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Trump sent ‘explicit’ threat to cut funds from University of Virginia, senator says

by Evelyn Reynolds 29 June 2025, 20:16

The University of Virginia (UVA) received “explicit” notification from the Trump administration that the school would endure cuts to university jobs, research funding and student aid as well as visas if the institution’s president, Jim Ryan, did not resign, according to a US senator.During an interview Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation, Mark Warner, a Democratic senator for Virginia, defended Ryan – who had championed diversity policies that the president opposes – and predicted that Donald Trump will similarly target other universities.Warner said he understood that the former UVA president was told that if he “tried to fight back, hundreds of employees would lose jobs, researchers would lose funding, and hundreds of students could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld”.“There was indication that they received the letter that if he didn’t resign on a day last week, by 5 o’clock, all these cuts would take place,” Warner added. He also said he believes this to be the “most outrageous action” that the Trump administration has taken on education since it retook office in January.Ryan resigned from his position as UVA president on Friday. He was facing political pressure from Washington to step aside in order to resolve a justice department investigation into UVA’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, the New York Times reported on the same day.“I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job,” Ryan said in his resignation message to the university community. He expressed an unwillingness to risk the employment of other staff, as well as cuts to funding and financial aid for students.Ryan had a reputation for trying to make the UVA campus more diverse and encouraging students to perform community service. He had served as the university’s president since 2018.Warner criticized the administration for what he said was its overreach in education. He said federal education and justice department officials “should get their nose out of [the] University of Virginia”.“They are doing damage to our flagship university,” he remarked. “And if they can do it here, they’ll do it elsewhere.”He referred to Trump’s ongoing battles with Harvard, the US’s oldest university, including the president’s signing a proclamation to restrict foreign student visas and continued threats to cut funding over its DEI policies.“They all want to make them like Harvard,” Warner said. “End of the day, this is going to hurt our universities, chase away that world-class talent.“And, frankly, if we don’t have some level of academic freedom, then what kind of country are we?” More

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University of Virginia president resigns under pressure from White House over DEI programs
by Evelyn Reynolds 27 June 2025, 20:26
The president of the University of Virginia (UVA) has resigned from his position after coming under pressure from the Trump administration over diversity efforts.James Ryan was facing political pressure from Washington to step aside in order to resolve a justice department investigation into UVA’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing three people briefed on the matter.Ryan had a reputation for trying to make the UVA campus more diverse and encouraging students to perform community service.“I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job,” Ryan said in a message to the university reviewed by the Guardian.He added: “To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.“This was an excruciatingly difficult decision, and I am heartbroken to be leaving this way.”The apparent campaign against a prominent public sector university in the US follows Donald Trump’s agenda since returning to the White House to cancel programs and policies aimed at greater diversity, equity and inclusion in government, workplaces, and various establishments and organizations across American society.In parallel, the US president set about attacking and taking funds from elite private sector universities, with Harvard at the forefront, in an assault on the academic and research independence of higher education more broadly.The New York Times first reported late on Thursday that the justice department had demanded that Ryan step down as part of an agreement to settle a civil rights investigation into the school’s diversity practices, as Trump further erodes the government agency’s distance from the White House by enlisting its investigative powers as part of his political agenda.Ryan said in a letter, briefed to the Times by a source, that he was going to step down next year but “given the circumstances and today’s conversations” he had decided “with deep sadness” to resign now.The justice department had reportedly told UVA that the government thought it was prioritizing race-based factors during its admissions process and other aspects of student life in a way that constitutes “widespread practices throughout every component and facet of the institution”.Ryan’s removal is another example of the Trump administration using “thuggery instead of rational discourse,” Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, which represents university presidents, told the Associated Press.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is a dark day for the University of Virginia, a dark day for higher education, and it promises more of the same,” Mitchell said. “It’s clear the administration is not done and will use every tool that it can make or invent to exert its will over higher education.”In a joint statement, Virginia’s Democratic senators said it was outrageous that the Trump administration would demand Ryan’s resignation over “‘culture war’ traps.” “This is a mistake that hurts Virginia’s future,” Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine said.UVA is located in Charlottesville, and found itself in the global headlines early on in the first Trump administration when, in August 2017, hundreds of far-right demonstrators wielding torches and shouting racist slogans marched on to the historic campus ahead of a so-called Unite the Right rally in the small city, crowding towards a smaller group of counterprotesters.The subsequent rally, to try to prevent the removal of Confederate statues from a park, was massive and became very violent as neo-Nazi groups gathered and attacked counterprotesters, then later a white supremacist drove a car into such a group and killed a woman.Trump sparked uproar by blaming both sides for the violence, on the one hand and, on the other, saying: “You had people that were very fine people on both sides.”The Associated Press contributed reporting More
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‘No way to invest in a career here’: US academics flee overseas to avoid Trump crackdown
by Evelyn Reynolds 15 June 2025, 11:00
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View image in fullscreenEric Schuster was over the moon when he landed a lab assistant position in a coral reef biology lab at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (SIO). The 23-year-old had recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in nanoengineering from the University of California, San Diego, into a fiercely competitive job market. He felt like he’d struck gold.But the relentless cuts to scientific research and attacks on higher education by the Trump administration have turned what felt like a promising academic future into unstable ground.“There are several labs, both at our institution and around the US, that have essentially just sent everyone home because they have no money,” Schuster said, expressing concern not just for oceanography but for all fields of scientific research. The multi-pronged attacks have “been seriously detrimental to just about everyone”, he said.Though Schuster is grateful for his position, he is in a constant state of worry about whether it will still exist tomorrow. UCSD, which SIO is a part of, told the Guardian that the Trump administration has ended or frozen roughly $90m in grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Nearly 200 other grants are facing delays. SIO researchers have noted that the “vast majority” of their funding comes from the government.Schuster has decided he’s not going to stick around to see if he will lose his job.View image in fullscreenHe’ll be starting his graduate studies this fall in France with a European University Networks (EUN) program, a transnational alliance of higher education institutions. He plans to stay outside of the US after to continue his career.“It’s a grab bag that anyone you’re talking to has had decreased funding, or lost almost all of their funding, or is having trouble continuing their funding,” he says.“That, along with the pretty pervasive and growing anti-science establishment narrative … have been strong motivators to look elsewhere,” Schuster said.Schuster is one of many budding academics reflecting what could become a significant American brain drain, sending the brightest minds in the country to flee the US and take their scholarly endeavors elsewhere. Historically, the US has attracted top talent from around the world, but the moves by the Trump administration may have reversed these conditions in record time.Research institutions are feeling the strain from funding cuts from some of the biggest grant-making bodies in the world. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funds about 25% of federally backed basic research at US universities, but Trump’s proposed budget would cut over $5bn, or 57%, from its budget, chopping it from roughly $9bn down to $3.9bn. The US National Institutes of Health would lose about 40% of its budget compared to last year.But those cuts aren’t the only cause for anxiety. Nerves throughout the scholarly community are also on edge given what is widely perceived as a historic attack on academic freedom through administration assaults against universities such Columbia and Harvard University under the guise of rooting out antisemitism and diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Dozens more universities are waiting for their turn.‘The situation is just too volatile’A recent Nature survey revealed that approximately 75% of US-based scientists are contemplating relocation, with early-career researchers and PhD students particularly inclined toward opportunities in Canada, Europe and Australia.Valerio Francioni is one of them. A 32-year-old Italian citizen who moved to the US after getting his PhD at the University of Edinburgh, Francioni is now a postdoctoral research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying neuroscience.International students have faced nonstop chaos in the past few months, from visa suspensions to the attempted deportations of several students who expressed support for Palestinians. Last month, the Trump administration ordered US embassies worldwide to immediately stop scheduling visa interviews for foreign students as it prepares to implement comprehensive “social media screenings” for all international applicants.View image in fullscreen“As an international, there’s just no way that you can invest safely into a career here right now, there’s just no way to plan ahead. The situation is just too volatile to feel that you’re making a safe investment by being here,” Francioni said.A recent report from the Economist suggests that international students (and some domestic) are losing interest in American PhD programs. Searches for US PhD programs on the website FindAPhD fell 40% year on year in April, while interest from students in Europe has fallen by 50%. Data from another website, Studyportals, shows a decrease in interest for domestic PhDs among Americans, and a rise in interest for international programs compared to the previous year.Though his own visa has not been affected yet, Francioni plans to leave the US once his run at MIT is finished. He had wanted to stay in Boston – it’s a great place for people in the neurotech field, he says, and his American partner is there. But his calculus has changed in the past few months.Kristina, originally from Sweden, is grappling with the same questions. A mathematics professor at a university in the north-east US, Kristina requested that only her first name be used and her institution not be named over concerns of retaliation by the Trump administration.“Right now, I think that everyone who’s not a citizen feels that we cannot express our opinions,” Kristina said.She’s been in the US for 25 years, but does not have US citizenship. She is now debating whether to stay or leave. To her, the question is a moral one, whether to leave for safety or stay to “fight for a more democratic future”.View image in fullscreenEmmanuel Guerisoli, a French and Italian academic with a PhD in sociology and history, moved to the US in 2010 to pursue a masters in sociology. He is now finishing a postdoc at the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at the New School.Guerisoli is concerned about being targeted by Ice because of discussions he has led in class on the war in Gaza. He was offered a tenure-track position at a different institution, he said, but it was quickly rescinded, which he was told was due to the Trump administration’s funding cuts.He gave up on applying to academic jobs in the US and decided to move to Argentina this summer, where the dread of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents knocking down his door will not follow him every day.“It’s not just that you’re being questioned on your political beliefs, but any type of critical or academic engagement on certain topics that go beyond the realm of just politics are being targeted,” he said.“Even if the state department renews my visa, I would be concerned about teaching courses the way I have done it in the past,” he said.Filling the voidScholars at Risk, which assists academics facing political pressure, saw this coming.“The recent policies have created a tremendous amount of anxiety,” Robert Quinn, the group’s executive director, said. He worries the loss will have ripple effects far beyond campus.“When a big economic contributor gets disrupted, that’s going to begin to affect everybody relatively quickly in those communities,” Quinn said. “Beyond that is the effect on public health. If we look at the cutting of the research pipeline, that means fundamentally cutting off access to services and medicines and treatments that affect every American who happens to get sick.”Quinn says that Scholars at Risk is working on ways to support US academics exploring foreign opportunities.Several other countries are jumping in to fill the void, and have already begun courting American academics.The European Union has pledged €500m (around $556m) over the next two years to become a prime destination for displaced scientists. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, announced $113m for a national program to bring in American researchers, and Aix-Marseille University separately announced Safe Place for Science, a three-year, $16.8m program to attract 15 American scientists working in climate, health and astrophysics.A university spokesperson previously told the Guardian that more than 60 applications have been received, 30 of them coming within the first 24 hours.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, Denmark is fast-tracking 200 positions for American researchers. In a widely shared Instagram post, the head of the Danish chamber of commerce directly invited American scientists to consider Denmark, “a place where facts still matter”.Sweden’s education minister held a roundtable of university leaders to strategize on attracting frustrated US talent, and publicly called for American scientists to relocate.Canadian institutions are following a similar path. The University Health Network in Toronto and associated foundations are investing CA$30m ($21.5m) to bring in 100 early-career scientists from the US and beyond. Meanwhile, the University of British Columbia reopened graduate applications in April specifically to accommodate interested US students.Carter Freshour, a 22-year-old US citizen, had just begun his masters program in business at the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona when Trump took office.As soon as the attacks on higher education began, he dropped out of the program out of fear of the direction the country is heading. He is now in the process of moving to Madrid, where he will finish his business degree, and then plans to move to Portugal.“I don’t want to live in a country that does not abide by the laws that they have set in stone,” Freshour said. “It has deeply troubled me, the direction that the United States is going.” More
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Trump’s war on Harvard was decades in the making. This letter proves it | Bernard Harcourt
by Evelyn Reynolds 11 June 2025, 08:00
On the shelf in my library, I have an autographed copy of a book written by a former Republican congressman from New York, John LeBoutillier, titled Harvard Hates America: The Odyssey of a Born-Again American. It was published in 1978, two years before LeBoutillier was elected to Congress – and decades before the Trump administration’s assault on the institution. But its message is familiar in 2025.The book is a scathing criticism of Harvard University, in large part over its supposed left-leaning professors who allegedly indoctrinate their undergraduates. Its thrust is straightforward: Harvard is America’s problem.Today, the blueprint for Donald Trump’s attack on Harvard, Columbia and other liberal arts colleges and universities can be found in another text: Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, a guide to rightwing government reform published in April 2023 by the Heritage Foundation – over a year before any encampments went up on Columbia’s campus. But the Republican ambition to subjugate Harvard and Columbia traces further back, at least to the 1970s, when it became apparent that college-educated voters favored the Democratic party.My copy of Harvard Hates America is autographed and dedicated to two constituents. And I recently stumbled on something tucked into the fold: a letter that LeBoutillier enclosed to the recipients of his gift. On House of Representatives stationery, LeBoutillier wrote:
Long after I had graduated from Harvard and was a freshman member of Congress, I realized just how terrible some of the people educating our young are; they are not only liberals, but they use their “power” over their students to preach an anti-American leftist point of view. And this is not confined to Harvard. Indeed, this is a disease spreading throughout the academic world.
I believe that this politicalization of education threatens this country. And, coupled with a bias so obviously evident in the media, makes it difficult for we conservatives to get our message across.
Well, I’m going to continue to fight for our point of view and our principles.
Enjoy the book.
LeBoutillier was not alone in these sentiments. In a taped conversation with Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig Jr in the Oval Office on 14 December 1972, President Richard Nixon attacked university professors, claiming they were the enemy. His rhetoric was characteristically colorful: “The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”Conservatives like the journalist Irving Kristol, the philosopher Allan Bloom, and Ronald Reagan’s education secretary, William Bennett, would perpetuate the criticisms of supposedly left-leaning universities in the 1980s. And there is a straight line from those attacks in the 1970s and 80s to the Trump administration.View image in fullscreenIn a speech titled “The universities are the enemy” and delivered at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, on 2 November 2021, JD Vance declared: “I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Vance would then add, quoting Nixon: “There is a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said approximately 40 to 50 years ago. He said, and I quote, ‘The professors are the enemy.’”The Heritage Foundation picked up the baton in a 43-page chapter on education in the Project 2025 text. Remarkably, the Trump administration’s continuing assault on Harvard, Columbia and other universities is unfolding line-by-line, chapter and verse, from that script.So, right after a federal judge in Boston blocked the Department of Homeland Security from revoking Harvard University’s ability to enroll foreign students, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, announced that the administration intended to revoke the visas of Chinese students, especially those with ties to the Chinese Communist party. On page 355 of its Mandate for Leadership, Project 2025 calls for “Confronting the Chinese Communist Party’s Influence on Higher Education.”At a press conference in the Oval Office on 30 May 2025, Trump attacked Harvard and said he would redirect the school’s grants to vocational education. “I’d like to see the money go to trade schools,” Trump said. The remark, again, came straight out of the Project 2025 playbook, which states on pages 15-16 and 319 that the federal government should prioritize “trade schools” and “career schools” over the “woke-dominated system” of universities.The Trump administration demanded that Columbia’s Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies program be placed “under academic receivership”. Again, straight out of the playbook. Project 2025 calls on page 356 for “wind[ing] down so-called ‘area studies’ programs at universities”.Trump signed executive orders on inauguration day banning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and “gender ideology” at institutions such as universities that receive federal funding. Again, textbook material. Project 2025 argued on page 322, regarding educational institutions, that “enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory”.In fact, the first line of the chapter on education in Project 2025 says it all: “The federal Department of Education should be eliminated.”Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist behind the attack on critical race theory and gender studies, has openly described the Republican attack on universities as a “counter-revolution” planned well before the campus protests. The Republican offensive traces back at least to the rise of the Black Lives Matter and abolition movements in the wake of the police killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, George Floyd and others. “It’s a revolution against revolution,” Rufo admitted, adding: “I think that actually we are a counter-radical force in American life that, paradoxically, has to use what many see as radical techniques.”And what the Trump administration has accomplished with its ongoing assault on Harvard and Columbia is the “prototype” of that wider counter-revolution. Rufo is explicit about this. “If you take Columbia University as really the first trial of this strategy, we’ve seen an enormous payoff,” he said. “I’d like to see that prototype industrialized and applied to all of the universities as a sector.”Given this history tracing back to the 1970s, it is puzzling why people continue to believe that the Republicans are trying to reform the universities to address antisemitism. It should be clear that their actions are instead part of a decades-long effort to humble universities for political reasons, namely to counter the trend that college-educated people tend to vote Democratic. Nixon was frank about this. That’s what made professors the enemy.On top of that, of course, there is profit and political economy. At the press conference last week, Trump admitted why he wants to shift education funding to trade schools.Encouraged by billionaire Elon Musk at his side, Trump said: “I’d like to see trade schools set up, because you could take $5bn plus hundreds of billions more, which is what is spent [on research universities], and you could have the greatest trade school system anywhere in the world. And that’s what we need to build his rockets and robots and things that he’s doing” – pointing to Musk.Trump could not have been more explicit. “We probably found our pot of gold,” Trump adds, “and that is what has been wasted at places like Harvard.”The Trump administration has seen some successes in its counter-revolution against higher education. So far, the lower federal courts have run interference. But there have been major casualties already, especially in the funding of sciences and medical research, academic integrity and autonomy, and area studies. Faculty governance at some universities has also been diminished, at some universities decimated.Anyone who is genuinely interested in understanding what the Trump administration is up to and to anticipate its next moves should return to books like Harvard Hates America and then read Project 2025’s chapter on education. It clearly explains the past four months and predicts the future – one in which the federal government will sacrifice liberal arts colleges and universities to the benefit of trade schools, faith-based institutions and military academies.The path ahead also includes, in all likelihood, eliminating the American Bar Association as an accrediting system (page 359), as well as the other actors in the “federal accreditation cartel” (pages 320 and 355); terminating the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program (page 354), phasing out income-driven repayment plans (page 337), and privatizing student loans (page 340); allocating at least 40% of federal funding of education “to international business programs that teach about free markets and economics” (page 356); and a host of other radical proposals.It is time now to be honest about the decades-long history of the Republican assault on higher education. Too many of the university leaders who are negotiating with the Trump administration about campus protest are naive at best and fail to grasp the stakes of the ongoing counterrevolution – or complicit at worst. In the process, they are undermining their universities and violating their fiduciary duties to their constituents – students, alumni, faculty and staff. By capitulating based on a pretext, a feint in military terms, those leaders have sacrificed the integrity of the research enterprise and the autonomy of the academy.Liberal arts colleges and universities are a gem in the US, envied by people around the world. Their strength lies in fostering critical thought, creativity and inventiveness throughout the humanities, social sciences, and natural and applied sciences. A liberal arts education, at its best, cultivates critical thinking that challenges society’s strengths and weaknesses, and asks how to make the world more just with more freedom for everyone. Those are the true aims of higher education.
Bernard E Harcourt is a professor of law and political science at Columbia University in New York City and a directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author most recently of “A Modern Counterrevolution” in The Ideas Letter More
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Stop bending the knee to Trump: it’s time for anticipatory noncompliance | David Kirp
by Evelyn Reynolds 8 June 2025, 11:00
During the first 100-plus days of his presidency, Donald Trump has done his damnedest to remake the US in his image. Fearing Hurricane Donald, a host of universities, law firms, newspapers, public schools and Fortune 500 companies have rushed to do his bidding, bowing before he even comes calling. Other institutions cower, in hopes that they will go unnoticed.But this behavior, which social scientists call “anticipatory compliance”, smoothes the way to autocracy because it gives the Trump regime unlimited power without his having to lift a finger. Halting autocracy in its tracks demands a counter-strategy – let’s call it anticipatory noncompliance.Examples of anticipatory compliance are legion.Goodbye, academic freedom: Trump means to impose his anti-intellectual ideology on higher education. He is using unproven allegations of antisemitism and claims of discriminatory diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs as an excuse to punish top-ranked private universities – initially hapless Columbia, then other schools including Harvard, Princeton, Cornell and Northwestern – by withholding billions of dollars in federal grants. My own university, the University of California, Berkeley, anticipates that it will be added to this list when Trump turns his attention to nationally renowned public universities.“Be afraid” is the message for every university – threats to withhold funds from schools that use “woke” language have prompted some that aren’t even under the gun to censor themselves, excising words like “race”, “gender”, “class” and “equity” from course titles and curriculums.Anticipatory compliance also affects the actions of public schools. Worried that, because of their alleged “wokeness”, they will lose the federal dollars that deliver extra help to those who need it most, school systems have altered their curriculum to whitewash the historical record and restrict the literature available to students. Adieu, Toni Morrison and Rosa Parks.Goodbye, free press: Disney and Meta shelled out a combined $40m to settle baseless libel lawsuits brought by Trump, and Paramount is negotiating to make Trump’s spurious 60 Minutes lawsuit disappear.On the eve of the 2024 election, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and the owner of the Washington Post, pulled an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, to stay in Trump’s good graces. So did the Los Angeles Times, whose owner is a billionaire businessman.Goodbye, legal representation: Nine leading law firms succumbed to blackmail to get rid of the president’s executive orders that punished a few firms for displeasing him. Collectively, they agreed to provide more than $1bn worth of pro bono legal work to causes of Trump’s choosing. Now they’re being asked to defend the coal industry and tariffs, which surely isn’t what they expected.What’s more, some top-drawer firms have stopped providing pro bono work on immigration lawsuits and other hot topic issues. Instead, they are putting their talent at Trump’s disposal, neutering themselves while the White House makes mincemeat of the rule of law.Hello, toadying: To curry favor and avoid ridicule in a Trump tweet, dozens of major companies, ranging from Amazon to Pepsi, are treating the president as if he were king, reducing or abandoning their DEI programs without being specifically threatened.Those who bend the knee rationalize their actions as simply a prudent survival strategy. But that’s delusory, for the historical record shows that anticipatory compliance paves the road to autocracy. Bullies like Trump always demand more from their supplicants – more money, more abandoning principles, more loyalty-oath behavior. Anticipatory compliance feeds the beast, showing authoritarians how much they can get away with.Here’s the good news – anticipatory noncompliance is on the rise. Challenges to Trump’s unconstitutional actions have emerged in higher and K-12 education, the legal profession and the corporate world. The citizenry is now making its voice heard.Spearheaded by Harvard’s defiant pose, a growing number of colleges and universities are pushing back against Trump’s outrageous demands. A recent statement from hundreds of college administrators declared that “we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education”. Faculty senates in the Big 10 Academic Alliance crafted a “mutual defense compact”; behind the scenes, the presidents of about 10 elite private universities are deciding what red lines they won’t cross.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRather than meekly comply with Trump’s monarchical demand that public schools eliminate DEI initiatives or risk losing federal funds, 19 states have gone to court, contesting the administration’s contorted reading of civil rights law.The CEOs that scaled back their companies’ diversity programs misread the market and have suffered the consequences. Diversity is a popular goal that many investors and consumers take into account in their decisions. When Target rolled back DEI, the company had to confront a consumer boycott and a 17% stock drop. Meanwhile, corporations like Costco and Apple, which have stood firm, are on buyers’ and investors’ good guy list.Several law firms refused to cave in the face of Trump’s blackmail tactics, instead taking the administration to court. Not only is that the right thing to do; it could turn out to be the profitable course. The judges are unequivocally on their side. And when Microsoft dropped a firm that surrendered to Trump, signing on with a firm that’s taking the administration to court, it signaled that virtue may be financially rewarded.After months of quiescence, with the populace overwhelmed by the tsunami of outrages, popular opposition is emerging. On May Day, tens of thousands of demonstrators participated in nearly 1,000 anti-Trump demonstrations.Restoring democracy is no easy task, for it is infinitely easier to destroy than rebuild. It will take a years-long fight that deploys an arsenal of tactics, ranging from mass demonstrations and consumer boycotts to litigation and political organizing. It’s grueling work, but if autocracy is to be defeated there’s no option. “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced,” observed James Baldwin, in a 1962 New York Times article. A half-century later, that message still rings true.What’s giving me hope nowCourts have stood firm in their defense of the rule of law, pushing back against Trump’s power-grab executive orders. Americans are participating in mass demonstrations nationwide and voting for Democratic candidates in local elections. What’s more, Americans are voting with their wallets – spurred by a consumer boycott, the value of Tesla shares has plunged by close to $700bn from its peak a year ago.
David Kirp is professor emeritus at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley More
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Judge blocks Trump’s ban on Harvard’s foreign students from entering the US
by Evelyn Reynolds 6 June 2025, 03:13
A district judge in Boston has blocked the Trump administration’s ban on Harvard’s international students from entering the United States after the Ivy League university argued the move was illegal.Harvard had asked the judge, Allison Burrough, to block the ban, pending further litigation, arguing Trump had violated federal law by failing to back up his claims that the students posed a threat to national security.“The Proclamation denies thousands of Harvard’s students the right to come to this country to pursue their education and follow their dreams, and it denies Harvard the right to teach them. Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard,” the school said in a filing to the judge.The filing also argued that the national security argument was flawed as the ban did not stop the same people from entering the country, it only barred them from entering to attend Harvard.Harvard amended its earlier lawsuit, which it had filed amid a broader dispute with the Republican president, to challenge the ban, which Trump issued on Wednesday in a proclamation.White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson earlier called Harvard “a hotbed of anti-American, antisemitic, pro-terrorist agitators”, claims that the school has previously denied.“Harvard’s behavior has jeopardized the integrity of the entire US student and exchange visitor visa system and risks compromising national security. Now it must face the consequences of its actions,” Jackson said in a statement.The suspension was intended to be initially for six months but can be extended. Trump’s proclamation also directs the state department to consider revoking academic or exchange visas of any current Harvard students who meet his proclamation’s criteria.The Trump administration has launched a multifront attack on the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university, freezing billions of dollars in grants and other funding and proposing to end its tax-exempt status, prompting a series of legal challenges.Harvard argues the administration is retaliating against it for refusing to accede to demands to control the school’s governance, curriculum and the ideology of its faculty and students.Trump’s directive came a week after Burroughs announced she would issue a broad injunction blocking the administration from revoking Harvard’s ability to enrol international students, who make up about a quarter of its student body.Harvard said in Thursday’s court filing that the proclamation was “a patent effort to do an end-run around this Court’s order”.The university sued after the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, announced on 22 May that her department was immediately revoking Harvard’s student and exchange visitor program certification, which allows it to enrol foreign students.Noem’s action was temporarily blocked almost immediately by Burroughs. On the eve of a hearing before her last week, the department changed course and said it would instead challenge Harvard’s certification through a lengthier administrative process.Wednesday’s two-page directive from Trump said Harvard had “demonstrated a history of concerning foreign ties and radicalism” and had “extensive entanglements with foreign adversaries”, including China.It said Harvard had seen a “drastic rise in crime in recent years while failing to discipline at least some categories of conduct violations on campus”, and had failed to provide sufficient information to the homeland security department about foreign students’ “known illegal or dangerous activities”.The school in Thursday’s court filing said those claims were unsubstantiated. More
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Trump officials intensify Columbia dispute with accreditation threat
by Evelyn Reynolds 4 June 2025, 21:20
The Department of Education announced on Wednesday afternoon that it has notified Columbia University’s accreditor of an alleged violation of federal anti-discrimination laws by the elite private university in New York that is part of the Ivy League.The alleged violation means that Columbia, in the Trump administration’s assessment, has “failed to meet the standards” set by the relevant regional, government-recognized but independent body responsible for the accreditation of degree-granting institutions, as a kind of educational quality controller.In this case the accreditor is the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. Accreditors determine which institutions are eligible for federal student loans and various federal grants.The university did not immediately respond to a request for comment.“Accreditors have an enormous public responsibility as gatekeepers of federal student aid. They determine which institutions are eligible for federal student loans and Pell grants,” the secretary of education, Linda McMahon, said in a statement. Pell grants are awarded as federal financial aid to students with exceptional financial need.A spokesperson for the Middle States Commission on Higher Education declined to provide comment but confirmed that the organization had received a letter from the Department of Education about the matter on Wednesday.While the federal government does not directly accredit US universities, it has a role in overseeing the mostly private organizations that do. Trump has often complained that accreditors approve institutions that fail to provide, in his view, quality education.The notice marks the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s bid to dictate to Columbia after accusing the college of failing to protect students from antisemitic harassment.It follows the cancellation of $400m in federal grants and contracts, after which the university yielded to a series of changes demanded by the administration, including setting up a new disciplinary committee, initiating investigations into students critical of Israel’s war in Gaza, and ceding control of its Middle East studies department.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionColumbia was at the forefront of student encampment protests last spring, with more direct action protests erupting in recent weeks and jeers at leadership at commencement ceremonies last month, and has cycled through a series of university presidents in the past 18 months.The Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services said last month that an investigation found that the university had acted with “deliberate indifference” toward the harassment of Jewish students during campus protests, while Columbia has previously said it would work with the government to address antisemitism, harassment and discrimination.Reuters contributed reporting More
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‘They are in shock’: Indian students fear Trump has ended their American dream
by Evelyn Reynolds 3 June 2025, 23:01
For weeks, Subash Devatwal’s phone has not stopped ringing. Some of the calls have been from distressed students, at other times it is their panicked parents, but all have the same question – is their dream of studying in the US still possible?Devatwal runs an education consultancy in Ahmedabad, the main city in the Indian state of Gujarat. It is one of thousands of such organisations that exist across the country, helping Indian students achieve what many consider to be the ultimate symbol of success: getting into an American university.It has long been a booming business for Devatwal. Families in India will often invest their entire life savings to send their children to study in the US and last year there were more than 330,000 Indians enrolled at American universities, more than any other foreign nationality, overtaking Chinese students in numbers for the first time in years.But this year the situation looks drastically different. As Donald Trump’s administration has taken aim at international students – first implementing draconian screening measures over political views and then last week ordering all US embassies globally to indefinitely pause all student visa interviews – many Indian students and their families have been left in limbo.Trump’s unilateral decision to block Harvard University from admitting international students, which was later blocked by the courts, also caused widespread panic and stoked fears that foreign students at other universities could get caught in the president’s crosshairs.“The students are in shock. Most of them spend several years preparing to study in the US,” said Devatwal. He said many of his clients were now hesitant to pursue a US degree, given the high levels of turmoil and uncertainty following the Trump administration’s new policies. Indian students can expect to pay between $40,000 to $80,000 (£29,500 to £59,000) a year on tuition alone to study in the US.In previous years, Devatwal’s organisation sent more than 100 students to American universities but this year he said the number had dropped to about 10. Instead, families were shifting their focus to the UK and other European countries. A recent analysis by the Hindu newspaper estimated a 28% drop in Indian students going to the US in 2025.View image in fullscreen“Families contribute their savings, take out loans from banks and borrow from relatives, all in the hope that the student will secure a good job abroad, repay the debt, and build a promising future,” said Devatwal. “In such uncertain circumstances, parents are understandably reluctant to let their children take such a risky path.”Brijesh Patel, 50, a textile trader in Surat, Gujarat, said he had been saving money for over a decade to make sure his son could go to a US university, including selling his wife’s jewellery and borrowing money from relatives.“Everyone in the family wanted our son to go to the US for his studies and make something good of his life,” said Patel. His 21-year-old son, who he asked not to be named for fear of retribution by the US authorities, had secured a place at two American universities for his master’s degree and Patel had already paid 700,000 rupees (£6,000) to consultancies who helped with the applications.But amid the turmoil under Trump, Patel said his son was being advised not to even apply for his student visa, due to the uncertainty and high probability of rejection. “We simply can’t take that risk. If our son goes now and something goes wrong, we won’t be able to save that kind of money again,” he said.However, Patel said he was not willing to give up on the family dream just yet. “I am an optimist, and my son is willing to wait a year,” he said. “We’re hoping that things improve by then. It’s not just my son who will be living the American dream, it’s all of us: my wife, our relatives and our neighbours. I’ve struggled my whole life – I don’t want my son to face the same struggles here in India.”The fear among prospective and current students was palpable. Several Indian students studying in the US declined to speak to the Guardian, fearing it could jeopardise their visas.In India, a student selected in December to be one of this year’s Fulbright-Nehru doctoral fellows – a highly competitive scholarship that pays for the brightest students to study abroad at US universities as part of their PhD thesis – said the applications of their entire cohort had recently been demoted back to “semi-finalists”.The student, who asked to remain anonymous over fears it would affect their application, said they had invitation letters from top Ivy League universities for the fellowship, which is considered one of the most prestigious scholarships in the US, but now everything was up in the air. “We are supposed to start in October and our orientation was scheduled for May, all the flights and hotels were even booked, but then it all got cancelled. Now we’ve been informed all our applications are under review by the Trump administration,” said the student.They said it had caused “huge panic and anxiety” among those accepted. “I know a lot of people are going back through their social media, deleting things and doing a lot of self-censoring.”Piyush Bhartiya, a co-founder of the educational technology company AdmitKard, said many parents who had been set on sending their children to the US were rethinking their plans. He cited one example of a student who had been admitted to New York University for the coming year but was instead planning to go to the London School of Economics after the US visa interviews were paused.Bhartiya said Indian students primarily went to the US to study Stem subjects – science, technology, engineering and maths – and so the focus had shifted to other countries strong in these areas.“Germany is the main country where students are shifting to for Stem subjects,” he said. “Other countries like Ireland, France, the Netherlands, which are also gaining substantial interest in the students. At the undergraduate level, the Middle East has also seen a lot of gain in interest given parents feel that it is close by and safer and given the current political environment they may want their kids closer to the home.”Among the Indian students forced to abandon their plans is Nihar Gokhale, 36. He had a fully funded offer for a PhD at a private university in Massachusetts, but recently received a letter saying the funding was being withdrawn, as the university faced issues under the Trump administration.“It was quite shocking. I spoke to people at the university, and they admitted it was an exceptional situation for them too,” said Gokhale.Without the funding, the US was financially “out of the question” and he said he had an offer from the UK he now intended to take up.“For at least the next three or four years, I’m not considering the US at all,” he said. More
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‘Insidious fear’ fills universities as Trump escalates conflict during commencement season
by Evelyn Reynolds 1 June 2025, 12:00
It is graduation season in the United States and with it comes a tradition of commencement speeches to departing college students, usually from high-profile figures who seek to inspire those leaving academia.But, as with many things under Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, commencement season this year has been far from normal, especially as the US president and his allies have waged conflicts against the nation’s universities.Amid concerns about the Trump administration undermining US residents’ free speech rights, some commencement ceremonies have featured speakers who have warned about the president’s abuses of power, while others have hosted pop culture figures who have delivered more innocuous remarks. Trump himself went off script at the nation’s most famous military academy.The politically charged speeches could hold increased significance this year as university leaders grapple with how to respond to Trump’s efforts to exert more control over federal funding to schools; campus protests and curriculum; and which international students are allowed to study in the United States, according to people who study such addresses.“A lot of folks this spring will turn to these commencement speeches, especially now with the advent of social media, which allows us to distribute the clips much more widely, to see what people are saying in this critical moment, where our democracy is so fragile,” said James Peterson, a Philadelphia columnist and radio show host who has written about commencement addresses.US graduation ceremonies have long provided a forum for speakers to not only deliver a message to students but also to shape public opinion.In 1837, the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a speech at Harvard University titled The American Scholar in which he argued that colleges “can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls and by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame”.The US supreme court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr described the speech as the country’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence”.More recently, some of the most famous speeches have included those from then president John F Kennedy in 1963 at American University, David Foster Wallace in 2005 at Kenyon College and Apple founder Steve Jobs the same year at Stanford University.While plenty of commencement speakers have sparked a backlash – after delivering another speech in 1838, Emerson was banned from Harvard for 30 years – the stakes could be higher this year for universities that host speakers who criticize Trump, who has withheld federal funding from universities that didn’t agree to his demands.In recent weeks, the administration halted Harvard’s ability to enroll international students and ordered federal agencies to cancel all contracts with the school because it “continues to engage in race discrimination” and shows a “disturbing lack of concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students”.A Harvard spokesperson said the ban on international students was “unlawful” and “undermines Harvard’s academic and research mission”.“This is not a time when colleges and universities are trying to attract a ton of attention,” said David Murray, the executive director of the Professional Speechwriters Association. “Nobody wants to put their head above the fray and give anybody any reason to single them out as the next Harvard.”But some speakers have delivered fiery remarks aimed at Trump. Wake Forest University hosted Scott Pelley, a longtime reporter for the famous CBS show 60 Minutes, amid turmoil at the network. The program’s executive producer resigned because he said he no longer had editorial independence. Trump had filed a lawsuit against CBS’s parent company, Paramount, over an interview with his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris.Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, wants to sell the company and needs approval from federal regulators. She reportedly wants to settle the case.Pelley did not mention Trump by name but said: “Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack. An insidious fear is reaching through our schools, our businesses, our homes and into our private thoughts.”The speech sparked backlash from rightwing media. Laura Ingraham, a Fox News host, said Pelley was a “a whiny liberal and still bitter”.At the University of Minnesota, Tim Walz, the state’s governor and a former vice-presidential candidate, described the president as a “tyrant” and called the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) “Trump’s modern-day Gestapo”.The Department of Homeland Security account on X posted that Walz’s remarks were “absolutely sickening” and that Ice officers were facing a “413% increase in assaults”.The department did not respond to the Guardian’s question about how many assaults have occurred and which time periods they were comparing.Ben Krauss, the CEO of the speechwriting firm Fenway Strategies and former chief speechwriter for Walz, said he thinks commencement addresses are important because there are not many opportunities where you have “a captive audience, even if it’s for 10 minutes”.For speakers to “break through to society is probably a tall order, but I think the goal of a good commencement should be just to break through to the people in the room”, said Krauss, who shared that his agency worked on more than a dozen commencements this year but did not disclose which ones.Still, Murray isn’t sure the speeches from Pelley and Walz will have a big impact.“Pelley’s speech made a lot of people mad on the right, and I don’t know how much it did on the left or in the center,” Murray said. “It’s really hard to give a speech that really unites everyone, and giving a speech that divides everyone just seems to make the problems worse.”Trump also took political shots during his address to graduating cadets at the United States military academy at West Point. He said past leaders “subjected the armed forces to all manner of social projects and political causes, while leaving our borders undefended and depleting our arsenals to fight other countries’ wars”.He also spoke about postwar housing developer William Levitt, who married “a trophy wife”.“I must tell you, a lot of trophy wives, it doesn’t work out,” Trump said.“It’s great to hear someone speak truth to power,” Peterson said of Pelley’s address. “It’s also sobering to hear a president be, as I think, in many folks’ perspectives, disrespectful of a longstanding American institution.”Earlier this week, Trump ordered federal agencies to cancel all contracts with Harvard. On Thursday, the school held its commencement ceremony. Meanwhile, a federal judge issued an injunction blocking the administration’s efforts to prevent the school from enrolling international students.Many speakers at the school’s events over the last week addressed Trump’s impact on the school and worldwide.Yurong “Luanna” Jiang, a Chinese graduate who studied international development, said she grew up believing that the “world was becoming a small village” and that she found a global community at Harvard, the Associated Press reported.These days, her worldview has changed.“We’re starting to believe those who think differently, vote differently or pray differently, whether they are across the ocean or sitting right next to us, are not just wrong – we mistakenly see them as evil,” she said. “But it doesn’t have to be this way.”Other commencement speakers included actor Elizabeth Banks, who at alma mater University of Pennsylvania argued that the main problem affecting the world was not race, religion, ability or gender but the extreme concentration of money, and encouraged graduates to “wrap it up and keep abortion legal”.At Emory University, the artist Usher argued that a college degree still matters “in a world where credentials can feel overshadowed by clicks and followers and algorithms”.“But it’s not the paper that gives the power – it’s you,” Usher said.Then there was Kermit the Frog at the University of Maryland, the alma mater of the Muppets’ creator, Jim Henson. The frog, voiced by Matt Vogel, told graduates that life is “like a movie. Write your own ending. Keep believing. Keep pretending.”He then closed by asking the crowd to join him in singing his classic tune, Rainbow Connection.“Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection,” they sang. “The lovers, the dreamers and me.” More

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