Trump, Harvard confrontation takes a sharp turn

The Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has terminated Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Programme certification, pushing out 7,000 visa holders. Harvard remained defiant and immediately sued the Trump Administration in the Boston federal court. The university said in its petition, “With the stroke of a pen, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body, international students who contribute significantly to the University and its mission.” It asserted, “Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard.”

Noem, dismissing Harvard’s lawsuit, said, “If only Harvard cared this much about ending the scourge of anti-American, anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist agitators on their campus they wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with.” She went on to accuse Harvard of “coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party.”

Noem said that the certification could be restored if the university handed over information about the visa-holding students, including audio records and their participation in campus protests. This is indeed the classic battle between a liberal university which believes in dissent and freedom of speech, and an authoritarian government which opposes liberalism, freedom of speech. The immediate political context is important. Most of the protests are against Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Israel has killed more than 50,000 civilians. The protesters’ attack on Israel has been shown to be as belligerence towards Jewish students in the university, and it is being interpreted as anti-Semitism. The fact is that many Jewish students had participated in the protests as well. But Israel has always held on to the position that an attack on Israel, through protests and speech, amounts to anti-Semitism. The right-wing Trump administration has unhesitatingly adopted the Israeli stance.

What has shocked and surprised people and authorities in the United States is the intensity of the campus protests against Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza. It is after a long time that students have turned to the protest mode. In the 1980s, campus students protested asking American companies to disinvest in South Africa because of its apartheid regime, and asking American universities not to accept money from South Africa. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, campus protests erupted in America against the war in Vietnam. The protests against the massacre of Gazans should not then come as a surprise. Americans have always asserted their right to express their views, and especially against their own government. And it has been a characteristic feature of contemporary American democracy.

Trump’s intolerance towards dissent is not unusual either, and that he should use his executive powers to suppress dissent is in conformity with his personality and his politics. The last time the American government went all out against dissent, singling out the leftists and communists, was during the infamous McCarthy years in the 1950s.

The House Un-American Activities Committee became notorious for naming and stigmatising people with leftist sympathies, including the man who headed the Manhattan Project for making the atom bomb, Robert Oppenheimer. Trump’s attack on Harvard and other Ivy League universities is a clear echo of the McCarthy era. Harvard University, under its president Alan Garber, has held out against the intimidatory tactics of the Trump administration. And it has given hope to many that there is still hope for free speech in America. The university in America has been a free space for debate, dialogue and dissent, and it has remained that through many terms of Republican presidents and Republican majorities in US Congress.

Trump has taken up cudgels against liberalism as no other president has done before. The battle is likely to last long, and it is hard to say who will win. If Trump wins, it will be big defeat for America.