Harvard University as a Problem of the 21st Century: Research and Practice in the Prevalence of International Students, a Statement by a Presidential Commission

Recent developments in the US may cause a lot of uncertainty for international students. HKU stands ready to welcome affected students at Harvard who wish to explore options and pathways for continuing their studies with us,” a spokesperson for the university told Nature.

In the same statement that you would lose the ability to host international students, the DHS could link to Harvard’s own documents. The report is from a presidential commission. It’s your commission looking at problems at Harvard University. And I read through the document. There are a lot of accusations in there about things that have gone wrong here and my eye fell on one sentence, which I wrote down. I’ll quote it to you: “Since fall 2023, different factions at Harvard have fought to force various university leaders to make statements, invest, divest, hire, fire, doxx, un-doxx, discipline students and undiscipline them.” How would you define the problem?

Harvard has become a target of the Trump administration in recent weeks. In April, the university declined to agree to the government’s demands for greater oversight of its admissions and hiring practices in order to continue receiving federal money. The government has since cut billions of dollars’ worth of federal funding in the form of close to 1,000 grants given to researchers at the university, according to an analysis by Nature.

Garber: I would say that we need to be firm in our commitments to what we stand for. And what we stand for – I believe I speak for other universities – is education, pursuit of the truth, helping to educate people for better futures. And hopefully our own students, after they graduate from our institutions, go out and serve the world. In the end, we’re about producing and disseminating knowledge and serving our nation and our world. When we fail in that, then we can expect to be attacked. So number one, I think we all need to redouble our commitment to the good of the nation and the world. And I know my fellow leaders are in agreement with that.

The university’s work benefits the public, and this is shown by recent awards for their work on obesity and diabetes drugs and gene editing.

The Harvard Lawsuit: “As Trump Targets Elite Schools, They Should ‘Stand Firm'” — An Interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep

The judge who blocked the administration’s attempt to remove international students from Harvard’s books posted on his website that his home countries are not friendly to the United States and that they don’t pay anything toward their students’ education. The post said that the administration wanted to know who the foreign students were.

Harvard’s ongoing legal fights with the Trump administration, the work of major research universities, and the administration’s concerns about antisemitism on campus were some of the topics covered in an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep.

Garber: I believe that we have made substantial progress on campus over the past year, and that’s what I’ve heard from many faculty and staff and students. There has been real progress. It is difficult to compare what happens on campus to what goes on in the rest of the country. We have fewer violent incidents from what I have heard. They are almost unheard of on our campus and probably less vandalizing. The main manifestation of antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias that we have grappled with has to do with social exclusion. It has to happen with shunning. If a student sits down at a dining room table and they have good conversations with other students who don’t know them, and when the other students find out that that student is Israeli, if they refuse to continue to speak to them, we have a serious problem that we need to address.

Source: As Trump targets elite schools, Harvard’s president says they should ‘stand firm’

Are Harvard and the international students really research universities? — An example of litigation against the Trump–Harvard lawsuit-funding-international-students position —

Garber: To the best of my knowledge, they are not true. I need to add, by the way, that this is clearly the subject of litigation, as you pointed out earlier. We have endeavored to do everything in line with the law.

Is that a small example of the things you’re trying to do? You want to allow all sorts of ideas, but you want people to be able to engage each other civilly.

Inskeep: Is this what you mean when, in the lawsuit, you say that without international students, which is a quarter of your student body, Harvard would not be Harvard?

Inskeep: What would you say to someone in the middle of the country who is listening to us and maybe thinking, “I really don’t have a stake in this? I did not go to Harvard. I’m not sending my kid to Harvard. I don’t like Harvard very much. This seems to be about a different kind of people. And Harvard deserves what they’re getting. It doesn’t really matter to me. What would you say to a person with that attitude?

I asked them to learn more about the universities like Harvard that are research universities. At the center of our university is teaching and learning. Much of the university’s activities are related to research. There’s so many discoveries that have come from Harvard and other research universities, advances in cancer and treatments of cancer of all kinds.

Source: As Trump targets elite schools, Harvard’s president says they should ‘stand firm’

The Realistic Use of the Federal Government Funds: Is It Really Helping Trade Schools? A Pedagogical Talk from the Head of State

Garber: I would say that the federal government has the authority through the budgeting process to reallocate funds. What is the problem he’s trying to solve by doing that? The money that goes to research universities in the form of grants and contracts, which is almost all of the federal support that we get, is used to pay for work that we perform at the behest of the government. So in reallocating to some other use, including trade schools, it means that work just won’t be performed. So the right question is, is this the most effective use of federal funding? Do you really want to cut back on research dollars? I’m less concerned about whether it goes to a trade school or if it goes to some other project, like working on highways. The real question is, how much value does the federal government get from its expenditures on research? There is a lot of actual research demonstrating the returns to the American people have been enormous.

Garber: Well, they said it I’ve repeat it myself, and I have to believe it. I have spoken to other leaders of universities and they all agree that it’s true. It is a warning. They see this as a message that if you don’t comply with what we’re demanding, these will be the consequences.