US universities see Trump’s Harvard move as a threat to them too

If it happened to Harvard University, could it happen anywhere?

The Trump administration’s surprising bid to end Harvard’s international enrolment put the higher education world on edge this past week, looming as a larger threat against academic autonomy.

Well beyond the halls of Harvard, college leaders were shocked that one swift move by the federal government could eliminate their ability to serve students from abroad, a growing population that has infused their campuses with cachet and wealth.

“This is a grave moment,” Professor Sally Kornbluth, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in a message to her campus.

More than 8,000km away, University of Hawaii president Wendy Hensel said that it was “reverberating across higher education”.

US President Donald Trump has unnerved universities in 2025 by launching investigations, freezing grants, demanding changes in campus practices and attempting to deport international students.

He has justified his punitive approach as a means to combat what he considers anti-Semitism. But he and his allies also have long resented a perceived liberal bias and racial diversity efforts at prestigious colleges.

The Trump administration said on May 22 that it had revoked Harvard’s international student certification because the university had failed to meet its demands, including a request for records of student protest activity dating back five years.

To many academics, that was a clear signal that Mr Trump was prepared to use any federal mechanism as leverage if he did not get what he wanted.

“While Harvard is the victim of the moment, it’s a warning and (an) unprecedented attempt of a hostile federal government to erode the autonomy of all major universities in the US,” said Dr John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley.

Mr Trump may not get his way in the end; a federal judge temporarily blocked his manoeuvre on May 23, setting up another legal battle that Harvard is willing to fight.

But the move itself could still force campuses elsewhere to think harder about how far they are willing to go to resist the President’s demands. And it likely will scare off some international students who fear their college track in the US could be disrupted at any point.

“The implication is a growing and great chill on attracting academic talent to the US,” Dr Douglass said.

The reaction highlights the increasing role international students have played in American higher education, particularly at some of the most prestigious universities. Across the nation, enrolment from abroad has doubled in the past 25 years, with more than one million international students now studying in the US.

While international students make up slightly more than 5 per cent of university students nationwide, some of the nation’s most selective schools rely far more heavily on them.

At New York University, home to nearly 60,000 students, one-third of them are international. At Columbia University, about two in five students come from abroad.

And at Harvard, more than a quarter of students come from across the globe.

Universities see many benefits of having a global student body, enriching the intellectual, social and cultural life on campus. Drawing the world’s top talent also helps develop outstanding academic programmes and opportunities for ground-breaking research.

Many students who complete their degrees in the US stay on afterwards to build their careers, whether in academia or private industry, fuelling a global economy.

But as selective universities have grown more international, some conservatives say American students are losing out.

“Upper middle-class children in America are having an increasingly hard time getting into places like Harvard,” said Dr Jay Greene, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Centre for Education Policy.

“More of those spaces are consumed by foreigners and fewer are available to American students.”

Ms Kristi Noem, the US Homeland Security Secretary who terminated Harvard’s access to the federal Student and Exchange Visitor Programme, said on May 22 that the move was a response to an unsafe campus environment for students, including many Jews.

She alleged that many protesters who have engaged in harassment and physical assault were foreign students.

“Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country,” she said in a statement.

Mr Abdullah Shahid Sial, a second-year student at Harvard from Pakistan, welcomed the judge’s halt to the federal order but said that the ruling will not undo the damage that has been inflicted on American higher education.

Many international students do not feel comfortable living in the US any more, according to him.

“They wanted us to feel unwelcome,” he said. “They’ve done a pretty good job of that.”

Professor of management Niall Hegarty at St John’s University in New York, who has researched international student enrolment trends, said growth in international students has slowed in recent years compared with the early 2000s.

Two decades ago, he said, many wealthy Chinese families had aimed to send their children to the US to study. At the time, US companies flocking to China were likewise eager to hire Chinese employees who had been educated at American universities.

That dynamic exists worldwide, as people educated in the US can help American companies operate effectively abroad, Prof Hegarty said.

“I think the takeaway is that our country needs them, they add value to the classroom, and when they go home, they’re proponents of US businesses,” he said of international students.

The Heritage Foundation’s Dr Greene said that international study programmes began with twin motivations: to improve American education with perspectives from overseas, and to help spread American political values around the world when students return to their home countries.

Over time, though, he said, the predominance of international students on some campuses has begun to undermine the original goals.

“When it gets large enough, rather than expanding the perspectives that are available for Americans in higher education, it allows for the dominance of other perspectives from around the globe,” Dr Greene said. “What is beneficial at a low level becomes dangerous politically at a high level.”

Mr Hafeez Lakhani, a college admissions counsellor in New York, said he was aware of international students who chose Britain or Canada over the US because of actions by the Trump administration.

The latest move against Harvard is bound to amplify the trend.

“This sends a signal to the rest of the world that not only is Harvard closed to the international best and brightest, but that the US is not a welcome place for international students,” Mr Lakhani said.

He added that it could open up opportunities for more domestic students with compelling records to land spots at the nation’s oldest and most prestigious university. NYTIMES