Reading about President Donald Trump’s most recent escalation of his war against Harvard, I thought about a special moment in the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, when Boston attorney Joseph Welch, in obvious dismay and disbelief, turned to GOP Senator Joseph McCarthy and sadly observed, “I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness…You have done enough.” Welch paused. “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
It was the question I wanted to ask Trump, when I heard that he had again acted with “cruelty,” “recklessness” and “with no sense of decency” in his destructive assault against America’s most venerable institution of higher learning. No longer content to accuse Harvard of many sins and injustices, topped by the disease of antisemitism; now, he has leaped rhetorically into an unreal world, so strange his anti-Harvard decision-making smacks of Pravda-like propaganda from an earlier time.
Henceforth, proclaimed Kristi Noem, his Secretary of Homeland Security, “effective immediately,” Harvard can no longer enroll any new foreign students, and those currently enrolled have to leave and move on to other universities, or, she stressed, “lose their legal status,” meaning go back to where they came from. She was targeting 6,800 students, or 27 percent of Harvard’s total enrollment, a rich source of talent, brainpower, and intellectual energy, not to mention substantial contributors to Harvard’s financial vitality. (A Harvard education now costs from $60,000 to $90,000 a year.)
Harvard immediately condemned the Trump administration’s decision as “unlawful and unwarranted,” imperiling the “futures of thousands of students and scholars” from around the world, and destabilizing the university’s very existence. It then sued the administration, and a federal judge in Boston, Allison D. Burroughs, quickly blocked implementation of the decision on foreign students.
In Washington, the White House dismissed these “frivolous lawsuits,” and Homeland Security accused Harvard of “seeking to kneecap the president’s constitutionally vested powers.” Clearly, Trump’s war against Harvard has reached a new level of unprecedented confrontation.
Earlier in Trump’s effort to pressure Harvard and other institutions of higher education to bend to his will, sacrificing their academic independence in the process, he withheld $3 billion in promised research grants to Harvard and froze $7 billion more once earmarked for Harvard-affiliated hospitals in the Boston area. The impact on medical research, not only at Harvard but throughout the country, has already been devastating, with laboratories shut down and scientists left looking for jobs in other countries. And, as reported this morning, the university must now also cope with another Trump threat to cut all federal funding to Harvard, estimated at roughly $100 million.
Secretary Noem’s official statement reads like an order rigidly crafted by a Kremlin alumnus. It’s cushioned with fragments of truth; but against a mountain of lies, the fragments convey only misleading distortions—which apparently is of no concern for this president.
“Harvard’s leadership has created an unsafe campus environment,” her statement alleges, “by permitting anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators to harass and physically assault individuals,” as if that were a fair description of a normal day at Harvard. “Many of these agitators are foreign students.”
In Trump’s continuing effort to dirty Harvard’s honor and reputation, Noem shockingly linked Harvard to the Chinese Communist Party and, weirdly, to its continuing effort to demolish the dissident Uyghur community in northwest China, stating that Harvard has been “engaged in coordinated activity with the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), including hosting and training members of a CCP paramilitary group complicit in the Uyghur genocide.” A footnote in Noem’s official handout identifies this “paramilitary group” as the “Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps,” which was supposedly active in the Uyghur “genocide” from 2020 to 2024. Harvard was to have known about the Corps’ complicity, because it was in the “US Treasury’s Specially Designated Nationals List,” whatever that may be.
Communist China is now in Trump’s doghouse, with both nations battling over tariffs—but really over political and military power. But for a long time now, ever since President Richard Nixon visited China in 1972, American universities (Harvard among them) have established exchange programs with Chinese universities and research institutions, and students and scholars have been traveling back and forth. Even the daughter of Chinese leader Xi Jinping was a student at Harvard, following in the footsteps of many other Chinese offspring.
Trump’s policy towards China flickers from confusing to confrontational. In either case, China is regarded with deepest suspicion, not quite as an enemy but clearly as a hostile adversary. Nevertheless, and not surprisingly, Trump has had little familiarity with the Yughurs. They remain a rebellious minority in northwestern China, not usually in his sphere of interest. In July 2020, during the presidential campaign, Trump figured it would be both wise and expedient to sign a Washington statement critical of Communist China’s brutal crackdown of the Uyghurs. It made political sense, he thought, because it was anti-China. However, a year earlier, one of Trump’s national security advisers, John Bolton, wrote that when Trump met Xi Jinping at a summit, he refused to condemn Xi’s crackdown of the Uyghurs, which many Americans, concerned about human rights, had expected him to do. No, Trump told Xi, if he wished to “hold hundreds of thousands” of Uyghurs in oppressive detention camps, that was okay with Trump. In fact, that would be ”the right thing” for Xi to do,” he said, according to Bolton.
As the crisis between Harvard and Trump deepens, Harvard, saddled with a charge of Uyghur complicity but without its international students, finds itself facing a very uncertain future, still at war with the Trump administration, but diminished in size, influence, productivity, and power.
A Harvard professor, James Furman, told the New York Times, “It is impossible to imagine Harvard without our amazing international students.” A Harvard senior, Leo Gerden, described the relentless Trump attacks on Harvard to be “extremely dangerous.” All things considered, he concluded, “Harvard is not going to be Harvard anymore.”
Nor, unfortunately, will the United States be the United States anymore.
Marvin Kalb, Murrow professor emeritus at Harvard, a former network correspondent, is the author of “A DIFFERENT RUSSIA: Khrushchev and Kennedy on a Collision Course.”
The defense of Harvard from attacks by the administration should be extended to every institution of higher learning because the attacks are illegal. It shouldn't matter that Harvard was the alma mater of John Adams or has international name recognition or is impossibly hard to get admitted to. A shiny distraction. It should be "hands off" whether it's Harvard or a college no one has heard of. Let's not go gaga about Harvard and miss the point about the illegality of the assault on higher education.
It is to be feared that at the end of the orange felon's dictatorship ( if there is such a thing), all the institutions of higher learning in this country will be second or third rate. No help is to be expected from the "supreme" court, which is more catholic than the old or new pope. Two of the six are totally corrupt and the other four appear to belong to the opus dei strain.