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On Thursday of last week, the Trump administration announced that it was yanking the approval that allows Harvard University to enroll international students. When we wrote the news up on Friday, we guessed that Harvard's lawyers would have their challenge filed early Friday morning. Beyond the fact that a lawyer at that level can crank out a 75-page filing in their sleep... well, at this point, Harvard must have anticipated the various lines of attack, and pre-prepared filings where they just have to fill in a few blanks.
Our prediction—which, to be clear, was a lay-up—was on the mark. Harvard filed its request for an injunction early Friday, and Judge Allison D. Burroughs, of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, granted a temporary restraining order about an hour later.
At this point, let's pause to address a couple of factual matters. First of all, the TRO should have been, and was, an easy call. One of the main considerations for a judge, in these circumstances, is the harm that will be done by granting (or not granting) a TRO while a case is litigated. If Harvard does not get their TRO, and then ends up winning the case, the university will still be badly damaged. If Harvard DOES get their TRO, and then the Trump administration ends up winning the case, the Trump administration will not be damaged by the delay. This was an easy enough decision that we, despite not having law degrees or being federal judges, could have made it. That said, the fact that Burroughs acted so quickly, almost certainly before she actually had time to read Harvard's 72-page filing, can't exactly be interpreted as a good sign for the administration.
We also had some questions/comments from readers about this subject. The questions were about the student body at Harvard, and exactly how many of them would be affected. The school has about 22,000 students, and about a third of those are undergrads, while the other two-thirds are grads. The number of foreign students has been pegged at around 6,800, which would be around 30% of the student body. This is plausible, though most of those foreign-born students are certainly grad students. Also, we don't know this for sure, but it's possible that the 6,800 includes some sizable number of postdocs who are not included in the 22,000 enrolled students. Postdocs exist in a liminal space between "student" and "faculty," though they are more faculty than they are students, and they don't pay tuition.
That brings us to a comment we got from several different readers. In our item, we said the Trump administration's timing was not very smart, as it has given the school abundant time to file lawsuits, and also to make special accommodations (say, a satellite campus outside the United States). The comment we got was along these lines: "Maybe the Trump administration's timing is better than you suggest, because this will give students time to decide not to attend Harvard, and to transfer elsewhere."
There may be some merit to this observation, but... not too much, we think, for three reasons. The first is that the process of applying for admissions, funding, etc. is over for academic year 2025-26; for many people, the choice is "go to Harvard, or don't go anywhere." The second is that if someone is an undergrad, it's fairly plausible to re-deploy to another school. But most of the students at Harvard, and most of the foreign students, are grad students. It depends on the discipline but, on the whole, it's not too easy to move to a different institution, because your research is based at the institution where you commenced it. Third, and finally, anyone who gets admitted to Harvard, or who gets a post-doc at Harvard, has just been handed one of the world's great calling cards. Most folks are not going to be willing to give that up, particularly since the school is very likely to prevail on the merits. If it becomes necessary, it's more likely that students would just take an unplanned gap year, or would try to work remotely for a year. For all of these reasons, we just don't see a big disruption for the (foreign) student body. Some disruption, maybe. But not a lot.
Moving along, Trump yesterday made two announcements. The first is that he is thinking about taking the $3 billion he is withholding from Harvard, and redistributing it to trade schools.
This is actually a really good example of how Trump plays... checkers? At first glance, this looks like a pretty savvy move. That is to say, take a bunch of money from eggheads, and give it to blue-collar workers (i.e., Trump's target demo). But, at second glance, there are two problems. The first is that Trump is never actually going to be able to deliver, because he's not going to be allowed to cancel already-executed contracts, even if he really really really wants to. The second is that if $3 billion for trade schools (a relative drop in the bucket) is a good idea, then how about $10 billion or maybe $50 billion? And yet, he didn't put that money into his budget proposal. Why not?
The second announcement from Trump, meanwhile, was that he wants the names of all the foreign students at Harvard RIGHT NOW. He went on his very depressing social media platform and thundered:
Why isn't Harvard saying that almost 31% of their students are from FOREIGN LANDS, and yet those countries, some not at all friendly to the United States, pay NOTHING toward their student's education, nor do they ever intend to. Nobody told us that! We want to know who those foreign students are, a reasonable request since we give Harvard BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, but Harvard isn't exactly forthcoming. We want those names and countries.
Whereas the first announcement was a pretty good illustration of Trump's low-skill political maneuvering, this one is a pretty good illustration of his incompetence or his dishonesty (readers can decide for themselves which it is). See, there is a federal database called the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, which is used to keep track of foreign student visas. And so, the federal government already has "names and countries" (and a bunch of other information). Kind of feels like tariffs-on-penguins time, to us, but maybe readers will see it differently.
And that's the latest. Trump believes this war on Harvard is producing lots of the right kind of headlines, so expect many, many more salvos to be fired back and forth. (Z)