal violence, or illegal harassment”.The administration also demanded that Harvard cooperate with federal immigration authorities.Harvard’s president said in a letter that the university would not comply with the Trump administration’s demands to dismantle its diversity programming and to limit student protests in exchange for its federal funding.“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Alan Garber, the university president, wrote, adding that Harvard had taken extensive reforms to address antisemitism.The department of education announced in March that it had opened an investigation into 60 colleges and universities for alleged “anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination”. It came after protests against Israel’s war on Gaza were put on across campuses last year, demonstrations that many Republicans framed as antisemitic.Harvard’s response to the White House’s demands was in sharp contrast to the approach taken by Columbia University, the epicentre of last year’s protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza.The Trump administration cut $400m in grants to the private New York school, accusing it of failing to protect Jewish students from harassment. The school caved in to demands and responded by agreeing to reform student disciplinary procedures and hiring 36 officers to expand its security team.Stay with us throughout the day as we have more reaction to this story and many others. More

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      Trump officials cut billions in Harvard funds after university defies demands

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      The US education department is freezing about $2.3bn in federal funds to Harvard University, the agency said on Monday.The announcement comes as the Ivy League school has decided to fight the White House’s demands that it crack down on antisemitism and alleged civil rights violations, including shutting down diversity, equity and inclusion programs.“Harvard’s statement today reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges – that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws,” said a member of a department taskforce on combating antisemitism in a statement.The education department taskforce on combating antisemitism said in a statement it was freezing $2.2bn in grants and $60m in multi-year contract value to Harvard.In a letter to Harvard on Friday, the administration called for broad government and leadership reforms, a requirement that Harvard institute what it calls “merit-based” admissions and hiring policies as well as conduct an audit of the study body, faculty and leadership on their views about diversity.The demands, which are an update from an earlier letter, also call for a ban on face masks, which appeared to target pro-Palestinian protesters; close its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which it says teach students and staff “to make snap judgments about each other based on crude race and identity stereotypes”; and pressured the university to stop recognizing or funding “any student group or club that endorses or promotes criminal activity, illegal violence, or illegal harassment”.The administration also demanded that Harvard cooperate with federal immigration authorities.Harvard’s president said in a letter that the university would not comply with the Trump administration’s demands to dismantle its diversity programming and to limit student protests in exchange for its federal funding.“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Alan Garber, the university president, wrote, adding that Harvard had taken extensive reforms to address antisemitism.Garber said the government’s demands were a political ploy.“It makes clear that the intention is not to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner,” he wrote. “Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard.”On Monday, Barack Obama posted in support of the university: “Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions – rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. Let’s hope other institutions follow suit.”The demands from the Trump administration prompted a group of alumni to write to university leaders calling for it to “legally contest and refuse to comply with unlawful demands that threaten academic freedom and university self-governance”.“Harvard stood up today for the integrity, values, and freedoms that serve as the foundation of higher education,” said Anurima Bhargava, one of the alumni behind the letter. “Harvard reminded the world that learning, innovation and transformative growth will not yield to bullying and authoritarian whims.”It also sparked a protest over the weekend from members of the Harvard community and from residents of Cambridge and a lawsuit from the American Association of University Professors on Friday challenging the cuts.In their lawsuit, plaintiffs argue that the Trump administration has failed to follow steps required under Title VI before it starts cutting funds, and giving notice of the cuts to both the university and Congress.“These sweeping yet indeterminate demands are not remedies targeting the causes of any determination of noncompliance with federal law. Instead, they overtly seek to impose on Harvard University political views and policy preferences advanced by the Trump administration and commit the university to punishing disfavored speech,” plaintiffs wrote.Edward Helmore contributed to this report More

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      Harvard’s Decision to Resist Trump is ‘of Momentous Significance’

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      But a fight with the nation’s oldest, richest and most elite university is a battle that President Trump and his powerful aide, Stephen Miller, want to have.Harvard University is 140 years older than the United States, has an endowment greater than the G.D.P. of nearly 100 countries and has educated eight American presidents. So if an institution was going to stand up to the Trump administration’s war on academia, Harvard would be at the top of the list.Harvard did that forcefully on Monday in a way that injected energy into other universities across the country fearful of the president’s wrath, rejecting the Trump administration’s demands on hiring, admissions and curriculum. Some commentators went so far as to say that Harvard’s decision would empower law firms, the courts, the media and other targets of the White House to push back as well.“This is of momentous, momentous significance,” said J. Michael Luttig, a prominent former federal appeals court judge revered by many conservatives. “This should be the turning point in the president’s rampage against American institutions.”Michael S. Roth, who is the president of Wesleyan University and a rare critic of the White House among university administrators, welcomed Harvard’s decision. “What happens when institutions overreach is that they change course when they meet resistance,” he said. “It’s like when a bully is stopped in his tracks.”Within hours of Harvard’s decision, federal officials said they would freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to the university, along with a $60 million contract.That is a fraction of the $9 billion in federal funding that Harvard receives, with $7 billion going to the university’s 11 affiliated hospitals in Boston and Cambridge, Mass., including Massachusetts General, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The remaining $2 billion goes to research grants directly for Harvard, including for space exploration, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and tuberculosis.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harvard says it will not ‘yield’ to Trump demands over $9bn in funding cuts

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      Harvard University said on Monday that it will not comply with a new list of demands from the Trump administration issued last week that the government says are designed to crack down on antisemitism and alleged civil rights violations at elite academic institutions.In a message to the Harvard community, the university president, Alan Garber, vowed that the school would not yield to the government’s pressure campaign. “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Garber said.The Trump administration said it would review $9bn of federal grants and contracts, including Harvard’s research hospitals, as part of its effort to “root out antisemitism”.In a letter last week from the government’s antisemitism taskforce, the university was accused of having “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment”.The Trump administration has also demanded that Harvard ban face masks and close its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which it says teach students and staff “to make snap judgments about each other based on crude race and identity stereotypes”. The administration also demanded that Harvard cooperate with federal immigration authorities.The administration further asked Harvard to reform its admissions process for international students to screen for students “supportive of terrorism and anti-Semitism” – and to report international students to federal authorities if they break university conduct policies.University faculties are also under the government’s microscope as it has called for “reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship”.Harvard’s announced resistance to the administration’s demands comes as Trump’s federal government pits itself against several Ivy League universities over intellectual and political freedoms. The dispute has been playing out in the courts over efforts by the administration to deport several postgraduate students holding provisional citizenship or student visas over pro-Palestinian demonstrations that the government alleges were shows of support for terrorism.On Friday, a federal judge in Louisiana ruled that the Columbia University graduate student and Palestinian organizer Mahmoud Khalil, 30, can be deported despite having been granted legal permanent residence in the US. The government contended that Khalil’s presence in the US posed “potentially serious foreign policy consequences”, satisfying requirements for deportation, according to the judge.After that ruling, Khalil’s immigration attorney Marc Van Der Hout told the court that his client would appeal.The letter from Harvard’s president said the university would not comply with the Trump administration’s demands to dismantle its diversity programming and to limit student protests in exchange for its federal funding.“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Garber wrote in the message.Garber said the government’s demands were a political ploy.“It makes clear that the intention is not to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner,” he wrote. “Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard.”The new approach by the university, which sits on an endowment valued at over $52bn, comes in contrast to Columbia University. Columbia, which holds an endowment of $14bn, largely acceded to the administration demands after it was threatened with $400m in federal funding cuts.But Jewish advocacy groups are divided on the administration’s efforts. Some say they are an innovative and muscular way to combat what they see as campus antisemitism. Others maintain that the government is weaponizing antisemitism to pursue wider intellectual crackdowns.“The gun to the head and shutting down all science seems like a counterproductive way to handle the particular problems of antisemitism,” Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychology professor, told the Boston Globe earlier in April. More

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      Inside Trump’s Pressure Campaign on Universities

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      As he finished lunch in the private dining room outside the Oval Office on April 1, President Trump floated an astounding proposal: What if the government simply canceled every dollar of the nearly $9 billion promised to Harvard University?The administration’s campaign to expunge “woke” ideology from college campuses had already forced Columbia University to strike a deal. Now, the White House was eyeing the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university.“What if we never pay them?” Mr. Trump casually asked, according to a person familiar with the conversation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussion. “Wouldn’t that be cool?”The moment underscored the aggressive, ad hoc approach continuing to shape one of the new administration’s most consequential policies.Mr. Trump and his top aides are exerting control of huge sums of federal research money to shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system, which they see as hostile to conservatives and intent on perpetuating liberalism.Their effort was energized by the campus protests against Israel’s response to the October 2023 terrorist attack by Hamas, demonstrations during which Jewish students were sometimes harassed. Soon after taking office, Mr. Trump opened the Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, which is scrutinizing leading universities for potential civil rights violations and serving as an entry point to pressure schools to reassess their policies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harvard Professors Sue Trump Administration Over Threat to Federal Funds

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      Two groups representing Harvard professors sued the Trump administration on Friday, saying that its threat to cut billions in federal funding for the university violates free speech and other First Amendment rights.The lawsuit by the American Association of University Professors and the Harvard faculty chapter of the group follows the Trump administration’s announcement earlier this month that it was reviewing about $9 billion in federal funding that Harvard receives. The administration also sent the school a list of demands that it must meet if it wants to keep the funds.The suit, filed in the Federal District Court in Massachusetts, seeks a temporary restraining order to block the Trump administration from cutting the funds.“This action challenges the Trump administration’s unlawful and unprecedented misuse of federal funding and civil rights enforcement authority to undermine academic freedom and free speech on a university campus,” the lawsuit said.The White House did not respond immediately to a request for comment.The Trump administration has been on a campaign against elite universities that it views as being too lax on antisemitism. In a recent letter to Harvard, the administration said the school had “fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence.” Other top schools like Columbia and Cornell have also been targeted.Harvard did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday. In recent weeks, Alan Garber, the university president, has said that Harvard had spent “considerable effort” during the past 15 months addressing antisemitism, adding that there was still more work to be done.In a statement, Andrew Manuel Crespo, a law professor at Harvard and general counsel of the AAUP-Harvard Faculty Chapter, said the administration’s policies are a pretext to chill universities and their faculties from engaging in speech, teaching and research that don’t align with President Trump’s views.“Harvard faculty have the constitutional right to speak, teach and conduct research without fearing that the government will retaliate against their viewpoints by canceling grants,” Mr. Crespo said.On Saturday afternoon, hundreds of protesters, including students, professors and even the mayor of Cambridge, braved the cold to protest against the Trump administration’s threat to cut Harvard’s funding. At a packed park in Cambridge, Mass., home to Harvard’s campus, they called on the university to lead the charge against the government’s crackdown on higher education.“Harvard possesses not just the resources to withstand the pressure,” said Mayor Denise Simmons of Cambridge, “but the moral obligation to do so.”Miles J. Herszenhorn contributed reporting from Cambridge, Mass. More

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      She Worked in a Harvard Lab to Reverse Aging, Until ICE Jailed Her

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      A barracks-style detention center in Louisiana is jammed with around 90 immigrant women, mostly undocumented workers from central and South America, sharing five toilets and following orders shouted by guards.There is also, among them, a Russian scientist.She is 30 years old, shy and prone to nervous laughter. She cannot work, because her laptop was confiscated. She plays chess with other women when the guards allow it. Otherwise, she passes the time reading books about evolution and cell development.For nearly eight weeks, Kseniia Petrova has been captive to the hard-line immigration policies of the Trump administration. A graduate of a renowned Russian physics and technology institute, Ms. Petrova was recruited to work at a laboratory at Harvard Medical School. She was part of a team investigating how cells can rejuvenate themselves, with the goal of fending off the damage of aging.On Feb. 16, customs officials detained her at Logan International Airport in Boston for failing to declare samples of frog embryos she had carried from France at the request of her boss at Harvard. Such an infraction is normally considered minor, punishable with a fine of up to $500. Instead, the customs official canceled Ms. Petrova’s visa on the spot and began deportation proceedings. Then Ms. Petrova told her that she had fled Russia for political reasons and faced arrest if she returned there.This is how she wound up at the Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, La., waiting for the U.S. government to decide what to do with her.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Obama Calls for Universities to Stand Up to Trump Administration Threats

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      Former President Barack Obama urged universities to resist attacks from the federal government that violate their academic freedom in a campus speech on Thursday.He also said schools and students should engage in self-reflection about speech environments on their campuses.“If you are a university, you may have to figure out, are we in fact doing things right?,” he said during a conversation at Hamilton College in upstate New York. “Have we in fact violated our own values, our own code, violated the law in some fashion?”“If not, and you’re just being intimidated, well, you should be able to say, that’s why we got this big endowment.”Mr. Obama’s comments came as the Trump administration has threatened universities with major cuts. It took away $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia University in March. It later suspended $175 million to the University of Pennsylvania, and said this week that it was reviewing about $9 billion in arrangements with Harvard and its affiliates.At Harvard, where the university has made efforts to respond to Republican criticism and concerns from Jewish students and faculty, more than 800 faculty members have signed a letter urging their leadership to more forcefully resist the administration and defend higher education more broadly. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harvard faculty organize amid anxiety university will capitulate to Trump

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      The day after the Trump administration announced a review of $9bn in federal contracts and grants with Harvard University due to what it claimed was the university’s failure to combat antisemitism on campus, the university’s president, Alan Garber, sent an email to the Harvard community titled: Our resolve.“When we saw the Garber statement’s subject line, everybody thought: ‘Oh, great, Harvard’s going to stand up!” said Jane Sujen Bock, a board member of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard, a group of alumni founded in 2016 amid a legal battle over affirmative action.But the actual body of the message indicated no such thing. In the email, Garber briefly touted academic freedom while pledging to “engage” with the administration to “combat antisemitism”, which he said he had experienced directly, and listed a series of measures the university had already taken. “We still have much work to do,” he wrote. He offered no detail about what Harvard would do to protect its independence from the Trump administration.It was “a statement of abdication”, said Kirsten Weld, a history professor and the president of the Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors, a national group advocating for faculty. “It basically says: ‘Yes, we have been bad and we deserve to be punished.’”The email, along with a string of actions recently taken by Harvard against academic programmes, faculty and student groups who have been accused of being pro-Palestinian, have fueled anxieties throughout US campuses that the Ivy League school will be following in the footsteps of Columbia University, which recently bowed to a string of demands from the Trump administration in an effort to retain federal funding.On Thursday, the Trump administration wrote in a letter to Harvard that federal funding would be conditional on the university banning diversity and inclusion initiatives, restricting protests on campus, cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security, reviewing its academic programs “to address bias”, and installing leaders to implement the president’s demands.Dozens more universities are under investigation for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students from pro-Palestinian protests, with Brown University on Thursday becoming the latest to face the risk of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. They are all paying close attention to how Harvard and others weigh the financial costs of standing up to Donald Trump against the moral and academic costs that come with appeasing him.‘We have to be willing to stand up’Some signs of more muscular pushback are starting to emerge.On Tuesday, in response to the administration’s announcement that it would suspend $210m in funding to Princeton University, its president, Christopher Eisgruber, indicated that he had no intention of making concessions to the administration. At Harvard, the student newspaper reported that Rakesh Khurana, the dean of Harvard College, drew applause from his colleagues on Tuesday when he accused the Trump administration of weaponising concerns about campus antisemitism to justify its ongoing attacks against higher education. (Eisgruber and Khurana did not respond to requests for comment; several Harvard faculty only agreed to speak off the record, citing a repressive climate.)View image in fullscreenKhurana’s comments followed days of upheaval at Harvard, after 600 members of the faculty signed a letter calling on the university to publicly condemn the US president’s attacks and “legally contest and refuse to comply with unlawful demands”. The Harvard Academic Workers union, which represents non-tenure-track researchers and lecturers, wrote in a statement on Wednesday: “The Trump’s administration attack on Harvard has nothing to do with antisemitism” and called on the university to “resist this intimidation with us”.So far, Eisgruber and Christina Paxson, Brown’s president, have signaled they may take a different path and resist.“University presidents and leaders have to understand that the commitment to allow academics – including our faculty, including our students – to pursue the truth as best they see it is fundamental to what our universities do,” Eisgruber said in an interview with Bloomberg this week. “We have to be willing to stand up for that.”Brown has not announced how it plans to respond to threats it will lose more than $500m in funding, but last month, Paxson outlined how the university would respond to federal attacks on its academic freedom. “I know that many in our community have been gravely concerned about persistent media reports of some of our peers experiencing encroachments on their freedom of expression and the autonomy necessary to advance their mission, she wrote. “If Brown faced such actions directly impacting our ability to perform essential academic and operational functions, we would be compelled to vigorously exercise our legal rights to defend these freedoms.”Faculty across the country have also begun to organize. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has filed three lawsuits: over the funding cuts at Columbia, the targeting of international students by immigration authorities, and Trump’s efforts to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programmes on campuses. Meanwhile, faculty at Rutgers University have proposed a “mutual defence compact” within the “Big Ten” consortium, which includes some of the largest state universities in the country, to support one another in the face of political attacks.“The attacks that are coming from the federal government might be directed toward Columbia University last week, and Harvard University this week, and who knows which other university next week, but if we allow them to proceed, then we will be picked off one by one,” said Weld. “The only way forward for any individual institution in the higher-education sector right now is to join forces.”‘We have our voices’Harvard had tried to get ahead of the administration’s attack. The university was one of the first to come under scrutiny following 7 October 2023 and protests over Israel’s war in Gaza. Allegations that it had failed to address antisemitism on campus contributed, in part, to last year’s resignation of Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black president.This year, Harvard adopted a controversial definition of antisemitism in a legal settlement over complaints brought by Jewish students. In the days leading up to Trump’s threats, it forced out two leaders of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and suspended a public health partnership with Birzeit University, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. This week, the university also suspended a “religion, conflict and peace initiative” at the divinity school that the Jewish Alumni Association had accused of focussing “entirely on the Palestinians”, and banned the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee from hosting events on campus.View image in fullscreenBut if the repression of programmes targeting spaces sympathetic to Palestinians was meant to appease the Trump administration and avert threats of funding cuts, it didn’t work.A fraction of Harvard’s $53bn endowment – the world’s largest for a university – is liquid or free of restrictions, but several faculty said that this is the time for the university to tap into it to defend its core values. While the administration’s cuts threaten hundreds of jobs on campus, Harvard is uniquely placed to withstand the impact, they say.“We’re constantly told that the endowment is not a piggy bank, it’s not a slush fund, and that we need to protect it because it ensures the success of our initiatives over the long term and for future generations,” Maya Jasanoff, a history professor at Harvard, said. “But if we lose the independence of universities from political interference, then we’re sacrificing something for future generations that is truly priceless.”Others noted that Harvard is also in a position to forcefully defend itself in court, much like it did when affirmative action came under attack, although the US supreme court ultimately ruled against the university in that case.So far, the university administration hasn’t shown signs it will put up a fight. Several faculty members believe that Trump’s efforts have the tacit support of some university leaders and trustees.“There is a strategic alliance among segments of the professoriate and university administrations, particularly boards of trustees, who agree that pro-Palestine activism on US college campuses needs to be shut down,” said Weld. “Whether those voices understand what the collateral damage of their participation in that alliance is going to be, I don’t know.”Harvard faculty in recent months have ramped up organizing efforts, including by launching the AAUP chapter on the heels of the Gaza encampment last spring and the university’s response.“One of the perversely brighter things to come out of last year is that I saw the faculty organizing and working together to an extent that outstripped anything I had seen in my academic career,” said Jasanoff. “We have our voices, and we can use our voices together.” More