Bulwark Takes - Trump Tries to Break Harvard: Only American Students Allowed

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

The Trump administration is escalating its battle with Harvard, moving to block international student enrollment and threatening funding unless the university complies with demands for control over co...urses and student data. It’s a political attack aimed at weakening elite institutions, but Harvard—wealthy and powerful—is unlikely to fold. The bigger threat is whether the courts will allow it.

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Starting point is 00:00:26 Total savings varies based on purchase amount. See Lowe's.com for details. Hey, guys. It's me, Sam Stein, Managing Editor at The Bulwark. I'm joined by JVL, Editor of the publication. We are going to be talking about some breaking news that just happened. Pretty wild stuff. It looks like the Trump administration is moving to restrict international students from going to Harvard University.
Starting point is 00:00:48 A real escalation in the war between the administration and the university. Before we get to that, subscribe to the feed. We appreciate your subscriptions. We welcome international students and viewers. All right, JVL, what are your first reactions to this? It's a really big deal. It is a continuing attempt to threaten the economics of Harvard. I mean, the Trump administration has basically said, we want to
Starting point is 00:01:13 own Harvard. We want to be the shadow hand that makes all decisions at Harvard. They want help. They would like to have guidance over who Harvard lets in, who Harvard rejects, who Harvard hires, what teachers are hired at Harvard. What they teach. And what they teach. And to impose this, what they have said is, like, anywhere that Harvard touches the government, we are going to use that as leverage against you. And so this is grants and funding. Harvard's a gigantic institution, right? I mean, there are grants coming in
Starting point is 00:01:50 to biomedical research being done at Harvard. And what the Trump administration said is, we want to know what your undergraduate courses are. And if you don't tell us that, or you don't allow us to have veto power over your undergrad course offerings, then we will not, say, fund this research study going over on some other part of campus. When that hasn't worked, they have threatened with removing tax exempt status for the entire institution. And where that has not worked, they are now attacking Harvard's ability to enroll foreign students. And the reason this matters is because foreign students
Starting point is 00:02:30 at the university level pay full freight. And this is true no matter where you are, whether it's your community college, state school, Ivy League school. If you're a foreign student, you're paying full price tuition. And that, not at Harvard, but at other schools, what that does is it allows them to give financial aid to American students. Just for some data points, the number of international students that are attending Harvard has gone up significantly since 2006. Back then, it was about a 19.6% of the total enrollment were made up of international students. That was about 3,940. In 2024, 2025, that number had gone up to 6,793, which was roughly 27.2% of total enrollment. Now, that's a lot. That's not nothing. And if they're playing full
Starting point is 00:03:24 tuition, that's a sizable chunk. But Harvard's got a huge endowment. People who look at the Harvard endowment say, well, they can get by with that. And certainly they can fill some of these slots. There's plenty of people who want to go to Harvard who are not international students. It's not that they're going to have to cut slots. So how significant is this from a financial perspective? So none of this is, from Harvard's perspective, they're going to be fine.
Starting point is 00:03:56 And this is – as you say, I mean Harvard could – Harvard is one of a handful of schools that could simply make tuition free for everybody and still be absolutely economically viable. There's even been movements to do that at Harvard and some of the other top schools. But you have to understand, so this is all part of, again, Trump's administration's attempt to break Harvard. So this follows what happened in April was Trump demanded to have a series of document dumps from Harvard about their foreign students. And so they wanted to they wanted to know what courses these students were taking. They wanted Harvard to report their activities. I mean, really, it, it is like the lives of others. Um, you know, like the Trump administration wanted Harvard to, to be reporting on their students in order to, to finger who are the good ones and who are the bad ones, bad ones being anybody whose politics they don't like, for instance. And Harvard resisted this, and that is why.
Starting point is 00:04:52 And so because Harvard wouldn't inform on their own students, Trump has just said, OK, well, then you can't have any foreign students enrolled at all. I'm probably pushing my boundaries here, but what does the immigration law actually say about the government's ability to say, yeah, I'm sure we can restrict visas, but are they allowed to just sort of pinpoint what institutions are allowed to use and get student visa recipients? I don't know. We're going to find out. Exactly. Harvard does have some lawyers who I think will fight this one. The thing that strikes me is, you know, obviously it's about Harvard specifically, but it's just continuing this whole notion of like we're really just destroying our academic institutions and science in America. citizen who wants to go to school and study science and go into that field, they've really sapped some of the opportunities for that by just restricting the amount of federal money that's available for grants. Now, if you're an international student who has real promise in scientific
Starting point is 00:05:52 research or any of the postgrads or anything like that, medical research, you're now restricted from going to at least one of these major universities, the major university of America. The idea that this country is going to be a inviting climate for some of the best and brightest is far-fetched we're ruining that and i think that has a very profound impact for not just like next year but for 5 10 15 years down the road because you need that certainty yeah i mean why wouldn't you if you were a smart kid from South Korea or from Brazil or any other place, why wouldn't you just go to Cambridge? You want a career in the West? Yeah, you want a career in the West?
Starting point is 00:06:32 Like, you know, you go do your research someplace else now. You don't want to go to a country where who knows what will happen to you, right? You get nabbed off the street. You could be there perfectly legally, and then America could, in secret, change your legal status. Instead of telling you you got to go home, they could just, again, literally grab you off the street, maybe get shot during the arrest or not. Who knows, right? Or you write a not bad that they don't like on some sort of geopolitical issue. Right. And you don't know where the lines are. That's the other thing, right? I mean,
Starting point is 00:07:03 nobody is certain. It's not like, hey, you can go to America, just don't break any laws. Because it's not even about law breaking, right? Nobody knows what the lines are, which could get you in trouble. It's really bad. I am interested, Sam, why do you think the Trump administration picked on Harvard? Because I got to say, they were very smart in how they attacked the law firms. Right. Like going after Paul Weiss was was smart. I think they understood that there is a level at which with elite law firms you can find the people who are weak.
Starting point is 00:07:39 You can hurt them and then that'll make it easier to roll the stronger firms as you go on yeah at the university level like columbia is is sort of you know the sick the sick impala in the herd right but harvard is like i don't know like i i gotta think that harvard is the last institution that would crack yeah harvard's a little too precious of their reputation to crack, right? They don't want to be seen that way. My sense is probably that they thought that if you could break Harvard, then everyone else would fall in line and so you go for it, right? And the report and the contemporaries reporting on it was that they accidentally sent the
Starting point is 00:08:22 demand letters, like they hadn't fully cleared it. And like they went for some pretty far-reaching demands as you articulated and harvard was just in an impossible situation they said no and now you have a situation frankly where you know this administration would never back down it's just not in their mo and so they have to constantly escalate i think you wrote a column about this about how you always up the ante uh until like you just basically the person on the other side of the table says, I can't play anymore. Right? That's the situation here. And I am curious if Harvard has a breaking point, what would it be?
Starting point is 00:08:55 I mean this is pretty bad, honestly, but I don't know if this is where they break. At some point, though, there must be a breaking point. So here's the thing. I don't think Harvard can be broken. I think Harvard is simply too big. Too big to break? I mean, it's such a – I mean, honestly, if Harvard lost its tax-exempt status, it would be fine. It would be the most significant employer in the state of Massachusetts.
Starting point is 00:09:20 I mean, the amount of power it has, the amount of resources it has, it's like picking a fight with General Motors in 1960 or something. You know, like it's just too big. Yeah. And it just seems like the first really significant strategic error from the Trump administration's attempt to break civil society. I think they've been very smart in everything else they've done. And I just think they misjudged what Harvard's resources and powers are. So how do you think Harvard responds to this one? Obviously, they're going to challenge it in court, right? They're challenging it in court. Yeah. Yeah. And the question is,
Starting point is 00:10:03 do the courts break? And maybe that's the gamble, right? Maybe the court. Yeah. Yeah. And this is the question is, do the courts break? And maybe that's the gamble, right? Maybe Trump's, maybe the Trump administration's gamble was this will ultimately be decided by courts. And if we're rolling the dice on that anyway, why not roll the dice on the biggest gorilla? So you could see, you could see a situation where they play a little bit dirty, right? And they say, okay, we're not going to accept any of the kids of prominent Trump supporters. We're not going to take any kids. You have a cabinet official whose kid wants to enroll here? Good luck. I mean, that would be the real dirty rule, but I don't know if they're going to go there.
Starting point is 00:10:38 They won't do that. They won't do that. I'm just imagining a future in which it really escalates into nasty, nasty shit. But that's the real question. What if the courts let the administration do this? They might. That's the real question, right? Because then, I mean, Harvard's not breaking.
Starting point is 00:10:52 Like, you know, if Harvard has to take that on the chin, they'll take that on the chin. I still don't think they'll fold. But then the next, you know, there will be more pressure against it. And if the Trump administration is able to break Harvard, then literally no university in America is safe. Oh yeah, no, this is it. Like you can't, this is the biggest, the most well-funded university and it sets the tone for everyone else. And I say that as a Dartmouth graduate, as much as that pains me. All right, man, thank you for doing this. Appreciate it. We'll be following the story. Thank you guys for watching. Appreciate that. Subscribe to the
Starting point is 00:11:24 feed. Tell everyone about it. We'll be following the story. Thank you guys for watching. Appreciate that. Subscribe to the feed. Tell everyone about it. Talk to you soon.

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