Shock at Harvard after US government says international students must go

WASHINGTON – Just before the Trump administration announced on May 22 that it would

bar international students from Harvard University,

staff from the university’s International Office met graduating seniors at the Kennedy School of Government, congratulating them on their degrees – and on surviving the chaos of recent months.

Then, within minutes of the meeting’s end, news alerts lit up the students’ phones. Chaos was breaking out again: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had notified Harvard that its permission to enrol international students was revoked.

With that, the degrees and futures of thousands of Harvard students – and an integral piece of the university’s identity and culture – were plunged into deep uncertainty.

“There are so many students from all over the world who came to Harvard to make it a better place and to change America and change their home countries for the better,” said Mr Karl Molden, a student from Vienna who had just completed his sophomore year. “Now it’s all at risk of falling apart, which is breaking my heart.”

The university has faced rapid-fire aggressions since its president, Dr Alan Garber, told the Trump administration in April that Harvard would not give in to demands to change its hiring and admission practices and its curriculum.

After the government froze more than US$2 billion (S$2.6 billion) in grants, Harvard filed a suit in the federal court in Boston. Since then, the administration has gutted the university’s research funding, upending budgets and forcing some hard-hit programmes to reimagine their scope and mission.

The end of international enrolment would transform a university where 6,800 students, more than a quarter of the total, come from other countries, a number that has grown steadily in recent decades. Graduate programmes would be hit especially hard.

At the Kennedy School, 59 per cent of students come from outside the US. International students make up 40 per cent of the enrolment at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health and 35 per cent at Harvard Business School.

Because international students do not qualify for federal financial aid, and typically pay more for their education, they contribute disproportionately to the university’s revenue, in addition to bringing diverse perspectives that enrich campus life and classroom discussions.

“This will destroy the university as we know it,” said Professor Kirsten Weld, who specialises in Latin American history and is the president of the Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

“Harvard is situated in the United States physically, but its students and faculty hail from all over the world. That is fundamental to the work and mission of the institution. You cannot take that away and have an institution left at the end of it.”

Fear and confusion spread quickly on May 22 as international students flooded group message boards with anxious questions and refreshed their e-mail inboxes.

Ms Sarah Davis, a second-year Kennedy School student from Australia who is scheduled to graduate next week, said she did not feel fully confident that she would receive her master’s degree in public administration if her student visa had been rendered invalid.

And even if she does receive her degree, Ms Davis said, it is unlikely that she will be able to stay in the US for the postgraduate job she has accepted.

Her employment is contingent on continued sponsorship by Harvard under the government’s Optional Practical Training programme, which permits universities to sponsor the visas of international students for as long as three years after they graduate.

“It’s incredibly disappointing to have something you’ve worked so hard for be taken away in an instant, and to end up in limbo,” Ms Davis said.

Mr Molden said he had broken out in a sweat as he read about the administration’s action.

“Getting into Harvard was the best thing that has ever happened to me in my life,” he said. “I can’t actually believe that this is happening.”

Mr Alfred Williamson, 20, a student from Wales who just completed his freshman year, said that he and many of his international friends had already started to think about transferring to other universities.

“I was messaging a friend from the UK, asking if we could talk about whether we could transfer to Oxford or Cambridge. People are taking this very seriously,” Mr Williamson said.

“Everyone’s freaking out,” he added. “No one knows what to do.”

Yet even students who had already begun to consider leaving found themselves overwhelmed by the prospect of quickly finding a spot elsewhere – and by the idea of leaving a place where they had invested so much.

“To watch my dream and those of my international peers be turned into a nightmare is one of the hardest experiences of my life,” Ms Ella Ricketts, a freshman from Canada, said in a text message. “The thought of leaving the Harvard community – the place where I feel most at home – remains almost impossible to consider.”

Canada, China, India, Britain and South Korea are among the countries that send the largest numbers of students to Harvard, according to university data.

Ms Genia Lukin, a doctoral student from Israel in Harvard’s psychology department, said that the Trump administration’s latest pressure tactic – deployed, like the rest, in the name of combating anti-Semitism – would further harm people like her who have experienced anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias on Harvard’s campus.

“This is not helping,” Ms Lukin said.

The new crackdown seemed to throw the future of some programmes into question. Mr Jose Ignacio Llodra, a student from Chile who is set to graduate next week from the Kennedy School, estimated that 90 per cent of students in his master’s programme had come from overseas.

“The programme is about how to bring international development to countries around the world – without international students, it doesn’t make sense,” Mr Llodra said.

“Many of us came to the US to study because the university system is the best in the world, and this policy might destroy this system.”

He said he was lucky that his student visa had been sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is about to receive a master’s degree in business administration. NYTIMES