In record time, a court has at least temporarilyput a stopto the Trump administration’s latest attack on Harvard University, part of a larger retaliation spree that began in April.
On Thursday,Kristi Noemhad 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 Harvardmakes 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’slawsuit against the Department of Homeland Securityrightly 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, Trumpistshad assertedtheir 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 ofa university whose attendees received a $25m settlementhas 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 withthe 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 withthe logic of authoritarian populist leaderswho 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 Americansdisapprove 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 becomepawns– 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