Trump's Latest Swing at Harvard: Taking Away Foreign Students
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The federal government cuts off visas for foreign students at Harvard, another escalation of President Trump's spitting match with the Ivy League University, which has already sued and gotten a temporary victory from a federal judge. Meantime, the U.S. Supreme Court splits 4-4 on religious charter schools while signaling an end to so-called independent federal agencies.

Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with The Wall Street Journal. We're joined today by my colleagues, columnist Alicia Finley and editorial board member Colin Levy.

President Trump wants to shake up higher education, and he's right that at least some of these elite schools didn't do enough to protect Jewish students on their campuses from harassment and intimidation amid recent anti-Israel protests. But his dispute with Harvard seems to have turned into a contest of wills, first withdrawing billions in federal grants, resulting in a lawsuit from Harvard. Now, the latest is a move by Homeland Security Secretary Kirsten Noem,

ordering the termination of Harvard's participation in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program. According to a DHS press release on Thursday, this means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status, unquote.

Here is President Trump in the Oval Office this afternoon asked about his feud with Harvard. Billions of dollars has been paid to Harvard. How ridiculous is that? Billions. And they have $52 billion as an endowment. They have $52 billion. And this country is paying billions and billions of dollars and then gives student loans and they have to pay back the loans. So Harvard's going to have to change its ways.

Alicia, what do you make of this latest move by the Trump administration? How big of a deal is it to cut off foreign students from Harvard? Well, I think it is a big deal. A lot of private universities, actually public ones as well, rely on foreign students to pay the full freight that helps support and subsidize financial aid for U.S. students. Now, it's unclear how much money he

Harvard gets from foreign students. It says it's need-blind, so it also offers financial aid to some of its foreign students. But the foreign students comprise about around a third or a quarter of its student body. And most of these are, by the way, are graduate students. And there's the crop.

at least in my view, is that these graduate students, yes, they help teach a lot of the undergraduate classes and some of them were involved in the anti-Israel protests, but they also support a lot of Harvard's research activities in the sciences.

And at least my sources say one of the reasons why the administration is doing this is basically it's trying to kick Harvard in for some of its more renowned professors and talent to go elsewhere because they won't have the underlings to help them with their research.

But this is just the latest attack on Harvard. It's already withdrawn billions of dollars in funds, mostly for research. President Trump has threatened its tax-exempt status. And it has issued a demand seeking to dictate all kinds of its curriculum, hiring practices, and such. And its pretext for all of this is how it did handle the anti-Israel protest. Now, Harvard has already settled lawsuits with a number of Jewish groups on campus over its handling of that.

So it seems to me that a lot of this is just pure retribution and trying to play to a part of the right or President Trump's base who wants to beat up on Harvard, though it doesn't really seem to serve any purpose. Colin, part of the dispute here is the legal basis for these kinds of moves. Secretary Noem is saying that she had asked Harvard for information about the criminality and misconduct involved.

of foreign students on Harvard's campus, and it had warned the school that suspension of its visa program and participation in this visa program would be at risk if Harvard did not comply with that.

But Harvard is saying in court that this is basically pretextual, and it is kind of hard to disentangle this move by the Trump administration from everything else that is going on between these two parties. Alicia mentioned the threats against Harvard's tax-exempt status.

And notable that the judge has granted a temporary restraining order now, at least for now, preventing these foreign students from being deemed ineligible and requiring them either to leave the country or to find some sort of other sponsor, another college or university that is able to take them. No, that's right. I mean, it's clearly overbroad. Look.

As a fundamental question of executive power, the executive branch does get to control and has pretty strong power to decide who can and can't come into the country. But outside the legal issues, I mean, as a policy issue, it's absolutely an attempt to use the economic lever.

against Harvard in a punitive way. Alicia's point about graduate students is really important. Universities have two major sources of income. They have federal research dollars, which the Trump administration has already gone after, and they have the foreign students who come in, who pay full freight. Sometimes they're

Parents even pay more than that, hoping for a good outcome, you know, whether that's a student from Qatar or from China or from elsewhere. So this was very clearly intended to go directly to the economics of the ways universities operate and making Harvard a very large, visible example for that threat. But I also think it's worth noting.

saying here, the whole thing is just not very well thought out. So we're just banning all international students. And this is done in retribution for the anti-Semitism on campus and the way that pro-Israel students were treated. So does this ban on all international students include Israeli students? It's certainly going to include so many students who have done nothing wrong and are caught in this dragnet.

really just this retribution cycle with the Trump administration, where it just is adamant that it's not going to lose. Now, the fact that Harvard is fighting back in the courts instead of rolling over just makes the administration that much more all in and committed to the idea that they're going to squash Harvard no matter what and use every available tool against them. It's not a very fun thing to watch. Hang tight. We'll be right back in a moment.

Welcome back.

Alicia, how much do you read into the fact that Harvard has gotten a temporary restraining order from a federal judge? And what's your view of the legal issue at stake here? And as a reminder, I mean, we talked about this in the context of those federal grant cases. No one has a right to federal money in that way.

But A, there may be rules that Congress has put down in the law about how those grants may be withdrawn. And B, you may have a right not to have adverse action taken against you on a protected basis. You may have a right not to have an administration come in and say, we're pulling that money just because we don't like you. And so that is a distinction that you have to keep in mind when thinking about these things.

Right. So for the federal grant money, there are required procedures that the administration must follow if it's going to yank federal grant funds from a university or any other recipient receiving federal funds. Now, there are regulations in both. There are actually rules set out, codified in the law about the procedures.

And what the Trump administration did is they basically alleged that Harvard had violated the civil rights of Jewish students, but didn't go through all those procedures. And Harvard sued, alleging that this was retaliation based on its First Amendment rights, and that it also exceeded its authority under the law and didn't provide the due process required. Now, it's making very similar arguments here.

in this case. Now, the DHS cites its authority to remove Harvard's eligibility for essentially the student visa program, saying that it didn't comply with required records requests. And now the

government does have that authority. The question is how it's being used and whether it's being used to punish Harvard, which is what Harvard alleges in its lawsuit. It says that this actually amounts to retaliation for exercising its First Amendment rights and not surrendering to the administration's demands in its letter, I guess it was about a month ago, seeking to dictate the hiring practices and missions practices

of the university and provide sufficient diversity and viewpoint diversity in every single department. Now, Harvard also makes a due process argument and one under the Administrative Procedure Act. Again, the administration didn't actually go through and dot all its I's across all of its T's before taking this action. And I think as a

strong argument that's ultimately likely to prevail. The issue is there's still going to be a lot of uncertainty for these students right now that they're still in legal limbo, even though there's been a temporary restraining order. It could take months or years for this case to be resolved. And in the meantime, I think some are at least going to seek to try to enroll in other universities just to avoid that kind of uncertainty.

But many of those universities that foreign students may now consider would be universities not in the United States. It seems to me there's a deterrent effect here. And I understand that this White House and President Trump wants to deter illegal immigration. If you look at the border numbers, it seems they have done that pretty successfully. But Colin, what's your take on that?

Why does President Trump want to deter people who can get into Harvard as foreign students from coming here, studying maybe in STEM fields, staying here, starting U.S. companies? There are studies on how many people that are founding AI companies, for example, are immigrants. And it seems to me that that has been part of America's success over many decades.

is the ability to attract foreign talent here, to come here, to study here, and often to stay here and contribute to America's dominance in fields that really matter and the economic growth in a way that redounds to the benefit of the United States broadly and everybody living here.

Absolutely. I mean, Harvard's a huge brand. American universities are a huge draw. Having lived overseas in Hong Kong for five years myself, I can tell you that every parent living over there is looking to the United States as the gold standard. Everyone is looking for an angle to get their kids into American universities. I mean, really, that is the whole ballgame. I think that's true in many, many countries. And it

It reflects beautifully on the United States and the real high points of our education system, at least as they are perceived abroad. Obviously, you know, there are plenty of problems that we've talked about in other contexts with what's happening on campus. But particularly these graduate programs that do produce some of the finest scientists, do world-class work, scaring off the best and brightest from other countries, I think is important.

it's really unfortunate. And, you know, as you were talking, though, something else occurred to me that I hadn't thought about before, which is that, you know, there are a lot of American universities that actually have campuses overseas. This became sort of a cool thing to do over the past decade. You know, you have, you know, I think

several universities who have campuses in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Certainly there's schools including Georgetown, including Northwestern that have campuses in places like Qatar. So it'll be interesting to see if maybe these outposts

of these very fine American research institutions become draws in and of themselves for foreign students who still want to be a part of the American university enterprise and engaged, as we've just been talking about, but don't want to actually set foot in the United States. That's an interesting question because, Alicia, I do think that's why this matters beyond the specifics of Harvard, who many people don't have a lot of sympathy for,

I think that the beneficiaries of this are going to be other universities outside the United States, and maybe some of them will be affiliates of American universities, but many of them won't be. Because if you're a foreign student and you've been thinking about trying to get an education in the United States,

maybe as a way to get an entry here. And if you can start a company, find a job here, you can end up staying and becoming an American citizen. If you start to worry that at any moment, the White House might shut it all down and you will get how much notice? I don't know, weeks to pack your bags and go back to your country of origin, your country of birth. It seems to me that you will decide that is maybe not worth the risk.

And take your tuition money and take your studies to some kind of elite university somewhere else. Right. I think the biggest beneficiaries of this may be the UK's Cambridge, Oxford, Candice McGill, other world-renowned universities. But I think China has some universities that are seeking to rival the American universities.

Ivy Leagues. And, you know, some of the Chinese, which make up a large share of Harvard's foreign students and foreign students overall in the U.S., may just decide to continue to study in China and found companies in China. And now there's a National Foundation for American Policy found that immigrants have founded nearly two thirds of the top AI companies in the U.S. and incredibly 70 percent of full time graduate students in fields that are

related to AI are actually international students. So I don't think that this is going to redound to America's benefit. It seems to me they're trying to discourage the best and brightest from coming to the U.S. to begin with an enrolling in these schools. So what you're going to see is less human and intellectual capital, more IP, more companies in AI, biotech,

and other cutting-edge fields started abroad, and likely that includes China. So I think this is really another counterproductive move by the administration. Hang tight. We'll be right back in a moment. Isn't home where we all want to be? Reba here for Realtor.com, the pro's number one most trusted app. Finding a home is like dating. You're searching for the one. With over 500,000 new listings every month, you can find the one today.

Download the Realtor.com app because you're nearly home. Make it real with Realtor.com. Pro's number one most trusted app based on August 2024 proprietary survey. Over 500,000 new listings every month based on average new for sale and rental listings. February 2024 through January 2025. Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker. Play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast. From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

Welcome back. Let's turn to the Supreme Court. A couple of interesting pieces of news there on Thursday. In the case involving the proposed charter school in Oklahoma, St. Isidore, which wanted to be a Catholic charter school, the justices split four to four.

That leaves in place the Oklahoma Supreme Court's decision against St. Isidore and essentially means that it won't be able to open. Colin, it's an unsigned opinion, so only insiders know exactly which justices were on which side. But I guess my assumption, just watching the oral argument in this case, is it was probably the Chief Justice John Roberts who went over to the three liberal colleagues and opposed St.

the opening of this charter school. And a couple thoughts I would have on that. One is Chief Justice John Roberts, I think, has been pretty stalwart on religious liberty. There have been some cases in recent years about tuition programs. If states give parents money to take to private schools, he wrote some of those opinions in very strong language, saying that families have a First Amendment right, free exercise of religion, to use that tuition money at religious schools.

My guess is that he was concerned that charter schools are a little bit different. They operate with a state charter. They have more state oversight. And interesting that he didn't want, at this point at least, to take that step of saying that those precedents also apply to charter schools. And so an institution, a nonprofit that wants to run a charter school and teach religious doctrine had that right, similar right under the First Amendment.

Also, what made that deadlock possible was the recusal of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. She hasn't said why she recused, which is typical speculation that she had maybe some ties to a Notre Dame law professor. She previously was at Notre Dame, who at one point had advised St. Isidore, and maybe she felt that she was too close to that case.

It does, I think, highlight the challenges of all these calls for recusal that go around aimed at Supreme Court justices, because if you're a party coming to the Supreme Court asking to overturn a lower ruling, you need five votes. And so a recusal is almost the equivalent of a vote against you. And my final thought here, Colin, before I get off my soapbox is there may be another case that is going to come up. That's the difficulty of these four fours that leave in place these lower court rulings is

then everybody tries to figure out where they can come up with the next case where you won't have a recusal from Justice Barrett. And in the meantime, open questions about how exactly the Supreme Court is going to view this question of religious charter schools. I mean, I think...

Because there was no majority in this case, as you said, the court's decision doesn't set any kind of precedent on the big questions that everyone wanted answered here, on whether or not the First Amendment allows these public charter schools that are funded by taxpayer dollars to be religious.

And it is possible, as you say, that the case will come around again in another form because so many people in the education movement sort of see it as what's next. But I think you're right that this decision really was a tactical split. I think Chief Justice Roberts has been so interested in the question of exactly what is the government? Where is that line? And I think that was a key part of the consideration here.

you know, essentially is a charter school a private contractor or is it a government actor? A friend suggested to me that one way to think about charter schools is similar to franchisees. That is that you might go into your local McDonald's and it looks like a McDonald's and it has a McDonald's menu, but you know quite well that it's actually owned by Jeff and Jane and they own the three McDonald's in the neighborhood and it's their family business. And they make a certain number of the decisions about what's happening in that restaurant.

So I think it's not an easy question here. I think the question of a religious charter school is different than the question of a religious school choice program. So what actually makes a private contractor a government actor? There are certainly Catholic hospitals that treat patients every day that are using Medicare, Medicaid. And even if that government money is a large portion of their income, nobody would say that that suddenly turns them into a government entity.

So there's a lot of very complex questions here that go beyond just the sort of toss-off argument between the Establishment Clause and the free exercise clauses of the First Amendment here on whether or not religious schools are being discriminated against or whether the ACLU and other groups

here said, you have government funding of religious charter schools, then it violates the separation of church and state and potentially gets the government into the business of religious indoctrination. I think, and I'll get off my soapbox in a minute too, but

I would say that I think it is really important to remember here that the point of a public education ultimately is that children are educated in reading and math and science and all the things that are ultimately very secular subjects. And it's certainly true that religious groups, the Jesuits springing obviously most immediately to mind, as well as some Jewish schools have been very successful in creating parochial

options that are celebrated because they offer an excellent secular education. I mean, that's why people flock to them because the kids are coming out with great test scores and, you know, out of a great system. But it's also true in the context of public education that

that religion isn't and shouldn't be the point. I think we still have to lift up the math and grammar here and not get too lost in the weeds. Finally, the justices also on Thursday sending a signal of their view on so-called independent agencies. This is a case involving a member of the National Labor Relations Board who President Trump is trying to remove.

She sued, saying that the NLRB, like a lot of these bodies in Washington, is an independent agency and its members cannot be fired by the president except for cause. The details may depend on the law at issue. But Alicia, this is something we've talked about in the past, and it depends on a 1935 decision called Humphrey's Executor blessing these sorts of bodies, saying that they are independent of the president.

Even if the president may appoint members to agencies like that, he doesn't necessarily have the day-to-day authority to fire someone if that person is not doing what he wants. So Alicia, what did the Supreme Court do here on Thursday in this case? And what do you think that it suggests about their ultimate view of Humphrey's executor and this question of independent agencies on the merits? A lot to unpack there, but the Supreme Court, or at least a majority of the Supreme Court, allowed

President Trump to go through with removing a member of the National Labor Relations Board as well as Merit Systems Protection Board. Now, a D.C. Circuit had already allowed that and said that Humphrey's executive precedent from 1935 actually didn't apply in the case of these two firings because these agencies are

aren't actually anything like the FTC of the 1935. They aren't quasi-legislative or judicial bodies. The fact that they exercise a lot of executive power. And the Supreme Court, or the majority on it, basically concurred and said and upheld the D.C. circuits actually ruling at least after a full briefing. It was...

on first blush, but they basically said, well, at this juncture, you can go ahead and move these two officials because it seems like you're probably going to prevail on the legal merits. And it seems like the writing is now on the wall that the Humphreys executive president, and we call it a president, but it's really just an exemption rather than the

rule. And it's probably a very limited relevance to all the alphabet soup of today's agencies that mostly do exercise executive power and the liberal justices in their dissent. And I guess we can presume that the conservatives were all in the majority here. The liberal justices in their dissent basically said, you're just one step of overturning Humphrey's executor outright. And

then you've done that through essentially non-binding dicta. And I think there's something to that. They are basically putting the writings on the wall. Don't be surprised if now Trump tries to clean house in these agencies. He already has removed two FTC Democratic commissioners. I mean, I think this will just embolden him to go further. Just on a footnote or end note, let's hope he doesn't try to remove Jay Powell. The Supreme Court was obviously very

cognizant that that could be coming. Jay Powell, the Fed chairman, said that the Fed may have a unique status, has a unique history, and that its decision or its order on Thursday does not necessarily apply to the Fed. And so the

that case involving whether the president can fire the Fed chair may invariably reach up to the Supreme Court, though it isn't there yet today. And I think Trump should be happy to take the victory for what it is right now. Thank you, Alicia and Colin. Thank you all for listening. You can email us at pwpodcast at wsj.com. If you like the show, please hit that subscribe button. And we'll be back next week with another edition of Potomac Watch.

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