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      Columbia University caves to demands to restore $400m from Trump administration

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      Columbia University has agreed to a series of changes demanded by the Trump administration as a pre-condition for restoring $400m in federal funding the government pulled this month amid allegations that the school tolerated antisemitism on campus.The university released a memo outlining its agreement with Donald Trump’s administration hours before an extended deadline set by the government was to expire.Columbia acquiesced to most of the administration’s demands in a memo that laid out measures including banning face masks on campus, empowering security officers to remove or arrest individuals, and taking control of the department that offers courses on the Middle East from its faculty.The Ivy League university’s response is being watched by other universities that the administration has sanctioned as it advances its policy objectives in areas ranging from campus protests to transgender sports and diversity initiatives.The administration has warned at least 60 other universities of possible action over alleged failure to comply with federal civil rights laws related to antisemitism. It has also targeted at least three law firms that the president says helped his political opponents or helped prosecute him unfairly.Among the most contentious of the nine demands, Columbia agreed to place its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department under a new official, the memo said, taking control away from its faculty.The university will appoint a new senior administrator to review curriculum and faculty to make sure they are balanced, and provide fresh leadership at the department, which offers courses on Middle Eastern politics and related subjects.The demand had raised alarm among professors at Columbia and elsewhere, who worried that permitting the federal government to dictate how a department is run would set a dangerous precedent.Republican lawmakers in the US House of Representatives last year criticized at least two professors of Palestinian descent working in the department for their comments about the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.The school has also hired three dozen special officers who have the power to arrest people on campus and has revised its anti-discrimination policies, including its authority to sanction campus organizations, the memo said.Face masks to conceal identities are no longer allowed, and any protesters must now identify themselves when asked, the memo said.The school also said it is searching for new faculty members to “ensure intellectual diversity”. Columbia plans to fill joint positions in the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and the international affairs school in an effort to ensure “excellence and fairness in Middle East studies”, the memo said. The sudden shutdown of millions of dollars in federal funding to Columbia University this month was already disrupting medical and scientific research at the school, researchers said. More

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      What is the US Department of Education and what does it do?

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      Donald Trump has taken the overwhelming step of undoing the Department of Education on Thursday by signing an executive order to dismantle the agency in charge of the country’s national education policy.With the stroke of a pen, Trump fulfills a campaign promise he made all the way back in 2016.What is the Department of Education?The Department of Education is a cabinet-level agency created by Jimmy Carter in 1979 to oversee national education policy and administer federal assistance programs for schools across the country.The department manages a budget of approximately $268bn and employs about 4,400 staff members. Its core responsibilities have included distributing federal financial aid for education, collecting data on the US’s schools, identifying major educational issues and enforcing federal education laws prohibiting discrimination and implementing congressional education legislation.Among its most significant functions is administering federal student aid programs, providing billions in grants, work-study funds and loans to more than 13 million students. The agency also oversees programs addressing special education, English-language acquisition and education for disadvantaged students.Critics have long questioned the need for the department, arguing education should remain entirely under state and local control, while its supporters maintain it plays a crucial role in protecting educational equity and providing much-needed federal backing to schools serving vulnerable populations.Can Trump legally eliminate a government agency?Scrapping an entire department would require congressional approval – something that conservatives seeking to get rid of the education department have failed to do for decades.No president has ever successfully closed a cabinet-level agency enshrined in law before. And the constitutional separation of powers means the president’s executive authority alone isn’t sufficient to close the agency by the stroke of his pen.The White House has acknowledged this limitation, with administration officials confirming they don’t have the necessary votes in Congress to eliminate the department completely.So instead, Trump’s executive order would essentially direct the education secretary, Linda McMahon, to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure”, according to administration officials, while working within existing executive branch powers. This could include reorganizing certain functions, appointing leadership aligned with the aggressive drawing-down goal and potentially returning specific authorities to states where federal law permits.What does the executive order mean for American students?The mass weakening of the agency will undoubtedly create significant uncertainty for America’s 50 million public school students and their families, with impacts varying widely depending on how the directive is implemented.In the immediate term, most students will probably see little change to their daily educational experience, as schools primarily operate under state and local control and budgets for the year are already set. However, the long-term implications could be substantial if federal education programs are modified or reduced.Shuttering the department puts marginalized students most at risk, experts say. Since federal programs support special education, English-language learners and disadvantaged students, they face the brunt of the impact. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (Idea), which provides protections for students with disabilities, is federally enforced through the department.What happens to student loans?There is significant uncertainty for the federal student loan system, which currently manages approximately $1.69tn in outstanding debt for more than 43 million Americans.While the White House has indicated functions such as student loans will continue, any disruption to the department’s distribution of grants, work-study funds and loans could affect the more than 19 million college students in the United States.There are questions about which department might oversee these operations, but earlier this month, Trump suggested transferring loan management to either the treasury department, commerce department or the small business administration next. The treasury department may be the most likely choice.Borrowers currently in repayment are unlikely to see immediate changes to their payment requirements or loan terms, but may face uncertainty about where to direct questions and how to navigate repayment options if administrative responsibilities shift. But the executive order’s impact on new student loans and financial aid processing for incoming college students remains unclear. More

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      Mahmoud Khalil and Trump’s assault on free speech – podcast

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      This month Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate who had worked with human rights groups and even the UK government, was detained in New York. His wife, who is eight months pregnant, said her husband was not told why he was being detained and that officers assumed he was on a visa – but actually he has a green card, allowing him to stay in the US and protecting his constitutional rights.Khalil says his detention is part of a crackdown on dissent – and to deter others from protesting. During pro-Palestine protests on the Columbia campus last year he acted as a mediator between the university and the demonstrators, and, unlike many students, left his face uncovered. Then Donald Trump was elected US president and promised to clamp down on student protests.Prof Joseph Howley, who knows Khalil, says he is “conspicuously committed to non-violent resolution of conflict, conspicuously committed to an inclusive vision of liberation and peace”. He tells Michael Safi why the implications of the government’s efforts to detain and deport Khalil are “incredibly chilling”.Chris McGreal, who writes for Guardian US, explains the background to the case and whether free speech and the right to protest are safe in Trump’s America. More

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      ‘I could be next’: international students at Columbia University feel ‘targeted’ after Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest

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      It was 4am and a Columbia University master’s student two months away from graduation lay awake in bed. His heart thumped so hard, his chest began to hurt. His hands got colder and colder; he was unable to speak. This had become an agonizing nightly routine for the 24-year-old from India since 8 March, when immigration officials handcuffed the Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil and took him into detention in Louisiana.“What scares me the most is that I would be fast asleep at home and I would hear a bang on my door and I’d be taken away in the middle of the night by Ice and nobody will ever know what happened to me,” said the student, who attended multiple protests to support Palestine around New York City. “It feels as if people are getting targeted for just speaking up for their political views last year.”Khalil was an organizer at Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment, part of a diverse community that ate, danced, prayed and protested together, demanding the university divest from corporations linked to Israel as violence in Gaza escalated.The federal immigration officers who arrested Khalil gained entry into the Columbia-owned building where he lived and told him his green card, which grants him permanent residence in the US, had been revoked. The Department of Homeland Security accused him of leading “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization” and is attempting to deport him, but has not alleged he committed any crimes. His lawyers are challenging his detention and potential deportation, and said agents did not provide an arrest warrant. Khalil’s arrest came after Donald Trump vowed to deport student visa holders who participated in pro-Palestinian protests, a move legal experts have called a flagrant violation of free speech.Now, Columbia students who are not US citizens, some who have vocally supported Palestinian rights, told the Guardian they feel they must be careful who they speak to and censor what they say. They fear being questioned by Ice agents, having their visas revoked or being arrested and detained. Some feel like they are being watched while walking around Morningside Heights and on campus, while others are reluctant to visit family or friends overseas in case they are not permitted back in the country.View image in fullscreen“When I leave my apartment, when I go out, I’m just so much more aware and cautious of who’s around me,” said Seher Ahmed, a psychology master’s student from Pakistan. “I went for a run this morning, and I’ve never felt this way before, but I felt like everyone was, like, looking at me.”Another student who arrived at Columbia in August last year to study journalism had been inspired by student reporters’ coverage of campus protests. She photographed a vigil where journalism school students recited names of the more than 100 Palestinian and Lebanese journalists killed in Gaza. For a reporting class, the 21-year-old wrote about an anti-Trump rally on election night that called for an end to the Israel-Gaza war. She posted her work and discussed related issues on Instagram and X.But just days away from applying for a year-long work visa that would follow her expected graduation this May, she stopped posting her opinions and made her accounts private. She is reconsidering attending a friend’s wedding overseas in case she is not allowed back in the country. “I feel like I’m being paranoid, but I’m really scared,” she said.Ahmed, who attended women’s rights marches in Pakistan from the age of 15 with her mother, began an art piece after Khalil’s arrest: a meditation on the Urdu translation of the word freedom, with blue ink pen swept across white canvas. “I come from a Muslim country, so did he. I believe in the same things he does, freedom and basic human rights and just standing up for a place that needs our voice right now,” said Ahmed. Her paralyzing fear is rooted in the idea that the US government will misconstrue those values as “pro-Hamas” and revoke her student visa.“We’re not terrorists, or, like, supporting terrorists. We’re trying to prevent a genocide from happening,” said Ahmed.Imam, a graduate student, went to the encampment – once with his professor – to join protests, listen to speakers including journalist Motaz Azaiza and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attend Friday prayers. The 30-year-old has been attending classes over Zoom or skipping them altogether: he feels he “could be next” on Ice’s list, without having any knowledge of what he has done wrong. Two months away from graduation, he is conflicted about attending more protests, which have continued on and off campus in support of Khalil and Palestine. “I want to do something, I feel so hopeless,” he said. “But also everything I do is going to cost me a bigger risk.”On 11 March, three days after Ice arrested Khalil, Ranjani Srinivasan, a Columbia PhD student from India who participated in campus protests, “self-deported” after her student visa had been revoked, DHS said. On 13 March, DHS presented warrants and searched two students’ dorm rooms on campus. In Newark, immigration agents arrested Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian from the West Bank, after saying her student visa had expired.That federal agents can target a student or recent graduate without charge is a chilling reminder of the oppressive environments that some international students left behind. For a 22-year-old master’s student from Russia who lives in university housing, Khalil’s arrest brought back memories of police knocking on doors to draft male citizens at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war. She said the spirit of the university had changed; now it feels like “the police state is coming after you”.“Your home should be your safe space. But ever since the arrest, anytime I hear footsteps at night in the Columbia housing – the walls are super thin so you hear everything – I’m always like, ‘Who is that? Who is that?’” she said.This week, Yale Law School professors warned international students about an impending Trump travel ban, saying they should avoid leaving the US or return immediately to the US if abroad. Brown issued a similar warning to its international students.“People look at the global north thinking they have things so much better. There are better laws to protect your rights,” said Thien Miru, a post-graduate student from Indonesia. Now there is overwhelming concern that if a green card holder can be detained, a student visa holder has little protection.The Trump administration is intent on bringing Columbia to heel: last week it sent a letter to the university demanding measures such as a mask ban, winding down the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies department and empowering campus law enforcement in exchange for any of the $400m federal funding it had clawed back after “inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students”, according to the administration.View image in fullscreenIn several emails to students and faculty, Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, emphasized the need to “stand together”. “Our university is defined by the principles of academic freedom, open inquiry, and respect for all,” she wrote. One email linked to a public safety webpage outlining protocols for potential Ice campus visits. But some students interpreted this to mean they were responsible for dealing with immigration officials alone. Columbia did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.While studying for her two-year degree in social work, Miru, 35, learned about advocating for those who need help. She said the university needs to “go the extra mile” by mediating with those in power to protect its students’ rights.“I’ve heard a lot of people at Columbia say that this is our community, so what are you going to do if your community is experiencing something like this?” said Miru. “I am expecting something more than just sending us super-long emails. Prove to us that we are part of your community.”On 14 March, Khalil’s lawyers released a video of him being taken away from his wife, Noor Abdalla, a US citizen who is eight months pregnant, by plainclothes immigration officers. “As a woman I feel it’s so hard for her to think about raising your child without support from your partner,” said Miru, a mother of two girls. “If they deport her husband, family separation is not a good idea, so I’ve been thinking a lot about this little family. I’m speechless.”Miru made the difficult decision to leave her daughters with her parents in Indonesia to get her degree, after her father gave her books about the US and talked for years about the high quality of education while she was growing up. “I also got accepted to some universities in Australia, but since Columbia also accepted me, I thought let’s aim for the highest, let’s aim for the stars,” said Miru. Her hope was to bring her daughters to the US so they could also study there. Now, she’s questioning whether she should give up on her aspirations and move back home.

      Some names have been withheld for sources’ safety.
      Jazzmin Jiwa is an international journalist and documentary maker currently based in New York City. Reporting contributed by Duaa Shah, a student at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. More

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      The US government has sent Columbia University a ransom note | Sheldon Pollock

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      On 15 March, Columbia University received what can only be described as the most dangerous letter in the history of higher education in America. The sender was the United States government. Like a ransom note, the government letter insists that Columbia comply with a list of Trump administration demands in order to even have a chance at recovering the $400m in federal funding for scientific research that the government canceled on 7 March.Oddly, one of the specific targets identified in the letter was Columbia’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (Mesaas), a small humanities department devoted to studying the languages, cultures and history of those regions. The government demanded the Mesaas department be put into “receivership” – basically, be taken over by the University – as a precondition to further negotiations.The battle against the authoritarianism taking hold in Washington now appears to turn in part on the fate of Mesaas.Why Mesaas?The Trump campaign to destroy the independence of American higher education began when an obscure federal agency, the General Services Administration (GSA), in collaboration with the Departments of Health & Human Services and Education, coordinated the extraordinary move to rescind $400m in federal funding for scientific research at Columbia, since Columbia “has fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment”.After threatening some 60 other universities with the same fate, on 13 March the government sent their ransom note to Columbia alone. Their conditions were to be met within seven days, and not in return for the release of the funds, but merely as “preconditions”. Further demands would then be presented for “formal negotiation” – which would not be an actual negotiation, because the GSA would continue to hold back the university’s money, like a mobster.The preconditions concern mainly the policing of student protest on campus. Their imposition likely violates both federal law and the US constitution, as Columbia law faculty have made clear. But in a startling and equally unlawful move the Government took another hostage in its letter: Mesaas. For a period of five years, Columbia must place the department in academic receivership. The university was given the same seven-day ultimatum by which to specify “a full plan, with date-certain deliverables” for enforcing the receivership.This is an unparalleled attempt to seize control over people and ideas in an American university. Universities do find it necessary sometimes to place an academic department in receivership, typically when the department’s self-governance breaks down. Normally the administration will appoint as chair a member of another department, for one academic year. Mesaas’s current self-governance is outstanding, and there have been no problems in all the years that that I chaired the department.For the United States government itself to intervene directly in faculty governance – specifying the extraordinary five-year period, and with “deliverables” on whose performance the future funding of the entire university might depend – is without precedent in the history of American higher education.Why has the government chosen to single out this department?The answer is clear: because its faculty have not voiced steadfast support for the state of Israel in their scholarship. The US government stands almost alone in the world in its unwavering ideological and financial support for the violence of the state of Israel against the people of Palestine. Most recently it has provided the consent, the justification and the arms for Israel’s destruction of Gaza. (Just this week, the destruction was relaunched, to condemnation from around the world but not from Washington, which alone gave its support.)In contrast, academic research by prominent scholars in the field of Middle Eastern studies, including those in Mesaas, has reflected deeply on the complexity of the situation and has long since questioned the versions of history and racial ideas fueling Israel’s actions. Mesaas professors ask hard but entirely legitimate questions about Israel – and our government wants to ban that.The Mesaas department played no role in organizing student protests for Gaza. But Washington has decided that in addition to dictating how a university should govern political protest, it should control how the University governs academic research –intensifying a broad attack on research on the Middle East across US universities.With its demands to essentially seize control of Mesaas, the federal government is undermining two fundamental principles of the American university: the right of academic departments to self-government and the freedom of members of the faculty to express their views, without fear, both as authorities in their fields of inquiry and as private individuals.Columbia is required to decide by Thursday 20 March how to respond to this ransom note, with the government threatening to cut off two of the university’s fingers: academic freedom and faculty governance. If the Columbia administration capitulates, it will mark the beginning of its own destruction and that of the American university as such – precisely what the American Enterprise Institute, which supplied the template for the note, has called for.The courts have so far paused more than 40 of the administration’s initiatives, though it remains unclear if the mob boss will obey. So long as we do have a functional judicial system, however, Columbia’s answer to Trump can only be: see you in court.

      Sheldon Pollock FBA is the Arvind Raghunathan professor emeritus of South Asian studies at Columbia University and former chair of the Mesaas department. He currently has no role in department or university administration and writes only in a personal capacity. More

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      I’m a recent Stem grad. Here’s why the right is winning us over

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      When my friends and I graduated with our math degrees this past May, we felt like we could do anything.After long nights spent on problem sets, the most aimless and ambitious of us will forgo grad school and become interns and employees at the shiniest, slimiest corporations in America – big banks, the military industrial complex, big tech, big pharma – where we will solve interesting, difficult problems on cushy salaries.Working at the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) seems to require the same skillset. Fueled by unbridled techno-optimism and edgy cultural capital, Doge seems less like a government agency and more like another one of Elon Musk’s shaky startups. While bewildered pundits including Fareed Zakaria struggle to diagnose and process the new technocracy in DC, our new Doge overlords are infinitely familiar to my classmates and me: they might as well be guys we knew from school.This is the new generation of young technocrats who helped lift Trump into office: they are the crypto-obsessed love-children of Musk and Donald Trump, of Silicon Valley and the Heritage Foundation, of “effective altruism” and “effective accelerationism”. Meanwhile, graduates who lean left are simply out of luck: outside of academia, it can feel nearly impossible to find a progressive job in tech. Progressive Data Jobs, a major hub for jobs in this space, currently lists 96 open positions across all experience levels. By contrast, the careers portal at Goldman Sachs alone boasts 1,943 open jobs.That’s because, for decades, the progressive movement worldwide has failed to organize technical talent for its own interests.Upon graduation, an average science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) student often faces a binary choice between industry and academia: BlackRock or grad school. Sure, there’s a handful of research non-profits out there, like Radical Data or the inactive Algorithmic Justice League; but they mostly focus on advocacy instead of governance. While there is excellent progressive work in data science being done by organizations such as OpenSecrets, Split Ticket, ProPublica’s Data Store, and even Twitter accounts such as Stats for Lefties, there is no systematic effort by progressives to recruit technical talent at scale.Meanwhile, financial and tech industries begin targeting Stem students with aggressive recruitment tactics as early as freshman year: over time, these industries become the only careers students can imagine outside of grad school. It’s no wonder that Stem students are more conservative than humanities and social science students, even though scientists tend to be more liberal. There are really only two things you can do with a Stem degree: stay in the ivory tower, or – to paraphrase Audre Lorde – go build the master’s house.In an interview with Ross Douthat, the tech investor Marc Andreessen claims that the left alienated Silicon Valley because “companies are being hijacked as engines of social change”: gone are the days of the agitprop 1984 Apple ads, or the naive “coding for good” movements of the 2010s. After the term “Stem” was coined in 2001, the next two decades saw the further division of science and the humanities into two opposing, irreconcilable systems of knowledge at the institutional level. While educational policy-makers obsess over Stem enrollments, funding and research as metrics to assess an education’s worth, students were incentivized to concentrate on one discipline, all while a liberal arts education diminished in appeal and practical utility.This made a generation of Stem students into technical ideologues. Starting from high school olympiads, they learn to worship technical capability above all else – and value the acquisition of technical skills above everything else. In college, they are never taught problem-solving frameworks outside those offered by programming or economics courses: game theory, homo economicus, Pareto efficiency. Crucially, these approaches always attempt to simplify the world instead of tackling society’s complexities head on: simplifying, as an impulse, has given rise to neoliberal, Silicon Valley-funded social movements such as “effective altruism” that do nothing to tackle crucial inequalities. Without alternative paradigms, these theories become real and universal ways to see the world and solve its problems.And so, empowered by Trump and Musk, it is the rightist technocrats who get to change the world today. With flashy tech stacks and a blind confidence to code up a solution to any and every problem, they set out to fix our government once and for all, armed with only three principles – simplify, automate, optimize. And so Doge runs the government as if solving an optimization problem: cut employees, retain key workers, minimize losses, simplify the structure. But already, Doge is reinstating fired federal workers who were working on crucial issues. Classic tech bro blunder: what else did they expect from trying to solve the problems of society without even bothering to understand their nuances?As the technocrat right rises into power, a luddite left also emerges in America – a narrowing base of grassroots organizers, local politicians, activists, academics and non-profits, that increasingly disaffiliate from technology with fear and distrust. As technical industries become more explicitly aligned with the agendas of the new American right in the post-Covid years, there has been little effort from progressive political organizations to recruit self-starting hackers and radical technologists, who exist in abundance on the decentralized internet. Did anyone even try to scoop up the workers who walked out of Google in 2018? Now, in 2025, we realize that a generation of politically naive engineers have already built a singular matrix of algorithmic oppression and universal surveillance that we cannot opt out of. Today’s progressives not only do not understand technology; worse, we have completely ceded technological power to the right.The dearth of efforts to recruit technical talent on the left essentially create a failure of imagination. Talented young engineers fail to imagine how their skills can be used to challenge existing power structures, and movements fail to imagine how technology can be used as a tactic to seize power. As Justin Joque argued in Revolutionary Mathematics, progressive movements need technical people who “understand the current metaphysics of capitalism – not in order to de-reify them, but rather to understand how they can be replaced”. One wonders whether more sophisticated data scientists could have made past Democratic campaigns more effective, or whether a collaboration between engineers and progressive thinkers could have led to more online platforms such as Bluesky.In order to hack and dismantle the technocrat right, American progressives must teach the engineers to dream again. Today’s engineers may be hard at work building the master’s house, but with the right organization and renewed senses of purpose, they, too, can learn to turn the master’s tools against him.

      Jaye Chen is a writer based in New York City More

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      The case for boycotting the United States | Robert Reich

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      To friends of democracy around the world: we need your help.You know that the Trump regime is brutally attacking US democracy. Most of us did not vote for Donald Trump (half of us didn’t even vote in the 2024 election). But he feels he has a mandate to take a wrecking ball to the constitution.Like most bullies, the regime can be constrained only if everyone stands up to the bullying – including you.First, if you are considering a trip to the United States, please reconsider. Why reward Trump’s America with your tourist dollars?Spending by non-Americans in the United States is a significant source of tax revenue and a major “export” of this nation. There’s no reason for you to indirectly support Trump’s economy.Many international travelers concerned about Trump’s authoritarianism have already canceled trips to the United States. You might do so, too.Last week, the US president threatened a 200% tariff on European wine and alcohol after calling the European Union “one of the most hostile and abusive taxing and tariffing authorities in the World”.Why reward this bellicose rhetoric? Many Europeans are already skipping trips to Disney World and music festivals.Travel from China, a frequent target of Trump’s contempt, is down 11%. Chinese travelers are choosing to vacation in Australia and New Zealand instead of visiting US national parks.Our dear neighbors north of the border, who have long been the major source of international travel to the United States, are deciding to visit Europe and Mexico instead.In response to Trump’s repeated desire to make Canada a “51st state”, Canada’s former prime minister Justin Trudeau has urged Canadians not to vacation in the US.An informal boycott by Canadian travelers has begun. The number of Canadians returning by car from visits to the United States already fell by 23% in February, and air travel by Canadians returning from the United States was down 13% relative to last year, according to Statistics Canada.Overall, it’s expected that international travel to the United States will drop at least 5% this year.Although we have loved (and profited from) your visits, I urge you to join many of your compatriots and at least for now decide not to come to the United States.Second, if you are thinking about coming to the United States on a student or even on an H-1B visa, which allows highly skilled foreign citizens to live and work here, you might also reconsider.Perhaps wait a few years until, hopefully, the Trump regime has ended.It is not entirely safe for you to be here, in any event.Dr Rasha Alawieh, 34, a kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University’s medical school, who has been in the United States legally on an H-1B visa, was just deported without explanation, and even though a court order had blocked her expulsion.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDr Alawieh had traveled last month to Lebanon, her home country, to visit relatives. When she tried to return from that trip to the United States, she was detained by US customs and immigration officials and put on a flight to Paris, presumably on her way to Lebanon.Lebanon is not even on a draft list of nations from which the Trump administration is considering banning entry to the United States.Even if there’s a shortage in the US of skilled workers in your specialty, you could be deported at any time, for any or no reason.Likewise, if you are considering coming to the US on a student visa, you might consider the risk at this time. A Columbia University graduate student, Mahmoud Khalil, was arrested and detained for no reason other than that he peacefully protested against Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies in Gaza.The administration of Brown University has advised foreign students, ahead of spring break, to “consider postponing or delaying personal travel outside the United States until more information is available from the US Department of State”.It is not just the risk. It’s also the circumstances. If you care about democracy, this is not the time to come here on a student or H-1B visa because the Trump regime is riding roughshod over our rights.On Sunday, it deported hundreds of Venezuelan nationals from the United States to a prison in El Salvador. This was done even though a federal judge blocked Trump’s use of the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act – which had only been used in times of war – and ordered planes carrying some of the Venezuelans to turn back to the United States.On Sunday night, Trump told reporters that the Venezuelans he deported were “bad people”.But no one can take Trump’s word that these were “bad” people. Trump routinely uses the term “bad people” to refer to people who oppose or criticize him.Whatever your reason for wanting to come to the United States – as a visitor, a student, or an H-1B skilled worker – you might want to reconsider your plans.Deciding not to come would send a signal that you’re justifiably worried about your safety and security here and you are as repulsed by the Trump regime’s attacks on democracy as are most of us Americans.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Trump is setting the US on a path to educational authoritarianism

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      On 14 February, the US Department of Education’s office of civil rights issued a letter providing notice to American educational institutions, schools and universities of the department’s new interpretation of federal civil rights law. The letter lays out new conditions for institutions to receive federal funding, including in the form of student loans or scientific and medical research.Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in federally assisted programs or activities. The education department’s “Dear Colleagues” letter redefines the central targets of Title VI to centrally include supposed discrimination against whites. The letter was followed, on 28 February, with a set of guidelines for its interpretation. The novel understanding of anti-white discrimination in these documents is a chilling manifestation of educational authoritarianism.In the letter, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights, Craig Trainor, writes:
      Educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’ and advanced discriminatory policies and practices. Proponents of these discriminatory practices have attempted to further justify them – particularly during the last four years – under the banner of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (‘DEI’), smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline.
      However, the United States pretty clearly is built upon systematic and structural racism. US history shows that slavery was a central factor in US wealth. The US was built on Indigenous genocide and colonialism, as seizing Indigenous land was one of the reasons for seeking independence from England and is, in any case, foundational to the country’s formation. Structural racism also persists; for example, cities are segregated because of structural injustice in housing and mortgage law. The ways in which the US was built on racism, against Black Americans and Indigenous Americans, is central both to the study of its history and its present structure. If Americans do not have an understanding of this topic, they will not be well informed.The guidelines for what would count as a Title VI violation are vague. From the guidelines:
      a racially-oriented vision of social justice, or similar goals will be probative in OCR’s analysis of the facts and circumstances of an individual case.
      The most straightforward way to read the letter and the guidelines is as defining “school-on-student harassment” as including Black history. The letter treats teaching large swaths of Black and Indigenous history as akin to a white professor consistently referring to all of their Black students with a terrible racial slur.The “more extreme practices at a university” that “could create a hostile environment under Title VI” include “pressuring them to participate in protests or take certain positions on racially charged issues”. But reason, rationality and morality are sources of “pressure”. How does one distinguish the pressure placed on people by moral arguments for racially charged issues from other kinds of pressure?The guidelines create a culture of fear and intimidation around history. If one discusses Black history, one immediately risks endorsing the view that the United States “is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’”. The guidelines invite students to report their teachers and their school administrators for not adhering to a state-imposed ideology about history, as well as state-imposed ideology about gender, which threatens to make teaching critically about gender identity, or including trans perspectives, into school-on-student harassment. Failure to adhere to state ideologies about history and gender fits this new definition of “school-on-student harassment”. Billions in federal funding is at stake.View image in fullscreenThe guidelines are not just vague, they are intentionally vague, in a way that would make it difficult for even a diligent administrator to interpret. They therefore allow maximum latitude for abuse. As the influential pro-Trump intellectual Jonathan Keeperman explained in the New York Times, referring to the Trump administration’s war on language:
      The things they’re attacking in these executive orders are sort of loose concepts. By focusing on these key terms that the left has grabbed on to, you can, without knowing much else about what you’re doing, at the scale of the entirety of the federal budget, basically remove a lot of the rot.
      The state of Florida has been a model of this strategy, leading to books being removed from school libraries because they normalize LGBTQ+ relationships, for example, and an unprecedented level of widespread fear among Florida’s professors and teachers. But it has spread to other states. The state of Tennessee has an online “divisive concepts reporting tracker” form for students who wish to report professors whose teaching can be seen as “promoting division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class, or class of people”.The Dear Colleague letter and its attendant guidelines are easily read as banning teaching the idea that many Americans have racist attitudes. But understanding that many Americans have racist attitudes is central to understanding US politics.For example, the Republican Southern Strategy involved exploiting racist attitudes against government programs they ideologically opposed, by using the term “welfare” as a dog whistle for these attitudes. We have strong evidence from social science to explain the mechanisms here. There is a large group of white Americans who agree with racist stereotypes. Among these Americans, calling a program “welfare” decreases its support dramatically.The letter also appeals to another racist dogwhistle, “DEI”, which is employed in a similar way to justify banning classroom discussion of a range of concepts (including, it appears, discussion of the use of dog whistles in American politics).By executive order, Donald Trump is trying to dismantle the Department of Education. Following Project 2025’s recommendation, he appears also to be seeking to eliminate funding for Title 1, which provides crucial federal support for students in under-resourced schools in urban and rural areas, special education for disabled students and a range of other educational programs. The abolition of the education department would mean no federal oversight of drastically widening educational inequalities facing millions of students (and threatens to undermine tracking of data on racial disparities in educational resources, which could be used to substantiate the official state ideology that there are no structural disparities).Linda McMahon, the new education secretary, issued a statement entitled “Our Department’s Final Mission” on 3 March. In it, she wrote about the motivation for this final mission:
      After President Trump’s inauguration last month, he steadily signed a slate of executive orders to keep his promises: combatting critical race theory, DEI, gender ideology, discrimination in admissions, promoting school choice for every child, and restoring patriotic education and civics. He has also been focused on eliminating waste, red tape, and harmful programs in the federal government. The Department of Education’s role in this new era of accountability is to restore the rightful role of state oversight in education and to end the overreach from Washington.
      From now on, the education department’s main function appears to be targeting “critical race theory”, DEI and “gender ideology”. The final mission of the education department also includes the imposition of “patriotic education”, as if the United States were trying to imitate North Korea.Since McMahon’s announcement, the education department has launched a broad investigation into “antisemitism” at the nation’s colleges and universities. The first target was Columbia University, whose student body is over 20% Jewish; as well as pressuring Columbia to fire a distinguished law professor for pro-Palestinian statements and arresting one of the university’s students for constitutionally protected speech, on 7 March, the education department cut $400m dollars in funding for Columbia for allowing “harassment of Jewish students”. On 10 March, the civil rights office of the education department announced it was sending letters warning of potential enforcement actions to 60 universities under investigation for antisemitic discrimination and harassment, who will presumably face similar jaw-dropping cuts, under the guise of protecting Jewish students and faculty.Universities are among the most Jewish institutions in American life, in fact and in their resonance. As the historian Tim Snyder dryly noted:
      History teaches clear lessons about breakdowns in the rule of law and about campaigns against cities and universities. These are very often associated with antisemitism. It is very hard, for me at least, to think of historical examples of campaigns against universities and freedom of expression that were intended to benefit Jews.
      As the US watches videos of the regime’s police handcuffing and arresting student protesters in front of their families, as well as the destruction of the world’s greatest system of higher education, all supposedly in the service of “protecting” Jewish Americans, it is past time to note: this can’t be good for Jewish people.As I have long warned, the media have been useful dupes for fascism. After years and years of vilifying academia, first by raising hysteria about “wokeness” and too little free speech (about eg race), and then by raising hysteria about too much free speech (about Israel), the mainstream media has smoothly paved the path for educational authoritarianism. No one should be surprised by its arrival.

      Jason Stanley is Jacob Urowsky professor of philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future More