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    Trump’s war on Harvard was decades in the making. This letter proves it | Bernard Harcourt

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    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

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      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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      Trump signs proclamation to restrict foreign student visas at Harvard

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      Donald Trump signed a proclamation to restrict foreign student visas at Harvard University, the White House said on Wednesday.The order would suspend for an initial six months the entry into the US of foreign nationals seeking to study or participate in exchange programs at Harvard. Trump declared that it would jeopardize national security to allow Harvard to continue hosting foreign students.The proclamation is the US president’s latest attempt to choke the Ivy League school from an international pipeline that accounts for a quarter of the student body, and a further escalation in the White House’s fight with the institution.“I have determined that the entry of the class of foreign nationals described above is detrimental to the interests of the United States because, in my judgment, Harvard’s conduct has rendered it an unsuitable destination for foreign students and researchers,” Trump wrote in the order.Trump’s proclamation also directs the US state department to consider revoking academic or exchange visas of any current Harvard students who meet his proclamation’s criteria.Harvard in a statement called Trump’s proclamation “yet another illegal retaliatory step taken by the Administration in violation of Harvard’s First Amendment rights.”“Harvard will continue to protect its international students.”Trump singled out Harvard’s connections with China as reason for cutting off the university from foreign students. The proclamation said Harvard was linked to research that “could advance China’s military modernisation”.The statement also said Harvard was considered the top “party school” for Chinese Communist party bureaucrats and noted that the daughter of Xi Jinping, China’s leader, attended in the early 2010s.In the early 2000s, Harvard ran a “China Leaders in Development” programme in conjunction with Tsinghua University in Beijing for Chinese government officials.“I don’t think this is going to benefit US universities at all,” said a Chinese undergraduate student with an offer to study at Harvard on a master’s degree starting next term who asked that his name be withheld. “It’s causing normal people, us students, a lot of anxiety.”The Trump administration has been engaged in a tense standoff with Harvard, the US’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 its demands to control the school’s governance, curriculum and the ideology of its faculty and students.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarvard sued after the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, on 22 May announced her department was immediately revoking Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, which allows it to enrol foreign students.Her action was almost immediately temporarily blocked by a Boston court. 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.Trump’s order on Wednesday invokes a different legal authority than the earlier move by the Department of Homeland Security. The legal justification for the ban, Trump said, are sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act, “which authorize the President to suspend entry of any class of aliens whose entry would be detrimental to the interests of the United States”.Trump officials have repeatedly raised the stakes and sought new fronts to pressure Harvard, cutting more than $2.6bn in research grants and moving to end all federal contracts with the university. The latest threat has targeted Harvard’s roughly 7,000 international students, who account for half the enrolment at some Harvard graduate schools.“President Trump wants our institutions to have foreign students, but believes that the foreign students should be people that can love our country,” the White House said in a fact sheet about the proclamation.Wednesday’s two-page directive said Harvard had “demonstrated a history of concerning foreign ties and radicalism” and had “extensive entanglements with foreign adversaries” including China.As well as the spat with Harvard, the White House has pledged to “aggressively revoke” visas for Chinese students across the country, especially those with links to the CCP or in “critical fields”. More

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      ‘They are in shock’: Indian students fear Trump has ended their American dream

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      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

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      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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      Jewish organizers are increasingly confronting Trump: ‘The repression is growing, but so is the resistance’

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      On the morning of Columbia University’s commencement last week, an intergenerational group of Jewish alumni gathered in the rain outside the Manhattan campus’s heavily policed gates, wearing keffiyehs and shirts emblazoned with the words “not in our name”. Two had graduated more than 60 years earlier, and one spoke of having fled the Nazis to the US as a child. Others recalled participating in Columbia protests of the past, including those that led the university to divest from apartheid South Africa.They spoke as alumni and as Jews to condemn the university’s investments in Israel, its repression of pro-Palestinian speech, and its capitulation to the Trump administration’s assault on academic freedom in the name of fighting antisemitism on campus. They had planned to burn their Columbia diplomas in protest, but the rain got in their way, so many ripped them to pieces instead.“As a Jewish person, I’m really appalled at the idea that they are trying to make it sound as if opposing genocide is somehow antisemitic,” said Josh Dubnau, a professor at Stony Brook University who received a PhD from Columbia in 1995 and led the protest. “There are thousands of us who don’t believe in the right of the Jewish people to ethnically cleanse Palestine. There were Jews thousands of years before Zionism, and there will be Jews when Zionism is in the dustbin of history.”Another alumna, who graduated last year after being suspended over her participation in campus protests, wore a graduation gown and carried the photo of one of nearly 15,000 Palestinian students killed in Gaza during the current war.“We have a particular duty to show up as Jews because we are not being actively targeted in the way that Palestinian students, Muslim students and Arab students are,” said the student, who asked to remain anonymous. “It’s our duty to weaponise our privilege as Jewish students.” New York police arrested her along with another protester after they set their Columbia diplomas on fire.View image in fullscreenNineteen months into Israel’s war in Gaza and the US protest movement it prompted, allegations of antisemitism on campuses have become one of the primary pretexts for the Trump administration’s multipronged attack on higher education, including billions in funding cuts, demands universities submit to a string of measures curtailing their academic freedom, and the detention and attempted deportation of international students who expressed pro-Palestinian views.But increasingly, Jewish students, faculty and alumni are pushing back against the exploitation of antisemitism charges to justify repressive policies they say do not represent their Jewish values. They have written letters, led protests, lobbied legislators and denounced what they say is the systematic exclusion of Jewish perspectives that are critical of Israel from the national conversation over antisemitism.Jewish Americans – some identifying as “anti-Zionists”, others with a range of views about Israel – have been at the forefront of the movement against the war in Gaza. Last summer, some 200 people, almost all Jewish, were arrested at a protest on Capitol Hill a day before a visit by Benjamin Netanyahu. Earlier this year, more than 350 rabbis, along with more Jewish creatives and activists, signed a New York Times ad denouncing Donald Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse Gaza.But Jewish-led organising has broadened in recent months. As Jewish Americans continue to protest the war, they are also taking on Trump’s onslaught against higher education in the name of Jewish safety, rallying around detained students and condemning what they view as the exploitation of antisemitism in the service of a rightwing political project. In yet another New York Times ad, several former heads of leading Jewish advocacy groups, including conservative ones like Aipac and Hillel International, criticised US Jewish groups that “have been far too silent about the stunning assault on democratic norms and the rule of law” under Trump.“The repression has been growing, but so has the resistance,” said Marianne Hirsch, a retired literature professor at Columbia University, who researches memory and the Holocaust and is outspoken against efforts to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. “I’m seeing a really cross-generational, Jewish faculty, student, and community mobilisation against this narrative.”A need for nuanceJewish Americans’ views on Israel, the war in Gaza, antisemitism on campuses and the Trump administration’s actions are far more complex than mainstream political discourse may suggest.A recent poll by the Jewish Voters Resource Center found that a majority of Jewish Americans are concerned about antisemitism and say they are “emotionally attached” to Israel, although older respondents poll much higher on both questions than younger ones. But the survey also found that 64% disapprove of Trump’s policies to purportedly combat antisemitism, and 61% believe arresting and deporting pro-Palestinian protesters contribute to increased antisemitism. A rightwing Israeli thinktank found last year that one-third of American Jews believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.While large numbers of Jewish students point to feelings of ostracization on campus in the last year and a half, their views on the campus protests vary widely. A qualitative study of the experiences of Jewish students, published this month, criticizes representations of campus life that “compartmentalize students into either/or categories, diminishing nuances between them”. The authors point to “a need for nuanced discussions about Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish identity that respect generational differences and diverse perspectives”.View image in fullscreenBut tackling complex questions – for instance, about when anti-Zionism veers into antisemitism – has become difficult in an increasingly repressive climate. “It is making it impossible to have discussions in the classroom,” said Joel Swanson, a Jewish studies professor at Sarah Lawrence College.Swanson noted that many Jewish Americans are now mobilising against precisely the kind of repression their ancestors came to the US to escape. “The very liberal principles that have enabled Jewish thriving in the United States are being chipped away at systematically, one by one,” he said.Many of those who identify as anti-Zionist have found a home under the umbrella of Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-Palestinian Jewish group whose membership has doubled since the war started – to 32,000 dues-paying members – and whose student chapters were banned from several campuses during last year’s protests. In Baltimore, earlier this month, members of the group’s dozens of chapters gathered for a national convening. Over four days of workshops at the heavily secured event, participants talked about organising from campuses to religious spaces to promote a “Judaism beyond Zionism”, as the conference tagline read, as well as address authoritarianism in the US.Leaning on JewishnessAs US universities have become political battlefields, much Jewish organising is happening on campuses and academic spaces.Responding to what they view as a crisis in their scholarly field precipitated by Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, Hirsch, the Columbia scholar and others have launched a multidisciplinary Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network, a group of mostly Jewish academics invoking their expertise to advocate against universities capitulating to authoritarianism.Jewish faculty and students have also organised in defense of pro-Palestinian students detained by the Trump administration. Following the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian permanent resident and Columbia University graduate who has been detained for nearly three months with no charges, more than 3,400 Jewish faculty across the country signed a letter to denounce “without equivocation, anyone who invokes our name – and cynical claims of antisemitism – to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities”. Several Jewish students and faculty wrote letters to the court in support of Khalil. And Jewish groups and synagogues filed a court briefing in support of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Tufts University student who was detained over an op-ed critical of Israel and released earlier this month as her case continues.“Jewish people came to America to escape generations of similar predations,” they wrote. “Yet the images of Ozturk’s arrest in twenty-first century Massachusetts evoke the oppressive tactics employed by the authoritarian regimes that many ancestors of [our] members left behind in Odessa, Kishinev, and Warsaw.”View image in fullscreenFaculty and students have also denounced congressional hearings against antisemitism on campuses that they say misrepresent their experiences and exclude their perspectives. As their president prepared to face legislators for a fresh round of antisemitism hearings in Congress this month, Jewish faculty and students at Haverford College issued a statement saying that their voices “have absolutely not been represented in the current public discussion of antisemitism” and questioning the credibility of mostly non-Jewish, Republican legislators leading the battle over antisemitism on campuses.Earlier this month, a group of Jewish students from Columbia University visited Congress to talk to legislators about their participation in campus protests that politicians paint as antisemitic, bringing their views “to lawmakers who are almost never hearing from that specific perspective”, said Beth Miller, the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace’s action group, who accompanied the group.As the Trump administration has sought to justify its repressive measures in their names, many American Jews have found themselves invoking their Jewishness in a public way for the first time. “We’ve been criticising identity politics and the way everything gets siloed into identities, and suddenly we find ourselves saying ‘as Jewish faculty’ or ‘as the daughter of Holocaust survivors’,” said Hirsch.“I’ve always tried to steer clear of having a public Jewish identity. I never felt like I had to advertise it,” echoed Joshua Moses, an anthropology professor at Haverford College. “But this moment kind of demands it.” More

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      Trump administration orders US embassies to stop student visa interviews

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      The Trump administration has ordered US embassies worldwide to immediately stop scheduling visa interviews for foreign students as it prepares to implement comprehensive social media screening for all international applicants.A Tuesday state department cable instructs consular sections to pause adding “any additional student or exchange visitor (F, M, and J) visa appointment capacity until further guidance is issued” within days.The directive, first reported by Politico and now confirmed by the Guardian, could severely delay visa processing and hurt universities – many of which Donald Trump accuses of having far-left ideologies – that rely heavily on foreign students for revenue.“The department is conducting a review of existing operations and processes for screening and vetting of student and exchange visitor visa applicants,” the cable reads. Officials plan to issue guidance on “expanded social media vetting for all such applicants”.The freeze is a further escalation from current screening measures, which have primarily targeted students who participated in pro-Palestinian campus protests. Since March, consular officers have been required to conduct mandatory social media reviews looking for evidence of support for “terrorist activity or a terrorist organization” which could be as broad as showing support for the Palestinian cause, according to a cable obtained by the Guardian at the time. That directive required officers to take screenshots of “potentially derogatory” content for permanent records, even if posts were later deleted.The new expansion would apply social media vetting to all student visa applicants, not just those flagged for activism. Under the screening process, consular officers would examine applicants’ posts, shares, and comments across platforms such as Instagram, X, and TikTok for content they deem to be threatening to national security, which has since been tied in to the Trump administration’s stance on combating antisemitism.Rubio told senators last week that his department has revoked visas numbering “probably in the thousands at this point”, up from more than 300 reported in March. “I don’t know the latest count, but we probably have more to do,” he said.There are more than one million foreign students in the United States, contributing nearly $43.8bn to the US economy and supporting more than 378,000 jobs in 2023 to 2024, according to NAFSA. The visa freeze threatens to compound existing challenges facing higher education institutions already experiencing declining international enrollment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe state department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

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      Former Harvard president urges people to ‘speak out’ against threats to US democracy

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      A recent former president of Harvard University urged people to “speak out” in defense of “foundational threats” to values such as freedom, autonomy and democracy in the US, as those whose deaths for such causes in war were being honored on Memorial Day.Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard, also warned on Monday of US constitutional checks and the rule of law being “at risk” under the current administration, even as Donald Trump issued a fresh threat against the elite university as it seeks to repel his assaults on its independence and funding.“We are being asked not to charge into … artillery fire but only to speak up and to stand up in the face of foundational threats to the principles for which [the US civil war dead] gave the last full measure of devotion. We have been entrusted with their legacy. Can we trust ourselves to uphold it?” Faust wrote in a guest opinion essay for the New York Times.She highlighted, in particular, the principles fought and died for by Union soldiers in the US civil war and the roles played by assassinated US president Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and leading Black civil rights leader of the 19th century.“We must honor these men,” she wrote.Faust, who led Harvard between 2007 and 2018 and still teaches there, did not mention the US president by name but she referred to his position and made a direct link between the civil war and now.Noting that about 2.7 million men, mostly volunteers, in 1861-1865 “took up arms to preserve the Union as a beacon of democracy at a time when representative government seemed to be fading from the earth”, she went on to warn: “Today democracy is once again under worldwide threat, assailed as disorderly and inefficient by autocratic leaders from Budapest to Moscow to Beijing, leaders our own president openly admires.”View image in fullscreenFaust said that Lincoln regarded the Confederacy’s split from the Union, when southern states seceded in order to defend slavery and evade federal government intervention, as a “direct assault” on government by the majority “held in restraint” by constitutional checks.“Those structured checks and the rule of law that embodies and enacts them are once again at risk as we confront the subservience of Congress, the defiance of judicial mandates and the arrogation of presidential power in a deluge of unlawful executive orders,” she wrote in her essay.Critics of Trump lament congressional Republicans’ acquiescence to the president’s expansions of his authority and challenges to constitutional constraints, Democrats’ lackluster resistance, and the administration’s defiance of court orders over various anti-immigration extremes and partisan firings of federal officials and watchdogs without cause.Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly accused Harvard of antisemitism and bias against Jewish students and attacked its efforts towards greater diversity on campus, and the administration has further demanded cooperation with federal immigration authorities, while harnessing federal powers to try to punish the university.Last Friday, Harvard sued prominent government departments and cabinet secretaries for what it said was a “blatant violation” of the US constitution when the Trump administration announced it would revoke federal permission for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based institution to enroll international students. A federal judge issued an injunction within hours, temporarily blocking such a ban.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarvard had previously sued in April over what it said was Trump’s attempt to “gain control of academic decision-making” at the university and the administration’s threat to review about $9bn in federal funding.On Monday, Trump posted on his social media platform: “I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,” adding: “What a great investment that would be for the USA.”By Monday afternoon the president had not followed up with action or further explanation or statements.Harvard’s current president, Alan Garber, who is Jewish, has called the Trump demands “illegal” and said the administration was trying “to control whom we hire and what we teach”.Faust, a historian and research professor at Harvard, who was also its first president to have been raised in the US south, concluded her essay by acknowledging that those who fought in the US civil war did, in fact, save the nation and subsequently gave opportunities to the generations that followed.“They were impelled to risk all by a sense of obligation to the future,” she wrote, adding that “we possess a reciprocal obligation to the past” and that “we must not squander what they bequeathed to us”. More

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      Trump’s revenge spree on Harvard echoes well beyond education | Jan-Werner Müller

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      In record time, a court has at least temporarily put a stop to the Trump administration’s latest attack on Harvard University, part of a larger retaliation spree that began in April.On Thursday, Kristi Noem had revoked Harvard’s certification to host international students, causing fear and existential uncertainty for thousands of young people and their families. The swift restraining order comes as a relief. But it is no cause for complacency.Attacks will not stop, and it is naive to think that this is all primarily a Harvard problem, or even only a challenge to higher education. Noem’s letter to Harvard makes clear that Trump and his sycophants will weaponize the state against anyone who incurs their displeasure. Courts may prevent the worst, but the whole pattern has to end if we want to have any hope of living in a country free of fear and featuring at least minimum respect for the rule of law.As Harvard’s lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security rightly pointed out, Noem’s revocation fits into the Trump administration’s orgy of vengeance prompted by Harvard’s refusal to comply with evidently illegal demands issued in mid-April. Among other things, Trumpists had asserted their right to determine appropriate levels of “viewpoint diversity” among faculty and students. After Harvard sued, $2.2bn in research funds were frozen, followed by Linda McMahon, the education secretary, asserting at a cabinet meeting on 30 April that Harvard was failing to report “foreign money that comes in”. This line of attack has now been extended with absurd claims that Harvard “coordinates with the Chinese Communist Party” and is somehow “pro-terrorist”.The background noise to the official letters has been a steady stream of social media posts from the president, throwing invective at Harvard instead of conducting the serious government business of maligning Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift. The founder of a university whose attendees received a $25m settlement has accused the US’s oldest university of “scamming the public”, constituting a “threat to democracy”, and exposing innocent young Americans to “crazed lunatics” (as opposed to non-crazed lunatics). It is a well-known pattern in authoritarian regimes that underlings try to please the leader by anticipating his wishes and imitating his style. Official letters, posts, and press statements from DHS and the Department of Education not only fail to provide evidence and violate procedural safeguards; they not only make up ad hoc demands that have no basis in law; they also contain the signature capital letters, spelling mistakes, and kindergarten-level invective familiar from the president’s rhetoric. It is governance driven by a desire to please Fox viewers, online Maga mobs, and the Avenger-in-Chief.Incompetence hardly makes the measures harmless. They instill fear even when courts step in (and no, not all Ivy League undergrads are spoilt kids who never have anything to fear). Noem, in a further escalation, demanded footage and audio from all protests at Harvard. It is a clear signal for young people to shut up and fall in line. But there was also a signal to foreign faculty: the letter emphasized that it was a “privilege to employ aliens on campus”. The threat aligns with the nativism of xenophobe-in-chief Stephen Miller, who is not just going after people who are in the country without proper paperwork – foreigners as such are a problem.But Noem’s rhetoric also aligned with the logic of authoritarian populist leaders who claim uniquely to represent what they call “the real people”: even citizens will not be free from the accusation by Trump and his sycophants that they are not proper Americans. Trump, at the April 30th cabinet meeting, declared: “The students they have, the professors they have, the attitude they have, is not American.” And Noem made it clear in her letter that her weaponization of the state will not be confined to campus; she wrote that the “evils of anti-Americanism” have to be rooted out in “society” at large.We can draw larger lessons from this – so far – failed attack (eight investigations, involving six different agencies, are still ongoing). One has to be ready – Harvard’s lawyers clearly were. Universities have to stand with each other; Noem warned all of them that they have to “get their act together” or else. Not least, university leaders have to explain to a larger public how Trumpists, in an unprecedented spree of national self-destruction, are busy preventing cancer cures, damaging American soft power, and killing one of the country’s major exports, namely higher education.As with so many other Trump policies, the assault on universities is actually not popular. Even after years of journalists and some professors priming people to think that campus is controlled by woke commissars and “Marxist maniacs” (Trump’s expression – I am still looking for them in the Economics Department), a clear majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s approach to higher education. Conservatives have stoked resentment of “liberal eggheads” for decades, but when their children get sick, they will still want to have access to the best medical schools; no parents wants their kids, away at college, to become pawns – as the Harvard Crimson put it – in political games and subject to an administration’s caprice. And even JD Vance is unlikely to send his offspring to Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest (no disrespect!).

      Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University More