Ivy fight

Why is Donald Trump waging war on Harvard, the oldest and among the most prestigious universities in the United States and is ranked among the top five around the world? Founded 1636, 140 years before the Britain’s 13 North American colonies declared independence in 1776. The university was named after its first benefactor, John Harvard.

Anong Harvard alumni, faculty, and researchers are eight US presidents, including Barack Obama, 24 heads of state and 31 heads of government, founders of multinational companies, Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize recipients, sports medallists, and nearly 200 living billionaires. Alumnae give Harvard serious political clout in the US and on the world scene.

Nevertheless, Trump and his administration took aim at Harvard, Columbia, and other leading universities as soon as he began his second term in office. The pretext was alleged to be antisemitism on college campuses where there were legitimate protests over Israel’s war on Gaza. He decided to use antisemitism as a tool for wielding influence and formed a task force “to root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses.” This force would review university policies with the aim of determining whether they would receive tens of billions of dollars in federal funding and grants which finance medical and other essential research.

Trump’s latest outrage is to block the foreign student presence and enrolment at Harvard although international students number 6,800, comprise 27 per cent of the total and provide a major source of revenue to the university and host communities. There are also more than 3,000 foreign researchers employed in Harvard programmes. Students from Taiwan, Canada, and India account for 40 per cent among the students from 146 countries, including this region. The university has rejected all Trump’s demands beginning with the call to turn over records on international students to regain its certification before the coming academic year.

The administration insisted that Harvard deny admission to students hostile to US “values,” end affirmative action in hiring faculty and student entry, and forbid the formation of student groups that promote criminal activity, illegal violence, or illegal harassment” which can embrace any activities denounced by the administration. It wants a ban on masks worn by students during protests and for Harvard to prohibit diversity, equality and inclusion programmes designed to counter discrimination due to race, gender, or religion and advance students and faculty from disadvantaged backgrounds. Harvard claimed Trump’s interventions would do irreparable damage to the university and submitted an emergency petition to a federal court, prompting a judge to temporarily block the administration’s efforts. Harvard has subsequently sued the Trump administration.

At the onset of his second term, why has Trump added Harvard to his antagonists? One reason could be he is seeking to divert attention from other controversial policies. He has proposed large tariffs on imports and called for the US to annex Canada and Greenland and take over the Panama Canal. He has begun destructively downsizing the US federal administration.

Since he returned to the White House on Jan. 20, Trump’s approval rating has slid from a high of 47 per cent to 39 per cent in mid-April, the lowest ever of any president during his first 100 days in office. His rating has since fluctuated around 42 per cent while more than half of respondents disapprove of his handing of domestic and foreign affairs.

Second, by targeting Harvard, Trump he has zeroed in on a major symbol of the influential US intellectual and pollical elite which is resented by many in his support base. While 90 per cent of the US population of 347,000 million has a high school degree, that percentage falls to 37.7 per cent for those with a college education while 0.2 per cent have attended elite Ivy League universities – Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth, and Pennsylvania.

Trump spent two years of his university career at Fordham in the Bronx area of New York City before transferring at his father’s insistence to the Wharton School of Business at Pennsylvania University where he gained a BA in economics in 1966. While he has repeatedly claimed to have been at the top of his class, his ranking was far below this level. For Trump, his Wharton School degree was essential if he was to realise his ambition to expand his family real state business from the Bronx to the wider world. The Wharton label, however, did not project Trump into the US elite, a status denied to his wealthy family. Consequently, one of his campaign promises was to oust the “corrupt elites.” Once in office he chose officials loyal to him rather than members of the traditional or educational elite.

Trump’s attack on Harvard and other leading universities is only one of his policies which define the man. Trump is the grandson of immigrants from Bavaria in Germany, his mother was an immigrant from a poor Scottish island, and two of his three wives have been immigrants from Eastern Europe. His first wife, Ivana Trump, was from Czech Republic, and his current wife, Melania Trump, was from Slovenia. All, of course, were from European stock.

In response to his anti-migrant support base, he has adopted a heartless, hard line on immigration, particularly, from Latin America and Asia. He has used the World War I Alien Enemies Act to imprison and deport migrants without due process and to target activists, permanent residents, students, and tourists who were critical of Trump. US immigration officials have snatched “undocumented” migrants from homes, farms, churches, restaurants, and hotels despite protests from employers who cannot do without them. Several small children who were US citizens were deported with their migrant mothers to Latin America. He also seeks to revoke the law granting citizenship to children born in the US. Naturalization has been denied to tens of thousands of the 11 million migrants living in the US, although millions are employed and pay taxes. Trump does not see that this is a lose-lose situation for the US which boasts it is a nation of immigrants and has been enriched by their presence.

Photo: TNS