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      European universities offer ‘scientific asylum’ to US researchers fleeing Trump’s cuts

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      Laced with terms such as “censorship” and “political interference”, the Belgium-based jobs advert was far from typical. The promise of academic freedom, however, hinted at who it was aimed at: researchers in the US looking to flee the funding freezes, cuts and ideological impositions ushered in by Donald Trump’s administration.“We see it as our duty to come to the aid of our American colleagues,” said Jan Danckaert, the rector of Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), in explaining why his university – founded in 1834 to safeguard academia from the interference of church or state – had decided to open 12 postdoctoral positions for international researchers, with a particular focus on Americans.“American universities and their researchers are the biggest victims of this political and ideological interference,” Danckaert said in a statement. “They’re seeing millions in research funding disappear for ideological reasons.”The university is among a handful of institutions across Europe that have begun actively recruiting US researchers, offering themselves as a haven for those keen to escape the Trump administration’s crackdown on research and academia.Since Trump took power in late January, researchers in the US have faced a multipronged attack. Efforts to slash government spending have left thousands of employees bracing for layoffs, including at institutions such as Nasa, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the US’s pre-eminent climate research agency. The government’s targeting of “wokeism” has meanwhile sought to root out funding for research deemed to involve diversity, certain kinds of vaccines and any mention of the climate crisis.In France, the director of the prestigious Pasteur Institute in Paris, Yasmine Belkaid, said it was already working to recruit people from across the Atlantic for work in fields such as infectious diseases or the origins of disease.View image in fullscreen“I receive daily requests from people who want to return: French, European or even Americans who no longer feel able to do their research or are afraid to do it freely,” Belkaid told the French newspaper La Tribune. “You might call it a sad opportunity, but it is an opportunity, all the same.”The sentiment was echoed by France’s minister for higher education and research, Philippe Baptiste, in a recent letter that called on research institutions to send in proposals on how best to attract talent from the US. “Many well-known researchers are already questioning their future in the US,” he said. “Naturally, we wish to welcome a certain number of them.”On Thursday, the Netherlands said it was aiming to swiftly launch a fund to attract researchers to the country.While the fund would be open to people of all nationalities, the country’s education minister, Eppo Bruins, hinted at the tensions that have gripped US academia in announcing the plans.“There is currently a great global demand for international top scientific talent. At the same time, the geopolitical climate is changing, which is increasing the international mobility of scientists,” Bruins said in a letter to parliament.“Several European countries are responding to this with efforts to attract international talent,” he added. “I want the Netherlands to remain at the vanguard of these efforts.”The Dutch effort comes after France’s Aix-Marseille University said it had set up a programme – titled Safe Place for Science – that would put aside funding for more than two dozen researchers from the US for three years.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We wish we didn’t have to do this,” said Éric Berton, the university’s president. “We’re not looking to attract researchers. But we were quite indignant about what was happening and we felt that our colleagues in the US were going through a catastrophe … we wanted to offer some sort of scientific asylum to those whose research is being hindered.”Two weeks after the programme was launched there have been about 100 applications, with researchers from Yale, Nasa and Stanford among those who have expressed interest. The university continues to receive about 10 applications a day, said Berton, many of them from researchers involved in studying climate, health or social sciences.Berton said he hoped universities across Europe would join his in providing a safe space for researchers. “I think that we need to realise the historic moment we’re living through and the serious, long-term consequences this could have,” he said. “Europe must rise to the occasion.”At VUB, the opening of the 12 postdoctoral positions was also aimed at acknowledging the global impact of Trump’s crackdown. Two research projects in which the university was involved – one delving into youth and disinformation and another investigating the transatlantic dialogue between the US and Europe – had been cancelled due to “changed policy priorities”, it said.For the university in Brussels, the openings were also a vindication of sorts. In a 2016 interview with Fox News, Trump had sought to characterise life in Brussels as akin to “living in a hellhole”, falsely accusing migrants in the city of failing to assimilate.“At the time, the statement elicited many emotional reactions in Europe,” the university said. “This gives additional symbolic meaning to the VUB initiative.” More

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      ‘The goal is to disassemble public health’: experts warn against US turn to vaccine skepticism

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      As vaccine hesitancy increases in the US, isolated, tight-knit and religious communities have frequently been at the center of high-profile outbreaks.Such is the case in west Texas, where a rural community is the center of an expanding measles outbreak that has already claimed the lives of two Americans – the first deaths from the disease in nearly a decade.However, as the conspiracy theories of Maga conservatism marry the bugbears of the US health secretary and vaccine skeptic Robert F Kennedy Jr, the one-time fringe view of vaccines has become increasingly mainstream – with activists in right-leaning population centers taking lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic into the realm of childhood inoculations.One need look no further than Sarasota, Florida, for a full-throated political denunciation.“Generally, people are weak, lazy,” said Vic Mellor, an activist based near Sarasota, and a close ally of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.Mellor owns the We the People Health and Wellness Center in nearby Venice. Mellor, in a shirt that shouts “VIOLENCE MIGHT BE THE ANSWER”, is a self-professed attendee of the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.“And that lazy part just makes them ignorant … Covid has proven that obviously this is true. I mean, all the facts are starting to come out on Covid now – that it was a hoax. That is just an extension of where this hoax began decades earlier with the vaccines, OK? This is all a money grab, this is all a power grab.”The pandemic was real, and it started Mellor down the road of questioning vaccines. Where he once opposed only the Covid-19 shots, he now opposes vaccines entirely – arguing they harm children despite experts on vaccines considering them one of mankind’s greatest medical achievements.“This is not an isolated, rural, religious community, which I think is what a lot of people associate with an anti-vaccine mentality,” said Kathryn Olivarius, the author of Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom, and a historian of disease at Stanford University. “This is in the heart of everything.”Sarasota has become a proving ground for the Maga right. Among nail salons, mom-and-pop Cuban restaurants and roadside motels lining US 41, known locally as the Tamiami Trail, a visitor can find the gates of New College. This was once a public university prized for its progressive liberal arts education. Now it is part of the new conservative experiment in remaking higher education led by activists aligned with Donald Trump and the Republican Florida governor, Ron DeSantis.Along the same road is the Sarasota memorial hospital, an aberration in American healthcare – it is publicly owned with open board elections. The normally sleepy election became contentious when insurgent “health freedom” candidates, supported in part by Mellor, entered the race. Three won seats on the nine-member board in 2022.Even the name of this stretch of sun-bleached asphalt is up for debate. This year, a state Republican lawmaker – who has also introduced bills to limit vaccine requirements – briefly proposed changing its name to the “Gulf of America Trail” – a nod to Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico.Arguably the most salient artifact of this activism in Sarasota is the least visible: vaccination rates against measles.Measles vaccination rates for kindergarteners have plummeted over the last two decades – from 97% in 2004 to 84% in 2023, according to state health records. Sarasota is roughly on par with the vaccination rates in rural Gaines county, Texas – the center of the ongoing measles outbreak that sickened 279 people in in that state alone. Notably, both Gaines county and Sarasota have large home-schooling communities, meaning vaccination rates could in fact be lower.It is well known in research circles that right-leaning states across the US south and west have worse health metrics – from obesity to violence to diseases such as diabetes. That reality was supercharged during the pandemic; as vaccine mandates became a fixation on the right, Republican-leaning voters became more skeptical of vaccines. In turn, places with politically conservative leaders experienced more Covid-19 deaths and greater stress on hospitals.Measles is one of the most contagious diseases known to medicine. At least 95% of the population needs to be vaccinated to prevent outbreaks of the disease. But despite a supremely effective vaccine that eliminated the disease from the US in 2000, vaccine hesitancy has increasingly taken hold.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionConservative activism alone can’t be blamed for declining measles vaccination rates. The measles vaccine in particular has been subject to a sustained firehose of misinformation stemming from a fraudulent paper linking the vaccine to autism in 1999. For years, this misinformation was largely nonpartisan. And Florida’s anti-vaccine movement was active even before the pandemic – with a vocal contingent of parents arguing against strengthening school vaccine standards in 2019.What appears new in Sarasota is how local conservative activists have brought opposition to vaccines into the heart of their philosophy. By Mellor’s telling, he and a loosely affiliated group of Maga activists began to adopt anti-vaccine beliefs as the pandemic wore on – helping organize major health protests in the area in recent years, such as mask mandate opt-outs and the “health freedom” campaign for hospital board seats.Mellor said his nearby property, the Hollow, was a gathering place during the pandemic (it is also a part-time gun range). He cites ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug that became a fascination of the right, as the reason “we didn’t lose people at all” during the height of the pandemic. Available clinical evidence shows it is not effective against Covid-19.Kennedy has fit neatly into this realignment. He enjoys trust ratings among Republicans nearly as high as Trump, according to polling from the health-focused Kaiser Family Foundation. Kennedy has already spread dubious information about measles vaccines in public statements (notably: from a Steak ’n Shake in Florida) – a response one vaccine expert said “couldn’t be worse”.“While children are in the hospital suffering severe measles pneumonia, struggling to breathe, [Kennedy] stands up in front of the American public and says measles vaccines kill people every year and that it causes blindness and deafness,” said Dr Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the division of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Severe side effects from the vaccine are possible, but they are much rarer than disability and death from measles.“This is what happens when you have a virulent anti-vaccine activist, a science denialist, as the head of the most important public health agency in the United States,” said Offit. “He should either be quiet or stand down.”The same poll found trust in public health agencies has fallen precipitously amid Republican attacks. More than a quarter of Republican parents report delaying childhood vaccines, the poll found, a rate that has more than doubled since 2022. There is no analogous trend among Democratic parents. Despite how claims espoused by vaccine skeptics can be easily refuted, their power has not been undercut.“The anti-vaccine business is big business,” said Offit, pointing to the myriad unproven “treatments” offered by promoters of vaccine misinformation, some of which are offered at Mellor’s We the People health center. “We have been taken over by a foreign country, and the goal of that foreign country is to disassemble public health.”The misery of measles did not take long to appear in Texas – measles-induced pneumonia has already led pediatricians to intubate children, including at least one baby, according to the Associated Press. About one to three people out of 1,000 who are infected by measles die from the infection, and one in 1,000 suffer severe brain swelling called encephalitis, which can lead to blindness, deafness and developmental delays.“We actually don’t have the perspective people in the past had on these diseases,” Olivarius. “I have spent many, many, many years reading letters and missives from parents who are petrified of what’s going to happen to their children” if there are outbreaks of yellow fever, polio or measles, Olivarius said about diseases now largely confined to history – thanks to vaccines.“The lesson from history is these are not mild ailments,” she said. “These are diseases that have killed hundreds of millions of people – and quite horribly too.” More

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      A French university is offering ‘scientific asylum’ for US talent. The brain drain has started | Alexander Hurst

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      In six weeks, the Trump administration’s “rapid scheduled disassembly” of American science has been as sharp and deep as its trashing of the US’s alliances and goodwill; Earth science, weather forecasting and early warning systems, medical research (including cancer research), Nasa. Academic grants more broadly have been cut, paused and subject to review for a long list of banned words (including such contentious terms as “political” and “women”).This has caused universities across the country to reduce their intake of PhD students, medical students and other graduate students, introduce hiring freezes and even rescind some offers of admission. More than 12,500 US citizens currently in other countries on Fulbright research grants recently had their funding paused, along with 7,400 foreign scholars currently hosted in the US, leaving them financially stranded. And, when it came to one foreign academic visiting the US, detaining them and refusing them entry.Even more worryingly, the administration is specifically targeting some universities, including pulling $400m in funding from Columbia University, and $800m from Johns Hopkins, forcing it to lay off 2,000 people. Furthermore, the legally dubious arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, and the cancelling of his green card, is sure to have a chilling effect on foreign students and researchers already in the US – and on the desire of others to go there in the future. As Christina Pagel, a German-British professor at University College London, writes: “This isn’t chaos.” Instead, the attacks on research appear to follow a three-pronged objective: to forcibly align science with state ideology; undermine academic independence and suppress dissent; and maintain geopolitical and economic goals.The Saturn V rockets that took US astronauts to space – and eventually the moon – in the 1960s owed their existence to Operation Paperclip, which brought 1,500 former Nazi scientists (such as Wernher von Braun, the former director of Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Center) to the US. In the week after Donald Trump’s election, I wondered whether the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas may inadvertently get his wish (of a Europe that unified through opposition to the US) and suggested that Europe position itself to reverse the decades-long transatlantic brain drain by welcoming highly educated American researchers and scientists who were sure to find themselves under attack. This time, there is no moral quandary about it, no Nazi pasts to ignore; only as much advantage to be gained as can be in a world where the EU must hold the ground for liberal democratic society, joined by Canada to the west, and Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand to the east.To some extent, EU governments and institutions are already picking up on the opportunity. For example, on 7 March, the University of Aix-Marseille announced Safe Place for Science, a three-year, €15m programme to bring 15 American scientists working in climate, health and astrophysics to its campus. According to a university spokesperson, more than 60 applications have been received, 30 of them coming within the first 24 hours. The university indicated that it has been in contact with other universities and the French government about expanding “scientific asylum” on both a national and European level, and to help coordinate welcoming and relocating different researchers.US federal government spending on all research and development (R&D) totalled roughly $195bn in 2024. That sounds imposing, but let’s put it into greater context. As of 2023, US GDP was $27.7tn and EU GDP was $26.5tn, when adjusted for purchasing power parity. Taken as a whole, both polities are roughly the same economic size. Let’s imagine that the EU were to put real money on the table to lure science of all kinds out of the US and to the continent. It wouldn’t need to match $195bn, euro for dollar, in part because more than half the US total is defence R&D, and the EU is already boosting defence spending … bigly. So, say it just picked a bold, round number that lends itself well to narrative, storytelling and headlines, and is enough to rope in the cuts happening in the US.A sum of €25bn a year would represent just under 0.1% of the EU’s GDP, and even less if the UK, Norway and Switzerland (all of which participate in the Horizon Europe research funding programme) were included. As it is, R&D spending in the EU lags behind the US – and a report ordered by the European Commission’s research department recently recommended more than doubling Horizon Europe’s €95bn, seven-year budget. What I’m suggesting goes further, yes. But not only is it well within the EU’s ability to afford, it would ultimately pay for itself: research found that non-defence R&D spending returned 200% for the US during the postwar period.But let me push the boundary of fantastical again, and suggest that the EU may lure not just American researchers, but American universities themselves. According to the Cross Border Education Research Team, US universities maintain 29 actual campuses in Europe (and far more if you include “centres” and study abroad programmes). There are dozens of American colleges and universities with enormous endowments that regularly splash out hundreds of millions of dollars at a time on new buildings. If US crackdowns (like the recent demands made of Columbia) on academic freedom, funding, and foreign students and faculties become more frequent, they may find the idea of second campuses in Europe tempting indeed.

      Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist

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      Columbia should have said, ‘see you in court,’ not ‘yes, Mr President.’ | Margaret Sullivan

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      Since early 2024, I’ve been running a journalism ethics center at Columbia University.So perhaps it’s no surprise that I see the university’s capitulation to Trump both in terms of journalism and ethics.I’ve never run a university, but I have run a newsroom. For 13 years (until I moved to New York City in 2012 to be the New York Times public editor), I was the chief editor of the Buffalo News, the regional newspaper in my home town. I had started there as a summer intern. As editor, I made a lot of decisions; the buck stopped at my desk.It’s not a perfect analogy to Columbia’s situation, but I’ve been thinking about what my options might have been if the paper’s biggest and most powerful advertiser – one important to our financial wellbeing – had gotten wind of an investigation they didn’t like the sounds of. Something that would reveal something negative about their business, let’s say.Suppose that advertiser had threatened to withdraw all their advertising unless we dropped the story. In fact, suppose they wanted promises of positive coverage – perhaps a fawning profile of their CEO, and a series about the good things the company was doing in the community.Let’s complicate it more. Let’s say that my boss, the paper’s owner, was on the advertiser’s side, or at least inclined to see their point of view.What would my options be as editor?There really would be only one: to hold fast. To make the case to the owner that if we were a legitimate newspaper, we would have to be brave and not allow ourselves to be bullied. And to refuse to pull the story. Make sure it’s bulletproof – every fact nailed down – and proceed with plans to publish it.What would happen?That’s hard to say. Maybe the advertiser would blink. Maybe the owner would fire me. Maybe I’d feel I had to resign.The point of this imperfect analogy is simply that allowing oneself – or one’s institution – to be bullied or threatened into compliance is never the right answer.And it’s especially important for strong institutions to stand up, to set an example and to insulate those who have fewer resources or are more vulnerable.Columbia has a huge – nearly $15bn – endowment. It could have withstood the withdrawal of federal funds.Columbia’s leadership could have chosen to say “see you in court” rather than “yes, sir”.Some principles are so central to an institution’s purpose that to betray them should be unthinkable. You don’t kill a valid story under pressure. Because journalism, however flawed, is about finding and telling the truth.And a university – which stands for academic freedom, for freedom of thought, speech and expression, including the right to peacefully protest – cannot buckle to demands to undermine those principles.Sadly, that’s what Columbia did, even going so far as to put an entire academic department under highly unusual supervision, and to empower beefed-up campus police to detain, remove or arrest students for various supposed offenses.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis action stains a great university, which could have recovered from a financial threat but may not recover from this capitulation.Of course, Columbia needs to work against antisemitism and against all forms of hatred and discrimination. But that’s not really – or certainly not fully – what’s at the heart of Trump’s move.“It’s all about intimidation,” as my Guardian colleague Robert Reich, a former labor secretary, wrote this weekend, “not only at Columbia but at every other university in America.”Columbia’s capitulation mirrors that of many institutions in recent weeks. A major law firm (Paul, Weiss), under pressure, struck a deal with the White House to donate $40m in legal work to enable Trump’s causes. ABC News settled a defamation suit it probably could have won. And newspaper owners, including Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post, have been cozying up to Trump in many ways that harm credibility and mission.Yet some organizations have decided not to cave, but to be true to their stated and long-held principles.The Associated Press is suing, after the Trump administration severely limited its journalists’ access, punishing them for an editorial decision to continue using the term “Gulf of Mexico” on first reference in their stories, not “Gulf of America”. Another large law firm, Perkins Coie, is fighting in court after Trump’s executive order stripped their lawyers of their security clearances and denyed them access to government buildings.Take this to the bank: there is no satisfying the Trumpian demands. The goalposts will always be moved and then moved again.With its huge endowment and sea of rich alumni – some of whom, surely, would be in sympathy – Columbia had other choices. Smaller universities may not.Institutions with resources must resist thuggish bullying, not just for their own sakes, but to protect others who will find it much harder. And for another reason: at an extremely dangerous time in the US and in the world, it’s the right thing to do.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Columbia University ‘refusing to help’ identify people for arrest – White House

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      The Trump administration said on Tuesday that Columbia University was “refusing to help” the Department of Homeland Security identify people for arrest on campus, after immigration authorities detained a prominent Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate over the weekend.The Trump White House’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on Tuesday the administration had given the university names of multiple individuals it accused of “pro-Hamas activity”, reiterating the administration’s intention to deport activists associated with pro-Palestinian protests.“Columbia University has been given the names of other individuals who have engaged in pro-Hamas activity, and they are refusing to help DHS identify those individuals on campus,” Leavitt said in a press briefing. “And as the president said very strongly in his statement yesterday, he is not going to tolerate that.”Khalil, a permanent US resident who helped lead pro-Palestinian protests at the university last year, was detained on Saturday night in an unprecedented move that prompted widespread outrage and alarm from free speech advocates.Trump described the arrest this week as the “first arrest of many to come”.The federal immigration authorities who arrested Khalil reportedly said they were acting on a state department order to revoke the green card granting him permanent residency.As of Tuesday, Khalil had not been charged with any crime. However, two people with knowledge of the matter told the New York Times that the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was relying on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that gives him broad power to expel foreigners if they give him “reasonable ground to believe” their presence in the US has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences”. Zeteo also reported that Rubio himself “personally signed off on the arrest”.As of Monday morning, Khalil was being held at an immigration detention facility near Jena, Louisiana.On Monday evening, a federal judge in Manhattan barred his deportation pending a hearing in his case set for Wednesday.The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights have joined Khalil’s legal team, led by his attorney, Amy Greer. Greer stated on Monday that she had spoken with Khalil and that he was “healthy and his spirits are undaunted by his predicament”.On Tuesday, 13 members of Congress – led by the Palestinian-American US representative Rashida Tlaib – issued a letter demanding his immediate release.The arrest came just days after Donald Trump’s second presidential administration canceled $400m in funding to Columbia University over what it described as the college’s failure to protect students from antisemitic harassment on campus.On Monday, the US education department’s civil rights office followed the cuts to Columbia with new warnings to 60 other colleges and universities indicating that they may face “enforcement actions” for allegations of antisemitic harassment as well as discrimination on their campuses.In Monday’s letters to the 60 higher education institutions, the federal education department’s office of civil rights (OCR) said that the schools are all being investigated in response to complaints of alleged “violations relating to antisemitic harassment and discrimination”.A department statement said it sent the admonitions under the agency’s authority to enforce Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act, which “prohibits any institution that receives federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color, and national origin”.“National origin includes shared (Jewish) ancestry,” the statement said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe letters stem from an executive order signed by Trump shortly after retaking office in January that purported to “combat antisemitism”. A fact sheet corresponding to Trump’s order suggested deporting international students involved in pro-Palestinian protests.In a statement on Monday, the education secretary, Linda McMahon, said her department was “deeply disappointed that Jewish students studying on elite US campuses continue to fear for their safety amid the relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year”.“University leaders must do better,” the former executive for the WWE professional wrestling promotion said. “US colleges and universities benefit from enormous public investments funded by US taxpayers.“That support is a privilege, and it is contingent on scrupulous adherence to federal anti-discrimination laws.”Trump had recently threatened to halt all federal funding for any college or school that allows “illegal protests” and vowed to imprison “agitators”. The president accused Columbia University of repeatedly failing to protect students from antisemitic harassment.The institution has been a focal point for campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Demonstrations erupted last spring both across the US and internationally, with students calling for an end to the US’s support to the Israeli military as well as demanding that their universities divest from companies with ties to Israel.At Columbia, such protests led to mass arrests, suspensions and the resignation of the university’s president at the time. More

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      Trump administration cancels $400m in funds to Columbia University

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      The Donald Trump administration announced on Friday that it had canceled $400m in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University in New York because of what it alleges is the college’s repeated failure to protect students from antisemitic harassment.The announcement comes after Columbia set up a new disciplinary committee and initiated its own investigations into students critical of Israel and its war on Gaza after Hamas’s own attack on Israel. That move by the university has alarmed advocates of free speech.It also comes at a time of widespread backlash to American universities by the Trump administration and conservatives more broadly who see the higher education sector in the US as dominated by liberals and ripe for a rightwing attack on its influence.Linda McMahon, the Trump-appointed secretary of education, had warned on Monday that Columbia would lose federal funding if it did not take additional action to combat antisemitism on its campus.A statement issued on Friday by the Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education, and the US General Services Administration, states: “These cancellations represent the first round of action and additional cancellations are expected to follow.”“For too long, Columbia has abandoned that obligation to Jewish students studying on its campus,” McMahon said in the statement.The statement also refers to ongoing “illegal protests” on college and university campuses, a phrase Trump has used to refer to some student protests, though what makes these illegal remains unclear.Columbia was central to campus protests that broke out across the US over Gaza last spring. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators set up an encampment there in April and inspired a wave of similar protests in many other colleges.The first amendment to the US constitution protects the rights of people to “peacefully assemble” and to petition the government for a “redress of grievances”.The extent that pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campuses can be considered antisemitic is still debated across political and academic spheres. Republican lawmakers viewed the protests as antisemitic, despite the fact many protesters denied the accusations or were Jewish themselves.Trump has threatened college students with imprisonment and deportation on Tuesday on his Truth Social platform, writing: “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested.”A Columbia University spokesperson wrote in a statement to the Columbia Spectator, that it was “reviewing the announcement from the federal agencies and [pledged] to work with the federal government to restore Columbia’s federal funding”.“We take Columbia’s legal obligations seriously and understand how serious this announcement is and are committed to combatting antisemitism and ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our students, faculty, and staff,” the spokesperson wrote.It is not immediately clear what contracts or grants would be cut under the directive. Columbia University currently holds more than $5bn in federal grant commitments, the GSA statement said.Katherine Franke, a retired legal scholar and former professor at Columbia Law School told the Guardian how she was “pushed out” of her role in January because of her pro-Palestinian activism. She had been with Columbia for 25 years.Franke says that the university was told “unless we as faculty and students take a pro-Israeli position, it [the university] will be sanctioned. And at the same time, the university is now committing itself to something it’s calling institutional neutrality.”She says that though not all the grants were cut, the Trump administration did “cut a significant part of them, and the important research that’s being done with those grants will stop”.Franke is highly critical of the way Columbia is responding to the threats from Trump, believing the institution could have done more to protect students, faculty and the pivotal role the university plays in a democracy.“If you grovel before a bully, it just emboldens the bully, and the bully has now become an authoritarian government with the capacity to act on a level that was unthinkable for us a couple of years ago,” she said.Columbia is one of five colleges currently under the new federal investigation, and it is one of 10 being visited by a taskforce in response to allegations of antisemitism. Others under investigation include the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Minnesota; Northwestern University; and Portland State University. More

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      Trump administration quietly shutters online form for student debt repayment

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      The Donald Trump administration has taken down the online application form for several popular student debt repayment plans, causing confusion among borrowers and likely creating complications for millions of Americans with outstanding loans.Those seeking payment plans are unable to access the applications for income-driven repayment plans (IDR), which cap what borrowers must pay each month at a percent of their earnings, as well as the online application to consolidate their loans on the US Department of Education website.The quiet removal came after a federal appeals court decision earlier this week that continued a pause on Joe Biden’s Save program, an income-driven plan for loan forgiveness that would have forgiven debts after as few as 10 years of payments.Biden’s Save program has been on hold since last summer after a group of Republican state attorneys general brought forward a lawsuit against the forgiveness features. As a result, about 8 million borrowers who enrolled in Save before it was halted currently have their loans in limbo as the litigation is ongoing.It is currently unclear how borrowers who were already enrolled in income-driven plans are supposed to submit their annual paperwork to certify their incomes. It is also uncertain when or if the payment plan applications will be back up on the website.The continued setbacks in the path towards student loan forgiveness has caused concern among those with debt, and loan forgiveness activists. Critics also point out that removing payment plan options was not a part of the previous litigation.There is also criticism towards the DoE’s decision to quietly remove the applications rather than announcing it, with the department opting instead to post a banner on StudentAid.gov.The Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC), a non-profit dedicated to eliminating student debt in the US, released a statement in response to the sudden removal.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Shutting down access to all income-based repayment plans is not what the 8th Circuit ordered—this was a choice by the Trump Administration and a cruel one that will inflict massive pain on millions of working families,” the statement says.It goes on to say: “President Trump campaigned on lower costs, but once again has chosen a path that will ensure the greatest possible harm to the monthly budgets of everyday working families.” More

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      US students rally college voters on campus: ‘We brought the polls to them’

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      College students formed a steady line outside a campus art museum to vote early on Tuesday at a pop-up polling place at the University of Minnesota.The one-day site, enabled by new state laws that allow for pop-up early voting, helps populations like student voters, who may not have access to transportation to get off campus, easily access the polls.“We brought the polls to them,” said Riley Hetland, a sophomore and undergraduate student government civic engagement director, who helped plan the event.Hetland said the group has been going to classrooms and hosting tables around campus for weeks to get people registered to vote and help them make a plan to cast ballots. So far, they have gotten 12,000 students to pledge to vote, double their goal of 6,000, a sign of the enthusiasm young people have to perform their civic duty in the presidential election, she said. More than 600 people voted during the seven hours the pop-up site was open on Tuesday, organizers said.Across the country, college campuses and campaigns have ramped up efforts to register and energize college voters, especially in critical swing states. The Democratic party is counting on high turnout on college campuses, which tend to lean Democratic..Kamala Harris’s campaign on Wednesday announced it was launching an early voting push targeting students on campuses in battleground states, including a seven-figure ad buy to primarily target students on social media.College campuses are also organizing their own get-out-thevote efforts. At the University of California Berkeley, hundreds of students came together recently for an event called Votechella, which featured music and on-site voter registration, the state university system said. The name is a nod to Coachella, the popular music festival held annually in southern California.At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, students have reacted positively to outreach efforts on campus, where a second voting hub opened on Monday, according to CBS News.Nevaeh McVey, a student, told CBS: “I come from a place where I wasn’t really educated about how to vote or who to vote for, and I think getting the younger population to vote is extremely important in times like these. I just think [this initiative] makes it really easy and accessible for us students to do.”The push to mobilize young voters comes as some students are facing challenges in casting their ballot. Leaders of some Republican-controlled states have worked to limit student voting, writing legislation to limit the use of student identification cards as an ID at polls and shuttering on-campus polling precincts.Proponents of these measures claim that they are necessary to prevent voter fraud, while others have railed that voting is too easy for university students.The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin has urged the US justice department to investigate text messages they believe targeted young people to dissuade them from voting. The organization received complaints from voters who received a text that read: “WARNING: Violating WI Statutes 12.13 & 6.18 may result in fines up to $10,000 or 3.5 years in prison. Don’t vote in a state where you’re not eligible.”College students could prove integral in tipping swing states, as they are traditionally permitted to vote either in their home state or where they attend school. Some students have registered in the state where they believe their vote might have the most impact.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We’ve seen dozens of elections up and down the ballot over the course of the last few years that have been decided by as close as one vote,” Clarissa Unger, co-founder and executive director of Students Learn Students Vote Coalition, told ABC News.“Every single college student’s vote can be consequential.”Throughout the day on Tuesday, the line for the pop-up site in Minnesota held dozens of people who passed by between classes, came to campus specifically for the voting site or walked over from their dorms. A 30ft inflatable eagle helped set a fun atmosphere for voting – and the free pizza didn’t hurt.There are election day polling places on campus, but the pop-up site is the only on-campus early voting opportunity. And it doesn’t require voters to live in any specific precinct – any Minneapolis voter could cast a ballot there on Tuesday. Joslyn Blass, a senior and undergraduate student government director of government and legislative affairs, said the group has pushed for early voting because there could be various obstacles – like an exam or getting sick – that can get in the way of voting solely on 5 November. “We really prioritize the early voting site, just because you never know what’s gonna happen,” she said.Madelyn Ekstrand finished her class for the day and waited about an hour to cast her ballot. The 21-year-old senior said abortion access and the climate crisis were important to her, so she was voting for Harris.“I’m happy to see people my age getting out and voting and being proactive and not waiting till the last second,” she said. More