05/23/2025
Trump's vindictive swipe at academia by stripping Harvard University of its foreign exchange certification is part of a broader assault on elite universities. A judge today has blocked Trump's ability to bar foreign students for now, however, Trump will not stop here. He is intent on illegally seizing control of the elite universities in our country. Does he scare you yet?
Below is part of the UC Berkeley graduation speech by Prof Robert Reich, UC Berkeley, former Secretary of Labor in Pres Clinton's Administration as he opines on the reasons universities like Harvard and Columbia are on Trump's "enemies list":
"Yesterday, Kristi Noem, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, notified Harvard University that “effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked.”
Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students. Existing foreign students must transfer to another university or lose their legal status.
This could affect more than a quarter of Harvard’s student body.
Noem said she did this because of the university’s “failure to comply with simple reporting requirements.”
Rubbish. There was nothing simple about the trove of information Noem demanded from Harvard — including the coursework of every international student and information on any student visa holder who had been involved in “illegal” activity — information beyond what Harvard is legally allowed to share with the government.
We are in deep authoritarian fascist territory, friends.
Trump is escalating his war against American higher education and against the rest of the world.
We will be the worse for this.
To Trump, the only useful non-Americans are those who invest in his crypto schemes and global resorts, or gift him jumbo “palace in the sky” aircraft.
Yet global brains have been crucial sources of our scientific and economic advances. Since the end of World War II in particular, we have benefitted enormously from talented students and faculty drawn here from all over the planet to learn, study, research, and innovate.
Once again, it will be up to the federal courts to stop this idiocy. The rest of us must speak out loudly and clearly against what is being done.
Here’s what I told the graduates from U. Cal. Berkeley’s School of Education at their commencement ceremony earlier this week (before I learned of the Trump regime’s latest move):
Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated citizenry. Slaveholders prohibited the enslaved from learning to read. N***s burned books. Putin and Xi censor the media.
Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.
America’s founders knew this. They saw how easily emperors and kings could mislead uneducated publics. The survival of the new nation required a public wise enough to keep power within bounds. People imbued, in the language of the time, with civic virtue.
Jefferson assured Americans that if they could “enlighten the people generally … tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”
So America became the cradle of free, universal, public education.
I don’t have any easy answers to the many challenges we’re experiencing today in classrooms across the land, but we must never give up on these three basic educational ideals: free, universal, and public.
If we stop thinking about education solely as a private investment on the way to a good-paying job and see it as a public good, we’d give every child an understanding of the Constitution, the meaning and importance of the rule of law, and why no one should be above it."
