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    Canadian universities report jump in US applicants amid Trump crackdown

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    More students living in the United States are applying to Canadian universities or expressing interest in studying north of the border as Donald Trump cuts federal funding to universities and revokes foreign student visas.Officials at the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Vancouver campus said the school reported a 27% jump in graduate applications as of 1 March from US citizens for programs starting in the 2025 academic year, compared with all of 2024.UBC Vancouver briefly reopened admissions to US citizens for several graduate programs this week with plans to fast-track applications from US students hoping to begin studies in September.University of Toronto, Canada’s largest university by number of students, also reported more US applications by its January deadline for 2025 programs, while a University of Waterloo spokesperson reported an increase in US visitors to campus and more web traffic originating from the United States since September.Gage Averill, UBC Vancouver’s provost and vice-president of academics, attributed the spike in US applications to the Trump administration abruptly revoking visas of foreign students and increased scrutiny of their social media activity.“That, as a result, and especially as a result of the very recent crackdown on visas in the United States for international students, and now the development of a center that’s reading foreign students’ social media accounts,” Averill said.The administration has frozen hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for numerous universities, pressing them to make policy changes and citing what it claims is a failure to fight antisemitism on campus. It has detained and begun deportation proceedings against some foreign students who took part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, while visas for hundreds of other students have been canceled – actions that have raised concerns about speech and academic freedoms in the US. At the same time, Canada has capped the number of international students allowed to enter the country for the second year in a row, meaning there may be fewer spots for US and other international students.Canada’s immigration ministry said it expects learning institutions to only accept the number of students they can support, including providing housing options. Provinces and territories are responsible for distributing spaces under the cap, the ministry said.The University of Toronto, considered an alternative to US Ivy League schools, said it was seeing a “meaningful increase” in applications from those living or studying in the US over previous years. University of Waterloo, which is known for its technical graduate programs and churns out top-notch engineering talent, said some faculties including engineering have seen increased interest and applications from students in the US.“We have seen an increase in US visitors to the UW visitors centre on campus, and web traffic that originates in the US has increased by 15% since September 2024,” a University of Waterloo spokesperson said.It did not specify whether these students were foreign students studying in the US or US citizens.Averill said UBC has seen only a modest 2% increase in undergraduate applications for this year’s programs, which closed around the time of Trump’s inauguration. However, interest appears to be growing, with campus tour requests from US students up by 20%.“We were concerned about the United States universities, our sister institutions in the US, who are under enormous pressure right now,” said Averill, referring in particular to the Trump administration’s efforts to withhold funds from universities that continue with diversity and equity initiatives or study climate science.According to UBC’s annual report, the United States ranks as one of the top three countries for international student enrollment. Currently, about 1,500 US students are enrolled in both graduate and undergraduate programs at the university’s two campuses. More

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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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      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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      Why fascists hate universities | Jason Stanley

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      In Bangladesh, something remarkable has happened. Initially in response to a quota system that reserved the majority of government jobs for specific groups, university students initiated large-scale non-violent protests. Bangladesh’s increasingly autocratic prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, responded essentially with “let them eat cake.” Instead of calming the protests down, Hasina’s response made the protests grow nationwide.In mid-July, the government responded with extreme violence, with police gunning down hundreds of students and shutting down the internet across the country. Scenes of extreme police brutality flooded social media. By the end of July, the protests had grown into a nationwide pro-democracy movement. Eventually, the military joined the students, and Hasina fled the country. A nationwide student-led democracy movement successfully challenged a violent autocratic leader, and, at least for now, appears to have won.Bangladesh’s non-violent student movement has not gone unnoticed in neighboring countries. In Pakistan, the popular former prime minister and leader of the opposition party, Imran Khan, was jailed a year ago, an act dictated by Pakistan’s military. Media companies were instructed not to mention his name, quote his words, or show his picture. Members of his opposition party were imprisoned. But something astonishing has begun there. Motivated by the success of the student-led pro-democracy movement in Bangladesh, the Pakistan Students Federation declared an ultimatum for the government: free Khan by 30 August or face nationwide student protests.What has happened in Bangladesh and now could happen in Pakistan is the nightmare of every autocratic regime. Authoritarians and would-be authoritarians are only too aware that universities are primary sites of critique and dissent. Attacks on universities are the canary in the coalmine of fascism.Narendra Modi, India’s autocratic Hindu nationalist prime minister, has ruled the country since 2014. Attacking India’s elite universities as “anti-India” is a hallmark of his government. Similarly, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, started a political campaign with an attack on Central European University in Budapest, with demagogic rhetoric directed against its supposed spreading of “gender ideology”. With the use of legislation, Orbán’s government went so far as to drive the university out of the country.The situation is structurally the same in the United States – would-be authoritarians and one-party states centrally target universities with the aim of restricting dissent. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, is an aspiring autocrat who has used the myth of widespread voter fraud to severely restrict minority voting. (Voter fraud practically never happens in the United States; rigorous investigation estimated it as between 0.0003 and 0.0025%.) DeSantis also created an office of election crimes and security, to pursue supposed cases of voter fraud.Besides minority voting populations, DeSantis has focused on public and higher education as central targets. According to an AAUP report by the special committee on political interference and academic freedom in Florida’s public education system in May 2023, “academic freedom, tenure and shared governance in Florida’s public colleges and universities currently face a politically and ideologically driven assault unparalleled in US history.” The committee’s final report reveals an atmosphere of intimidation and indeed terror, as the administrative threat to public university professors has been shown to be very real.Even more so than Florida, Tennessee is a one-party state, with a Republican governor and a Republican supermajority in the legislature. The Tennessee house and senate passed a resolution to honor the Danube Institute; on the floor of the Tennessee house, the state representative Justin Jones questioned why the state was honoring the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán’s thinktank. Tennessee has a state ban on the teaching of “divisive concepts”, one that includes public universities. To report a professor for teaching such a concept (such as intersectionality), Tennessee provides an online form.Attacks on voting, and democratic systems generally, almost invariably center on universities, and vice versa. The Yale Law School graduate and current Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance has claimed that the 2020 election should not have been certified because of suspicion of voter fraud. In a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, Vance also proclaimed, echoing Richard Nixon: “The professors are the enemy.”In the fall of 2023, in response to Israel’s brutal retaliation in Gaza for Hamas’s terrorist attack, anti-genocide protests erupted in American universities, with the active participation of a significant number of Jewish students. These anti-genocide protests were labeled as pro-Hamas and used as a basis to attack elite universities, their students, their professors and their administrations, verbally, politically and physically. It is not implausible to take the goal to have been, at least largely, a preliminary show of police power to university students.In the United States, the Republican party has long been aware of the democratic potential of student movements. As it lurches closer and closer to authoritarianism, it will, like all rightwing authoritarian movements worldwide, seek to crush dissent, starting with university students and faculty. With great courage and determination, the students in Bangladesh have shown that this strategy can be made to backfire.

      Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, and author of Erasing History: How Fascists rewrite the Past to Control the Future More

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      Dozens arrested at Columbia University as New York police disperse Gaza protest

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      Dozens of students have been arrested after hundreds of New York City police officers entered Columbia University on Tuesday night to clear out an academic building that had been taken over as part of a pro-Palestinian protest.Live video images showed police in riot gear marching on the campus in upper Manhattan, the focal point of nationwide student protests opposing Israel’s war in Gaza. Police used an armoured vehicle with a bridging mechanism to gain entry to the second floor of the building.Officers said they used flash-bangs to disperse the crowd, but denied using teargas as part of the operation.Before long, officers were seen leading protesters handcuffed with zip ties to a line of police buses waiting outside campus gates. NYPD spokesman Carlos Nieves said he had no immediate reports of any injuries following the arrests.View image in fullscreen“We’re clearing it out,” police yelled as they marched up to the barricaded entrance to the building.“Shame! Shame!” jeered many onlooking students still outside on campus.One protester at Columbia, who only gave their name as Sophie, told the Guardian that police had barricaded protesters inside buildings before making arrests. “It will not be forgotten,” she said. “This is no longer an Israel-Palestine issue. It’s a human rights and free speech and a Columbia student issue.”The police operation, which was largely over within a couple of hours, follow nearly two weeks of tensions, with pro-Palestinian protesters at the university ignoring an ultimatum on Monday to abandon their encampment or risk suspension. On Tuesday, Columbia University officials threatened academic expulsion of the students who had seized Hamilton Hall, an eight-story neo-classical building blocked by protesters who linked arms to form a barricade and chanted pro-Palestinian slogans.The university said in a statement on Tuesday it had asked police to enter the campus to “restore safety and order to our community”.View image in fullscreenIt said: “After the university learned overnight that Hamilton Hall had been occupied, vandalized, and blockaded, we were left with no choice. Columbia public safety personnel were forced out of the building, and a member of our facilities team was threatened. We will not risk the safety of our community or the potential for further escalation.”The university reiterated the view that the group who “broke into and occupied the building” was being led by individuals who are “not affiliated with the university”.It added: “The decision to reach out to the NYPD was in response to the actions of the protesters, not the cause they are championing.”View image in fullscreenNew York congressman Jamaal Bowman said he was “outraged” by the level of police presence at Columbia and other New York universities. He said on X: “The militarization of college campuses, extensive police presence, and arrest of hundreds of students are in direct opposition to the role of education as a cornerstone of our democracy.”Bowman has called on the Columbia administration to stop the “dangerous escalation before it leads to further harm” and allow faculty back on to campus.Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, has requested that police retain a presence until at least 17 May “to maintain order and ensure encampments are not reestablished”. Earlier, Shafik said efforts to reach a compromise with protest organisers had failed and that the institution would not bow to demands to divest from Israel.Separately, the New York Times reported dozens of arrests at City College of New York, part of the City University of New York system (CUNY), when some students left Columbia and moved north to the campus where a protest sit-in was still in effect.One protester who offered their name as OS, told the Guardian: “We need to keep protesting peacefully and the truth needs to come out. This is a genocide happening in front of us, and the people in power are allowing this to happen.“It’s scary to speak out because so many people are losing their tuition or being fired from jobs.”An NYPD official confirmed that CUNY had requested that police enter the campus to disperse protesters.An encampment at the public college has been going since Thursday and students had attempted to occupy an academic building earlier on Tuesday.At a Tuesday evening news briefing, Mayor Eric Adams and city police officials said the Hamilton Hall takeover was instigated by “outside agitators” who lack any affiliation with Columbia and are known to law enforcement for provoking lawlessness.Adams suggested some of the student protesters were not fully aware of “external actors” in their midst.“We cannot and will not allow what should be a peaceful gathering to turn into a violent spectacle that serves no purpose. We cannot wait until this situation becomes even more serious. This must end now,” the mayor said.Neither Adams nor the university provided specific evidence to back up that contention.One of the student leaders of the protest, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian scholar attending Columbia’s school of international and public affairs on a student visa, disputed assertions that outsiders had initiated the occupation. “They’re students,” he told Reuters.View image in fullscreenHamilton Hall was one of several buildings occupied during a 1968 civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protest on the campus. This week, student protesters, displayed a large banner that reads “Hind’s Hall”, renaming it in honor of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl from Gaza City who was killed by Israeli forces earlier this year.Columbia journalism professor Seyma Beyram, said on X that she and her journalism school colleagues were trapped on one block surrounded by police barricades. “All I can document right now are students getting put on one of the buses.”On Tuesday night, Columbia’s student radio station reported that Jelani Cobb, the dean of the journalism school, was threatened with arrest if he and others in the building came out. “Free, free, free Palestine,” chanted protesters outside the building. Others yelled: “Let the students go.”At CUNY as the police moved off, one student said: “We de-escalated , and now the police are leaving. We’re proud of standing up for something. All we’re saying is were not happy university tuition fees are being used to fund wars, and we want to see what we can do about it, but without violence.”Reuters contributed to this report More

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      USC vetoed a Muslim student’s graduation speech for her pro-Palestinian views. Why? | Mohammed Zain Shafi Khan

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      When Asna Tabassum, a hijab-wearing Muslim, was announced as the valedictorian for the University of Southern California class of 2024, my initial reaction was the thought of my south Asian mother saying, “What are you doing? Why aren’t you valedictorian?” But what followed was pride.Then the university announced last week that it would no longer allow Tabassum to speak at commencement. After pro-Israel groups mischaracterized Tabassum’s pro-Palestinian views as “antisemitic”, the USC administration claimed that security concerns made her speech untenable.“I am not surprised by those who attempt to propagate hatred,” Tabassum, a friend of mine, wrote in a statement. “I am surprised that my own university – my home for four years – has abandoned me.”USC has not just abandoned an accomplished student, but also nearly 1,000 Muslims on campus. I happen to be one of them.Right now, the reality of being a Muslim student is intertwined with the university’s decision to rescind Tabassum’s well-earned honour. We were teased by our institution, taunted even, as they refuse to publicly stand by their choice.As a Muslim, the lack of support scares me. My hijab-wearing friends have been called terrorists and spat at; my Palestinian peer has had their car broken into and their Qur’an torn and I am judged for wearing a keffiyeh to class or having a sticker on my laptop that reads “Free Palestine”.When Arab and Muslim students are directly affected, the university’s silence makes its position clear.When the office of the president can release a statement condemning Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October, but not one condemning Israel for killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, it makes the university’s position clear.And when the university refuses to publicly support its choice for valedictorian, again the school’s position is clear.Understandably, students and faculty are upset and angry. Last Friday, 11 members of the USC advisory committee on Muslim life resigned “in protest against the university administration’s decision to revoke Asna Tabassum’s valedictory address at commencement”.This committee was convened by the president “to consider a number of tangible solutions to support Muslim students, faculty and staff”. But now, when USC cannot support one student, I doubt it wants to support any of us.This is what it is to be Muslim at a college campus: enraged, scared and robbed of the hope that Tabassum represents. As a student, I placed my trust in this institution that has taught me, but that trust has waned.As a journalist, I am also alarmed. This profession, this institution, and its foundation are based upon the free exchange of ideas and the freedom to share those ideas. The cowardice of hiding behind the veil of “safety concerns” is appalling. Furthermore, California’s Leonard Law stipulates that even private universities like USC are obliged to uphold speech protected by the first amendment.USC seems to not just be above the law, but also hypocritical. Just last semester, the Turkish ambassador and Azerbaijani consul-general were on campus as part of an event hosted by the university during the height of Azerbaijan’s military campaign against the majority-Armenian region of Artsakh, also known as Nagorno Karabakh. The Armenian community on campus was facing tragedy, watching their people being starved and mourning their loss.When students demanded that the university, especially at such a time, rescind its invitation to the delegation, the university refused, arguing that doing so would infringe the delegation’s freedom to speak.The provost’s office sent out an email about USC’s commitment to academic freedom, writing: “These freedoms are outlined within the USC policy on free speech and serve to protect the viewpoints – no matter how controversial or unpopular – of all members of our community.” In response to the protests, the university also increased security for the delegation – an option the university failed to provide Tabassum.Freedom of speech was protected then. Just not now.While the university may have made its decision, the students have made one for themselves too: “Let her speak.” Over 300 students recently marched in solidarity with Tabassum, demanding that the USC administration reinvite the valedictorian to speak at commencement. The university did just the opposite. With a decision that has enraged the class of 2024, USC has instead “released” all its outside speakers from speaking during the main commencement ceremony. This means that keynote speaker Jon M Chu will not be speaking at commencement. Tabassum will not be speaking at commencement. The only person who will be speaking is Carol Folt, USC’s president. And, respectfully, no graduate who has worked tirelessly for four years wants to just hear from the president.Instead of emailing students about this change, the administration simply updated the commencement website and posted an Instagram story.If the aim of the university is to maintain the safety and security of its 65,000 graduation attendees, it may have achieved that. Because, in all fairness, who is going to attend this graduation now, and for what? Graduating students are not represented, they are not excited and right now they are angry – even more so given that many of them never had their high school graduation, due to Covid.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut all of the above is moot at this point. The university has now gone further and announced that it has simply canceled the main stage graduation ceremony – again citing unnamed safety concerns following a day of peaceful protest that only turned violent with the university-sanctioned introduction of law enforcement.But if the university can promptly expel hundreds of non-violent protesters from campus less than 24 hours after their occupation began, how is it possible that the best a university that charges nearly $70,000 per year could do is cancel the entire event?I refuse to believe these choices were about security. From the start, it’s been about restricting Tabassum from speaking. It’s been about USC failing to stand up for its Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students.The university has chosen to be on the wrong side of history. It can start repairing some of the harm done by prioritizing the needs of its students over protecting its president.USC hasn’t listened to its Muslim students, its Arab students or its Palestinian students when we asked for the university to figure out a way to let Asna Tabassum speak safely. By ignoring our voice, as it did Tabassum’s, USC has silenced us all.For this and many other hasty decisions taken by the university these past two weeks, it’s clear what the next decision should be: let Carol Folt go.
      Mohammed Zain Shafi Khan is a journalist and student at the University of Southern California studying international relations and journalism More

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      From the archive: Political correctness and how the right invented a phantom enemy – podcast

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      We are raiding the Audio Long Reads archives and bringing you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.
      This week: For 25 years, invoking this vague and ever-shifting nemesis has been a favourite tactic of the right – and Donald Trump’s victory is its greatest triumph. By Moira Weigel

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      Rudy Giuliani and Death in Venice | Brief letters

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      Re your report (Proportion of students in England awarded first-class degrees soars, 19 November), I got my BA degree from Nottingham University in 1970. When we began our final year we were told that there would be no first-class degrees for politics students that year. “We mark on the bell curve,” they said. “And we get one first per 30 students. There are only 15 students each year for politics, and a student got a first last year. So none of you lot can get one.”Stephen ReesVancouver, Canada
      • To while away the time during this lockdown, we are going through over 40 years of photographic slides. To save space, we are digitising the slides and discarding the originals. We now have a large number of empty yellow plastic boxes. Suggestions, please, for alternative uses – like 35mm film canisters, they must be useful for something!Elizabeth and Les BrettWelling, London
      • “Unintentional” bullying surely implies a lack of empathy, compassion and self-awareness (Bullying inquiry ‘found evidence Priti Patel broke ministerial code’, 19 November). Strange characteristics for a British home secretary, especially in the aftermath of the Windrush fiasco.Sandy DerbyshireLondon
      • What a metaphor. Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye running down his face (Donald Trump mounts all-out assault on election result in Michigan, 19 November) reminded me of the closing scenes of Death in Venice.Angela BogleBakewell, Derbyshire
      • Your editorial (18 November) rightly condemns the cronyism displayed by the Tories in their procurement of PPE, but let’s give it its proper name: looting.Deirdre BurrellMortimer, Berkshire More