Momentarily cornered by a Massachusetts judge, Donald Trump is not giving up his grip on Harvard: the president has returned to threatening new cuts to the richest and most famous American university, proposing to cut three billion in federal funding to be allocated to professional schools.
"What a great investment this would be for our country!" said the president, who returned to using as a casus belli the accusation that Harvard has not provided his administration with data on foreign students that the government actually already has because the students arrived in the US with visas from the State Department. Writing in Truth, Trump said he is "still waiting" for the lists of foreigners from Harvard that would serve - according to him - to "determine how many radicalized fanatics, all troublemakers, should not be readmitted to our country."
Noting that 31% of Harvard students come from "foreign lands," the president said he "has no problem with most of them," but that in general "there are too many," a relative statement, in the sea of one million international students in the United States : at New York University, where his son Barron studies, there are 27,000, including the two thousand enrolled at the Abu Dhabi and Shanghai campuses. Trump said that "there are many Americans who want to go to Harvard. No foreign government gives money to Harvard, but we do." And so, in addition to the billions of dollars already frozen, Trump threatened to cut another three billion, to be allocated to professional schools: a proposal in itself not without merit - many countries such as Germany invest in professional paths parallel to universities - but in this case the populist message is born as a punitive sanction towards universities, accused of being hotbeds of elitism where progressive professors brainwash young people, fueling hostility to conservative values.
Starting from Columbia, in the dock for the anti-Gaza protests last spring, Trump's tug-of-war against higher education has found its favorite target in Harvard. The parties' lawyers are sharpening their weapons in anticipation of May 29, when Judge Allison Burroughs will decide whether to extend the temporary order that has frozen the ban on the entry of foreign students. That same day, Ethiopian-American doctor and humanist Abraham Verghese will take the podium for the degrees - the other speakers of the week are CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour, NBA champion and social justice activist Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and actress Jody Foster. Yesterday, Fed chief Jerome Powell spoke at Princeton: "Our universities," he told the graduates of the class of 2025, "are the envy of the world and are a crucial national asset."
(Online Union)
