Wednesday Reads: Trump’s War on Harvard University

Posted: May 28, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: Donald Trump, education, just because | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Good Morning!!

Memorial Hall, Harvard University

Today I’m going to focus on the Trump administration’s attacks on Harvard University. Obviously, Trump’s war on Harvard isn’t just about Harvard. It’s a war on higher education. If he succeeds in destroying Harvard, he will move on to other universities. Thank goodness Alan Garber, Harvard’s president is standing strong against the blatant attacks on academic research, international students, and freedom of speech.

Here’s the latest news in the Trump-Harvard battle:

The New York Times: Trump Intends to Cancel All Federal Funds Directed at Harvard.

The Trump administration is set to cancel the federal government’s remaining federal contracts with Harvard University — worth an estimated $100 million, according to a letter sent to federal agencies on Tuesday. The letter also instructs agencies to “find alternative vendors” for future services.

The additional planned cuts, outlined in a draft of the letter obtained by The New York Times, represented what an administration official called a complete severance of the government’s longstanding business relationship with Harvard.

The letter is the latest example of the Trump administration’s determination to bring Harvard — arguably the country’s most elite and culturally dominant university — to its knees, by undermining its financial health and global influence. Since last month, the administration has frozen about $3.2 billion in grants and contracts with Harvard. And it has tried to halt the university’s ability to enroll international students.

The latest letter, dated May 27 from the U.S. General Services Administration, was delivered Tuesday morning to federal agencies, according to an administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official had not been authorized to discuss internal communications.

The letter instructs agencies to respond by June 6 with a list of contract cancellations. Any contracts for services deemed critical would not be immediately canceled but would be transitioned to other vendors, according to the letter, signed by Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the G.S.A.’s federal acquisition service, which is responsible for procuring government goods and services.

Contracts with about nine agencies would be affected, according to the administration official.

Examples of contracts that would be affected, according to a federal database, include a $49,858 National Institutes of Health contract to investigate the effects of coffee drinking and a $25,800 Homeland Security Department contract for senior executive training. Some of the Harvard contracts under review may have already been subject to “stop work” orders.

“Going forward, we also encourage your agency to seek alternative vendors for future services where you had previously considered Harvard,” the letter said.

It’s not just Harvard, of course.

Politico: Trump team pauses new student visa interviews as it weighs expanding social media vetting.

The Trump administration is weighing requiring all foreign students applying to study in the United States to undergo social media vetting — a significant expansion of previous such efforts, according to a cable obtained by POLITICO.

In preparation for such required vetting, the administration is ordering U.S. Embassies and consular sections to pause scheduling new interviews for such student visa applicants, according to the cable, dated Tuesday and signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

If the administration carries out the plan, it could severely slow down student visa processing. It also could hurt many universities who rely heavily on foreign students to boost their financial coffers.

“Effective immediately, in preparation for an expansion of required social media screening and vetting, consular sections should not add any additional student or exchange visitor (F, M, and J) visa appointment capacity until further guidance is issued septel, which we anticipate in the coming days,” the cable states. (“Septel” is State Department shorthand for “separate telegram.”)

The administration had earlier imposed some social media screening requirements, but those were largely aimed at returning students who may have participated in protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza.

What does this policy mean?

The cable doesn’t directly spell out what the future social media vetting would screen for, but it alludes to executive orders that are aimed at keeping out terrorists and battling antisemitism.

Many State Department officials have complained privately for months that past guidance — for, say, vetting students who may have participated in campus protests — has been vague. It’s unclear, for example, whether posting photos of a Palestinian flag on an X account could force a student to undergo additional scrutiny.

The administration has used a variety of rules to target universities, especially elite ones such as Harvard, that it sees as too liberal and accuses of allowing antisemitism to flourish on their campuses. At the same time, it is carrying out immigration crackdowns that have swept up a number of students….

The news was met with frustration in much of the higher education community.

NAFSA: Association of International Educators, a group that advocates for foreign students, decried the decision. The group’s CEO, Fanta Aw, said it unfairly cast aspersions on hardworking students.

“The idea that the embassies have the time, the capacity and taxpayer dollars are being spent this way is very problematic,” Aw said. “International students are not a threat to this country. If anything, they’re an incredible asset to this country.”

What is Trump’s supposed rationale for his attack on Harvard and high education?

The Boston Globe: Trump administration says Harvard funding cuts are punishment for ‘race discrimination.’

After a weekend of threats and criticism from President Trump, the federal government on Tuesday severed the last of its remaining business ties to Harvard University.

Josh Gruenbaum, a top official at the US General Services Administration, instructed all federal agencies to terminate any contracts with Harvard or transfer them to other vendors. He also said in a letter sent to federal procurement officials Tuesday that government agencies should refrain from awarding any new contracts to Harvard in the future….

Although the Trump administration’s original rationale for targeting Harvard was campus antisemitism, Gruenbaum’s letter Tuesday focused more on the government’s allegations that Harvard’s admissions and hiring practices violate antidiscrimination laws. For that reason, he said, Harvard should not be allowed to receive federal funding….

Gruenbaum’s letter laid out the government’s expanded justification for targeting Harvard. The university,the federal government alleges, systematically discriminates against white people, men, straight people, and, in some cases, Asian Americans.

“As fiduciaries to the taxpayer, the government has a duty to ensure that procurement dollars are directed to vendors and contractors who promote and champion principles of nondiscrimination and the national interest,” Gruenbaum wrote.

Harvard has denied the government’s allegations and sued the Trump administration. In two cases in federal court in Boston, Harvard’s lawyers argued the administration’s tactics violate federal laws and the Constitution and amount to illegal retaliation. Many lawyers, including some conservatives who share Trump’s critiques of universities, have agreed some of the Trump administration’s tactics appear to be illegal.

The administration’s letter on Tuesday accuses Harvard of discrimination in its admissions and hiring practices, as well as at the Harvard Law Review. Federal agencies have launched investigations on all of those subjects.

The Department of Justice is investigating whether Harvard’s admissions practices run afoul of a Supreme Court ban on affirmative action in college admissions. And the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have launched an inquiry into alleged discrimination by Harvard against white people, Asian Americans, men, and heterosexuals in hiring and promotions.

The Trump administration is even suggesting there could be criminal investigations of university officials.

Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Trump’s Fury at Harvard Gets More Deranged—and Exposes a Big MAGA Scam.

President Donald Trump has mostly justified his lawless attempt to restrict international students from attending Harvard University by pretending it’s designed to root out the antisemites, woke radicals, and dangerous terrorists supposedly nesting in their ranks. Now, however, Trump has a new rationale: It’s all about helping young, aspiring Americans, particularly those in the working class.

“We have Americans who want to go there and to other places,” Trump told reporters over the weekend, adding angrily that many of Harvard’s international students are “bad” and are taking Americans’ slots: “They can’t go there because you have 31 percent foreign.”

Trump then tweeted:

I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land. What a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed!!!

Yeah, OK. If Trump really wants to facilitate the upward mobility of America’s working-class youth, here’s a better way to do it: Persuade his fellow Republicans in the House to drop their new budget’s changes to financial aid for higher education, which will restrict access to it for large numbers of working-class students, probably including many who want to attend—yup—trade schools.

With Trump’s fury at Harvard getting worse, this turn in the saga suggests another grotesque subtext to all of it: Telling working-class families that the real obstacle their kids face is zero-sum competition from foreign students makes it easier to take away resources previously appropriated to boost working-class kids to fund tax cuts for the rich.

What’s going on here?

Trump’s assault is a wildly unhinged abuse of power in every way. Last week, Trump revoked Harvard’s ability to host international students, due to Harvard’s alleged failure to share sufficient “information” about foreign students in response to an administration demand. That demand was itself absurdly intrusive, and seemed designed not to be met, creating a pretext for Trump to broaden his attack. The revocation appears wholly lawless, and after Harvard sued, a court blocked it within hours.

At this point, there’s no need to pretend there’s a genuine public-interest rationale at work here. Everyone knows it’s all about getting universities to surrender to flatter Trump, or about executing a broader hostile MAGA takeover of liberal institutions. For instance, in an article reporting that Trump is now nixing Harvard’s federal contracts on top of canceling billions in grants, The New York Times notes almost in passing that Trump wants to bring Harvard “to its knees,” as if this is unremarkable, when it should be depicted as the power-crazed ravings of a Mad King.

But there’s something particularly ghoulish about Trump’s suggestion that his blockade on international students is about helping American kids who are unfairly displaced by them.

That’s because the “big, beautiful bill” that House Republicans passed last week—which Trump has urged Senate Republicans to adopt—could make attending college harder for countless such kids. For a detailed summary of its changes, see this piece by The New Republic’s Monica Potts: They would make it harder for full-time students to qualify for Pell Grants, bump off large numbers of part-time students, and restrict access to the program and other financial assistance for higher education in numerous other ways.

Indeed, a coalition of education advocacy organizations estimates that the bill’s changes to Pell Grants alone could deprive as many as 700,000 people of eligibility entirely and hit many more with higher costs. As Potts summarizes, all this “takes an ax to one of the few reliable ladders for working-class people seeking higher education” as an “engine for social mobility.” These are mostly poorer and working-class students by definition, many with jobs or young kids of their own.

Trump’s attack on Harvard and higher education hurts Massachusetts, which is home to 114 colleges and universities.

Karen Miller at Boston Globe Magazine: Trump vs. Massachusetts: How one state represents everything the president despises.

In her State of the City address in March, Mayor Michelle Wu spoke about her then-2-month-old daughter. The world she entered was “not the world I expected or hoped for her,” Wu said. “I want her to grow up in the America that Paul Revere rode for, that Dr. King marched for, that my parents left home for.”

A few weeks later, as Paul Revere’s ride was reenacted and scores of redcoats lined up with muskets on the Lexington Battle Green, you didn’t have to look far to see signs that Massachusetts’ centuries-long revolutionary spirit was being threatened. Sprinkled through the crowd, posters read “No King! No Tyranny! Support the Rule of Law” and “In America, the Law is King.” [….]

Widener Library, Harvard University

Massachusetts may be uniquely positioned to suffer in President Trump’s second term. And not just because the president has slashed disaster aid, school funding, and health support for the Commonwealth. Or because he plans to withdraw clean energy support and undercut states with robust environmental laws.

Our economy is deeply reliant on elite colleges, elite hospitals, and the elite minds who come here from around the world. In Massachusetts — like it or not — we have built an economy on expertise, excellence, and education.

In the early 2000s, after graduating from high school outside of Chicago, Wu was drawn — like so many others — to the educational opportunities here. Her parents “didn’t know too much about America” when they arrived in the 1980s from Taiwan. She says that they, “like so many, held such a reverence for the institutions that in some ways symbolized the American dream for them. Harvard was one of them.”

Now, the magnets that have attracted talent to Massachusetts have become liabilities. “ Boston is at the center of many of the most targeted industries and communities,” Wu says. “And so we’re feeling it very much — very urgently.”

The mayor notes that the city is “trying to plan for unpredictability. And so our city budget this year includes preparations for worst-case scenarios.” Although Boston’s financial foundation is “quite strong,” Wu says, “we need to be prepared for immediate, significant impacts to federal funding or larger macroeconomic impacts.”

We’re living, she says, under “a cloud of chaos.”

The Boston Globe: ‘This is about more than Harvard’: Healey tells alumni as university faces down Trump.

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey voiced support for her alma mater Tuesday night as Harvard University continues to battle President Trump’s attacks on the Cambridge institution’s autonomy and funding.

“This is about more than Harvard,” she told a virtual webinar of thousands of Harvard alumni.

In recent weeks, Harvard has filed litigation charging that Trump unlawfully froze billions in federal funding to the school after it refused to give the government control over academic decisions. More recently, the school also legally challenged Trump’s attempt to revoke the school’s ability to enroll international students.

On Tuesday night, a group of Harvard alumni held a pair of virtual events to discuss the impact of the administration’s actions on academic freedom, research, students, and employees of the Ivy League university.

Crimson Courage, which describes itself as “a nonpartisan community of Harvard alumni,” encouraged alumni to sign onto an amicus brief in ongoing litigation spearheaded by Harvard against the Trump administration.

The brief “supports the academic freedom and integrity of Harvard and higher education institutions across America—all of which must be able to educate students consistent with their missions and values, free from political interference.”

The brief, according to organizers, will be filed in a legal case where Harvard argues the government’s use of research funding cuts as leverage to exert control over its affairs is an abuse of federal power.

Healey, in her comments to alumni, said Trump’s moves against the university is undercutting American competitiveness and damaging the local and national economy. Harvard, she said, is the fourth largest employer in Massachusetts, and its international students alone contribute $400 million to the local economy annually.

If Trump succeeds in damaging Massachusetts, will other blue states be next?

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

With elite U.S. universities in President Trump’s crosshairs, the leader of Harvard University says institutions need to double down on their “commitment to the good of the nation” and be firm in what they stand for.

The Trump administration, acting on its claims that Harvard has failed to stamp out antisemitism on campus, froze more than $2 billion in research grants and contracts in April and attempted to revoke the school’s ability to enroll international students last week. The university is suing the federal government for both actions.

Harvard President Alan Garber told Morning Edition that he finds the measures taken by Trump to be “perplexing.” While he acknowledges there is work to be done on campus, he said he struggles to see a link between funding freezes and fighting antisemitism.

“Why cut off research funding? Sure, it hurts Harvard, but it hurts the country because after all, the research funding is not a gift,” Garber said, adding that these dollars are awarded to efforts deemed “high-priority work” by the federal government….

As evidence of how his university’s work directly benefits the U.S. public, Garber points to recent honors awarded to Harvard faculty by the Breakthrough Prize, known as “The Oscars of Science,” for their work on obesity and diabetes drugs and gene editing, used to correct disease-causing genetic variations.

The Trump administration’s multi-billion dollar funding freeze came after Harvard refused demands to change policies around hiring and admissions, eliminate DEI programs, or screen international students who are “supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism,” as the administration put it.

Read the entire interview at the NPR link.

Commentary on Trump’s attacks on Harvard:

Daniel Drezner at Drezner’s World: The Trump Administration Is Trying to Kill American Higher Education.

Recent readers may recall that I was in a bit of a funk last week because among other things “The [Trump] administration further escalated its war on Harvard in myriad ways. This is part and parcel of a wider war on higher education that will destroy American soft power, one of the country’s leading export sectors, and American economic productivity.”

Harvard Art Museum

Impressively, the situation on this front has gotten even worse in the last 24 hours….

…consider the complete set of federal actions taken against Harvard that the New York Times’ Michael C. Bender has compiled. It’s an extraordinary list of punitive actions given that the Trump administration has been in office for just a little over a third of a year.

Now, as a professor at the Fletcher School, a direct competitor of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, readers might wonder if I think there might be some competitive advantage that might be gained from Harvard’s misfortune. And the answer to this is “not really, no,” for two reasons.

The first is raw politics: Harvard is the most prestigious university in the United States. It has the deepest pockets. If the Trump administration can force Harvard to acquiesce to its demands, that capitulation will make it that much harder for other universities to protect academic freedom.

The second is that while Harvard might be receiving the brunt of the administration’s malignant attention, Trump’s team is taking other actions that will harm most U.S. universities.

Examples: Threats to investigate foreign students’ social media and ordering embassies to stop vetting visas for international students applicants.

This administration seems bound and determined to force U.S. students to pay higher tuition, because it keeps stripping away alternative sources of revenue. Between slashing federal research funding to record-low levels, raising the transaction costs of accepting foreign grants, and this freezing the visa processing of foreign students, the Trump administration is disincentivizing scientific research and forcing universities to rely increasingly on the tuition payments of domestic college students.

The end result will be a poorer, less dynamic economy and a less vibrant society. I wish the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer was being hyperbolic in this paragraph – but he isn’t:

“These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.”

Why are they doing it? Serwer attributes it to politics: “by destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior.” I could proffer a variety of other ideological or political responses. As of now, however, such rationales are besides the point. The only thing I know for sure is that it’s not for the reasons proffered by the administration.

Read the rest at the Substack link.

Paul Krugman on his Substack: America Turns Its Back on the World.

My wife and I are co-authors of a widely used textbook on the principles of economics, which is revised on a three-year cycle. When a new edition comes out, I normally visit a number of schools that might adopt it, usually giving a big public talk, a smaller technical seminar, and spending some time with students and faculty. I enjoy it, by the way; there are a lot of good, interesting people in U.S. education, and not just in the high-prestige schools.

So it was that at one point I found myself visiting Texas Tech in Lubbock. Yes, it seemed pretty remote to someone who has spent almost his whole life in the Northeast Corridor, but as usual the overall experience was very positive. And it was also surprisingly cosmopolitan: there were students from many nations. I just checked the numbers, and currently 30 percent of Texas Tech’s graduate students are international.

So it is all across America. Our nation’s ability to attract foreigners to study here is one of our great strengths. Or maybe I should say was one of our strengths.

According to Politico, a cable from Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has directed U.S. embassies and consulates to halt all processing of visa applications from foreigners hoping to study in the United States. This is reportedly a temporary measure in preparation for a new system in which would-be students will be screened on the basis of their social media history. And you can be sure that the criteria for denying entry will go far beyond, you know, advocating terrorism. Probably asking “Why was Trump talking to West Point grads about trophy wives?” will be grounds for rejection.

This completely insane policy move is presumably a temper tantrum in response to a court’s rejection of the administration’s attempt to prevent Harvard from admitting foreign students, which was in turn a temper tantrum in response to Harvard’s rejection of demands from Trumpists that they be allowed to dictate the university’s hiring and curriculum.

The courts will probably reject this policy move, too, but I worry that Rubio and co. can put enough sand in the gears of the visa process to bring the entry of international students to a near halt. And even if they can’t, the clear message to students that they aren’t welcome (and may be arrested once here) will have an immensely chilling effect.

It’s hard to overstate the self-destructiveness of this move, and the war on higher education in general. This is madness even in purely economic terms.

Read the rest at the link.

One more by Liz Dye at Public Notice: Trump’s attack on Harvard hampered by his inability to STFU.

The Trump administration would be getting slapped down in court even if the president and his minions didn’t constantly announce their intent to violate the law. But their incessant chest thumping does make things go a lot faster.

Case in point: the temporary restraining order barring the government from canceling student visas at Harvard University. The order was issued just hours after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem revoked Harvard’s visa “privilege” for foreign students. The administration teed up the ruling by declaring that it intended to flagrantly violate the First Amendment. But they telegraphed their punch so thoroughly that Harvard’s lawyers had a 72-page complaint with 28 exhibits ready to be filed the second Noem announced the plan.

Trump Hates Harvard

Just hours after being sworn in, Trump signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to “identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations” of civic, corporate, and academic institutions, including “institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars” for their supposed “illegal discrimination.”

Lowell House, Harvard University

The EO was clearly an attack on the Ivy League, long targeted by conservatives as a bastion of “wokeness” that should be brought to heel. And Project 2025, with its “big idea” to seize control of the budget from Congress, provided Trump with a blueprint to wield federal tax dollars as a weapon against state governments and institutions.

Part of the plan was for Trump to unilaterally announce new “laws” via executive order, and, instead of asking courts to enforce them, leverage federal funds to punish anyone who resists.

And so the president simply declared DEI “illegal,” and used the widespread adoption of anti-discrimination policies by corporations and academia as a pretext to go after anyone he doesn’t like. But, as a federal judge noted last week when he blocked an attack on the law firm Jenner & Block, “the defendants point to no case holding such diversity initiatives illegal.” This is simply the executive branch inventing a new legal theory and demanding that everyone treat it as settled law.

Dye describes how Harvard fought back successfully in court.

On April 11, Harvard sued in federal court in Massachusetts, alleging that the funding cuts were an arbitrary and capricious agency action in violation the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause, and the Constitution’s separation of powers. That case landed on Judge Allison Burroughs’s docket, and when the school sued again 10 days later over a further round of funding cuts, it designated the cases as “related,” ensuring that it, too, would be assigned to the Obama appointee.

Harvard docketed voluminous correspondence demonstrating that the Trump administration is using federal funds to both coerce the school into changing its speech, and retaliating against it for speech conservatives don’t like. For instance, a letter signed by representatives of the General Services Administration and the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services presented an “agreement in principle” demanding sweeping changes to all aspects of the university’s hiring, admissions, disciplinary, and curricular programs as a precondition of preserving the school’s federal funds.

“The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” the university wrote in response. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”

That response was signed by longtime Republican lawyer Bill Burck, of the law firm Quinn Emanuel, and Robert Hur, the former special counsel tapped by Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate Joe Biden. (Burck was immediately fired by the Trump Organization as an ethics advisor.)

But Trump kept on making public threats and posting nonsense on social media.

Trump’s constant public screeds serve as potent evidence that the funding cuts are retaliatory, and any supposed DEI “crimes” are mere pretext.

On April 15, he suggested that Harvard “should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’” [….]

That’s an explicit attack on Harvard’s academic freedom, which is protected by the First Amendment. And he followed it up the next day by screeching that “Harvard is a JOKE, teaches Hate and Stupidity, and should no longer receive Federal Funds.” [….]

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon admitted in an interview with CNBC on May 7 that the administration is 100 percent targeting Harvard for disfavored speech.

“Are they vetting students who are coming in from outside of the country to make sure they’re not activists? Are they vetting professors that they’re hiring to make sure that they’re not teaching ideologies?” she said. “They’ve taken a very hard line, so we took a hard line back.”

All these comments — and so many more! — featured in Harvard’s lawsuits.

Please read the rest at Public Notice. It’s an excellent summary of what Trump has been doing and why it’s unlawful.

That’s all I have for you today. What’s on your mind?

Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: March 29, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, education, Elon Musk, just because | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Stephanie Lambourne, Blissful Teatime

Good Afternoon!!

As usual, so much is happening that I don’t know where to begin, so I’ll begin with the Trump administration’s war on higher education.

The most detailed story I’ve seen so far is at The Times of India, but they don’t allow copying. I hope you’ll go to the link and read the article. The gist is that the Trump administration is emailing international students who were involved in campus activism to self-deport. The administration spies are searching social media for any comments from foreign students that they interpret as anti-American. In addition, Marco Rubio is using AI to find student that appear to support Hamas or other terrorist groups and revoke their visas. There’s more at the link.

This is from Ken Klippenstein.com: Trump Admin Spies on Social Media of Student Visa Holders. Ideological purge of foreign students revealed in new leaked directive.

The Trump administration is requiring that foreign students studying in, or seeking to study in the United States, pass an ideological test in order to obtain a visa, according to a “sensitive” State Department directive issued by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and which I obtained.

The crackdown, instituted on Tuesday, makes it “mandatory” for consular officers and State Department personnel to conduct a “social media review” — including screenshotting posts — of new and returning student visa applicants for any evidence of terrorist connections. Such connections are defined broadly to include “advocating for, sympathizing with, or persuading others to endorse or espouse terrorist activities or support” a terrorist organization. Though the document doesn’t explicitly define what counts as advocacy, it mentions “conduct that bears a hostile attitude toward U.S. citizens or U.S. culture (including government, institutions, or founding principles).

Specific reference is made to students seeking to participate “in pro-Hamas events,” which is how the Trump administration has characterized student protests against the war in Gaza.

“When you apply to enter the United States and you get a visa, you are a guest,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on March 16 in remarks quoted in the directive “If you tell us when you apply for a visa, I’m coming to the U.S. to participate in pro-Hamas events, that runs counter to the foreign policy interest of the United States ….. if you had told us you were going to do that, we never would have given you the visa.”

The order to “comprehensively review and screen every visa applicant” appears directed at Palestinian and other foreign students who are “sympathetic” to Hamas, but typical of every government directive, it also opens the door for broader ideological vetting. It also directs the social media of visa applicants to be assessed for “potential security and non-security related ineligibilities [that] pose a threat to U.S. national security.”

The directive, dated March 25, bears the subject line “Enhanced Screening and Social Media Vetting for Visa Applicants.” It begins with a reference to two of Trump’s executive orders, including one on “measures to combat anti-semitism” and another on combating foreign terrorists and other national security threats to public safety.

There’s more detail at the link.

The LA Times: California international students on alert as Trump ramps up arrests of pro-Palestinian activists.

Ali, a UCLA student who joined pro-Palestinian protests last year, avoided arrest when riot police dismantled the school’s encampment last May. An international student who took part in a surge of campus activism around Israel’s war in Gaza, he was wary of having a record that could affect his visa. But he did not otherwise hide his activism.

Now, as federal authorities act on President Trump’s directive to deport international student activists he accuses of being antisemitic “pro-Hamas” terrorism supporters, Ali has taken new precautions. He’s moved out of his apartment — the address listed with the government — and is staying with a friend. He attends classes but avoids social events. He carries a piece of paper with the number for a 24-hour hotline faculty set up for students detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Arthur’s Morning, by Vicky Mount

As more arrests unfold, fears among California international students are growing — and frustrations mounting — as they accuse campus administrators of not doing enough to protect them in the state with the largest foreign student population in the nation and universities at the forefront of national activism.

“It’s a matter of time before it gets here,” said Ali, who did not want his full name, nationality, area of study or age published because he is worried about being tracked. “This is free speech. Isn’t this what this country is supposed to be known for?” [….]

At UCLA, faculty members recently circulated advice to international students: “Don’t say anything to ICE. Don’t sign anything. Tell them to speak to your attorney,” it said alongside a hotline number. “… Please have a stamped, pre-addressed envelope to someone you trust with you in the event of an ICE arrest, you can send the mail to alert them you have been detained.”

During “know your rights” training events, some international students have been told to “not go out unless you need to and make sure someone knows where you are going if you do go out,” said Randall Kuhn, a UCLA professor of public health who last year joined protesters.

Apparently, Trump is attempting to cancel the First Amendment for international students, and he is working on ending it for all college students, professors, and administrators as well.

The New York Times (gift link): Columbia President Is Replaced as Trump Threatens University’s Funding.

The interim president of Columbia University abruptly left her post Friday evening as the school confronted the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding and the Trump administration’s mounting skepticism about its leadership.

The move came one week after Columbia bowed to a series of demands from the federal government, which had canceled approximately $400 million in essential federal funding, and it made way for Columbia’s third leader since August. Claire Shipman, who had been the co-chair of the university’s board of trustees, was named the acting president and replaced Dr. Katrina Armstrong.

The university, which was deeply shaken by a protest encampment last spring and a volley of accusations that it had become a safe haven for antisemitism, announced the leadership change in an email to the campus Friday night. The letter thanked Dr. Armstrong for her efforts during “a time of great uncertainty for the university” and said that Ms. Shipman has “a clear understanding of the serious challenges facing our community.”

Less than a week ago, the Trump administration had signaled that it was satisfied with Dr. Armstrong and the steps she was taking to restore the funding. But in a statement on Friday, its Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism said that Dr. Armstrong’s departure from the presidency was “an important step toward advancing negotiations” between the government and the university.

The statement included a cryptic mention of a “concerning revelation” this week, which appeared to refer to comments from Dr. Armstrong at a faculty meeting last weekend. According to a faculty member who attended, Dr. Armstrong and her provost, Angela Olinto, confused some people when they seemed to downplay the effects of the university’s agreement with the government. A transcript of the meeting had been leaked to the news media, as well as to the Trump administration, according to two people familiar with the situation.

Ms. Shipman, a journalist with two degrees from Columbia, is taking charge of one of the nation’s pre-eminent universities at an extraordinarily charged moment in American higher education.

The federal government is threatening to end the flow of billions of dollars to universities across the country, many of which are facing inquiries from agencies that range from the Justice Department to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Reuters has an update on Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University graduate student who was recently kidnapped by ICE in Somerville, Massachusetts: US judge halts deportation of Turkish student at Tufts.

BOSTON, March 29 (Reuters) – A federal judge in Massachusetts on Friday temporarily barred the deportation of a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, who voiced support for Palestinians in Israel’s war in Gaza and was detained by U.S. immigration officials this week.

Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, was taken into custody by U.S. immigration authorities near her Massachusetts home on Tuesday, according to a video showing the arrest by masked federal agents. U.S. officials revoked her visa.

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The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has accused Ozturk, without providing evidence, of “engaging in activities in support of Hamas,” a group which the U.S. government categorizes as a “foreign terrorist organization.”

Oncu Keceli, a spokesperson for Turkey’s foreign ministry, said efforts to secure Ozturk’s release continued, adding consular and legal support was being provided by Turkish diplomatic missions in the U.S.

“Our Houston Consul General visited our citizen in the center where she is being held in Louisiana on March 28. Our citizen’s requests and demands have been forwarded to local authorities and her lawyer,” Keceli said in a post on X….

In Friday’s order, opens new tab, U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston said that to provide time to resolve whether her court retained jurisdiction over the case, she was barring Ozturk’s deportation temporarily.

She ordered the Trump administration to respond to Ozturk’s complaint by Tuesday.

Mahsa Khanbabai, a lawyer for Ozturk, called the decision “a first step in getting Rumeysa released and back home to Boston so she can continue her studies.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been very busy undermining our health in his position as head of the Department of Health and Human Services. Here’s the latest.

ProPublica: The CDC Buried a Measles Forecast That Stressed the Need for Vaccinations.

Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica.

In an aborted plan to roll out the news, the agency would have emphasized the importance of vaccinating people against the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease that has spread to 19 states, the records show.

A CDC spokesperson told ProPublica in a written statement that the agency decided against releasing the assessment “because it does not say anything that the public doesn’t already know.” She added that the CDC continues to recommend vaccines as “the best way to protect against measles.”

But what the nation’s top public health agency said next shows a shift in its long-standing messaging about vaccines, a sign that it may be falling in line under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime critic of vaccines:

“The decision to vaccinate is a personal one,” the statement said, echoing a line from a column Kennedy wrote for the Fox News website. “People should consult with their healthcare provider to understand their options to get a vaccine and should be informed about the potential risks and benefits associated with vaccines.”

ProPublica shared the new CDC statement about personal choice and risk with Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health. To her, the shift in messaging, and the squelching of this routine announcement, is alarming.

“I’m a bit stunned by that language,” Nuzzo said. “No vaccine is without risk, but that makes it sound like it’s a very active coin toss of a decision. We’ve already had more cases of measles in 2025 than we had in 2024, and it’s spread to multiple states. It is not a coin toss at this point.”

CBS News: RFK Jr. to gut vaccine promotion and HIV prevention office, sources say.

The entire staff of the federal government’s Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy is expected to be laid off, multiple federal health officials told CBS News Friday. The moves are part of a broader restructuring plan ordered by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that involves cutting 20,000 HHS positions.

Much of the government’s efforts to buoy lagging childhood vaccination rates nationwide have been run through OIDP, including a new campaign called “Let’s Get Real” that had launched in the final months of the Biden administration to provide resources and information to health care providers talking to hesitant parents.

“Spreading the truth saves lives, so use our resources to help parents understand how vaccines work, why they’re safe, and how they help protect kids,” the department had said of the campaign after it was launched.

The Office of Minority Health has also been informed that it should expect to be dissolved, sources said.

OIDP, overseen by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health or OASH, had numbered around 60 employees at the end of the Biden administration. The cuts come as the Trump administration is trying to merge the other offices in OASH into a new HHS agency called the Administration for a Health America, or AHA….

The National Vaccine Program has also been run by OIDP, which works with an advisory committee to coordinate the department’s agencies to develop vaccines, oversee their safety and increase their availability and use.

The New York Times: Top F.D.A. Vaccine Official Resigns, Citing Kennedy’s ‘Misinformation and Lies.’

The Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official, Dr. Peter Marks, resigned under pressure Friday and said that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s aggressive stance on vaccines was irresponsible and posed a danger to the public.

“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Dr. Marks wrote to Sara Brenner, the agency’s acting commissioner. He reiterated the sentiments in an interview, saying: “This man doesn’t care about the truth. He cares about what is making him followers.”

By Karyn Lyons

Dr. Marks resigned after he was summoned to the Department of Health and Human Services Friday afternoon and told that he could either quit or be fired, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Dr. Marks led the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which authorized and monitored the safety of vaccines and a wide array of other treatments, including cell and gene therapies. He was viewed as a steady hand by many during the Covid pandemic but had come under criticism for being overly generous to companies that sought approvals for therapies with mixed evidence of a benefit.

His continued oversight of the F.D.A.’s vaccine program clearly put him at odds with the new health secretary. Since Mr. Kennedy was sworn in on Feb. 13, he has issued a series of directives on vaccine policy that have signaled his willingness to unravel decades of vaccine safety policies. He has rattled people who fear he will use his powerful government authority to further his decades-long campaign of claiming that vaccines are singularly harmful, despite vast evidence of their role in saving millions of lives worldwide.

“Undermining confidence in well-established vaccines that have met the high standards for quality, safety and effectiveness that have been in place for decades at F.D.A. is irresponsible, detrimental to public health, and a clear danger to our nation’s health, safety and security,” Dr. Marks wrote.

This is insane:

Mr. Kennedy has, for example, promoted the value of vitamin A as a treatment during the major measles outbreak in Texas while downplaying the value of vaccines. He has installed an analyst with deep ties to the anti-vaccine movement to work on a study examining the long-debunked theory that vaccines are linked to autism.

And on Thursday, Mr. Kennedy said on NewsNation that he planned to create a vaccine injury agency within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He said the effort was a priority for him and would help bring “gold-standard science” to the federal government….

In his letter, Dr. Marks mentioned the deadly toll of measles in light of Mr. Kennedy’s tepid advice on the need for immunization during the outbreak among many unvaccinated people in Texas and other states.

Dr. Marks wrote that measles, “which killed more than 100,000 unvaccinated children last year in Africa and Asia,” because of complications, “had been eliminated from our shores” through the widespread availability of vaccines.

Dr. Marks added that he had been willing to address Mr. Kennedy’s concerns about vaccine safety and transparency with public meetings and by working with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, but was rebuffed.

Next up, the latest Musk news.

The latest DOGE plan for Social Security is terrifying. Wired: DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Code Base in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse.

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system—and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely—at risk.

The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.

Under any circumstances, a migration of this size and scale would be a massive undertaking, experts tell WIRED, but the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits.

“Of course, one of the big risks is not underpayment or overpayment per se; [it’s also] not paying someone at all and not knowing about it. The invisible errors and omissions,” an SSA technologist tells WIRED….

SSA has been under increasing scrutiny from president Donald Trump’s administration. In February, Musk took aim at SSA, falsely claiming that the agency was rife with fraud. Specifically, Musk pointed to data he allegedly pulled from the system that showed 150-year-olds in the US were receiving benefits, something that isn’t actually happening. Over the last few weeks, following significant cuts to the agency by DOGE, SSA has suffered frequent website crashes and long wait times over the phone, The Washington Post reported this week.

By Fernando Botero

Why this is problematic:

This proposed migration isn’t the first time SSA has tried to move away from COBOL: In 2017, SSA announced a plan to receive hundreds of millions in funding to replace its core systems. The agency predicted that it would take around five years to modernize these systems. Because of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the agency pivoted away from this work to focus on more public-facing projects.

Like many legacy government IT systems, SSA systems contain code written in COBOL, a programming language created in part in the 1950s by computing pioneer Grace Hopper. The Defense Department essentially pressured private industry to use COBOL soon after its creation, spurring widespread adoption and making it one of the most widely used languages for mainframes, or computer systems that process and store large amounts of data quickly….

As recently as 2016, SSA’s infrastructure contained more than 60 million lines of code written in COBOL, with millions more written in other legacy coding languages….

SSA’s core “logic” is also written largely in COBOL. This is the code that issues social security numbers, manages payments, and even calculates the total amount beneficiaries should receive for different services, a former senior SSA technologist who worked in the office of the chief information officer says. Even minor changes could result in cascading failures across programs.

“If you weren’t worried about a whole bunch of people not getting benefits or getting the wrong benefits, or getting the wrong entitlements, or having to wait ages, then sure go ahead,” says Dan Hon, principal of Very Little Gravitas, a technology strategy consultancy that helps government modernize services, about completing such a migration in a short timeframe.

The New York Times: Elon Musk Says He Has Sold X to His A.I. Start-Up xAI.

Elon Musk said on Friday that he had sold X, his social media company, to xAI, his artificial intelligence start-up, in an unusual arrangement that shows the financial maneuvering inside the business empire of the world’s richest man.

The all-stock deal valued xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion, Mr. Musk said on X. X’s price was down from the $44 billion that Mr. Musk paid for the social media company in 2022, but higher than the $12 billion valuation that some of X’s investors have recently assigned it. The last valuation of xAI, at a December fund-raising round, was about $40 billion.

Both companies are privately held and already share significant resources, such as engineers. A chatbot called Grok, made by xAI, is trained on data posted by X users and is available on X. Last month, bankers for X told investors that some of the social media company’s revenue came from xAI.

Mr. Musk wrote in his post that “xAI and X’s futures are intertwined.”

“Today,” he said, “we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent.” He added, “The combined company will deliver smarter, more meaningful experiences to billions of people while staying true to our core mission of seeking truth and advancing knowledge.”

The deal shows how Mr. Musk can play with different parts of his business empire. In this case, he folded a company that has been losing value, X, into one that has been gaining value, xAI. Mr. Musk made a similar maneuver in 2016 when he used stock of his electric car company, Tesla, to buy SolarCity, a clean energy company where he was the largest shareholder and his cousin Lyndon Rive was chief executive.

While Tesla is a publicly traded company that must disclose its finances and other information to shareholders, most of Mr. Musk’s companies are privately held and more opaque. Those include the rocket manufacturer SpaceX; the Boring Company, a tunneling start-up; and Neuralink, a brain interface company. Mr. Musk often moves resources and employees among his companies, defying traditional business norms and operating his various companies as one big Musk enterprise.

The latest on Pete Hegseth.

The Wall Street Journal: Hegseth Brought His Wife to Sensitive Meetings With Foreign Military Officials.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is facing scrutiny over his handling of details of a military strike, brought his wife, a former Fox News producer, to two meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed, according to multiple people who were present or had knowledge of the discussions.

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One of the meetings, a high-level discussion at the Pentagon on March 6 between Hegseth and U.K. Secretary of Defense John Healey, took place at a sensitive moment for the trans-Atlantic alliance, one day after the U.S. said it had cut off military intelligence sharing with Ukraine. The group that met at the Pentagon, which included Adm. Tony Radakin, the head of the U.K.’s armed forces, discussed the U.S. rationale behind that decision, as well as future military collaboration between the two allies, according to people familiar with the meeting.

A secretary can invite anyone to meetings with visiting counterparts, but attendee lists are usually carefully limited to those who need to be there and attendees are typically expected to possess security clearances given the delicate nature of the discussions, according to defense officials and people familiar with the meeting. There is often security near the meeting space to keep away uninvited attendees.

Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer Hegseth, isn’t a Defense Department employee, defense officials said. It isn’t uncommon for spouses of senior officials to possess low-level security clearances, but a Pentagon spokesperson declined to say whether Jennifer has one. Jennifer didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Jennifer Hegseth also attended a meeting last month at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels where allied defense officials discussed their support for Ukraine, according to two people who attended the meeting. Hegseth’s brother Philip Hegseth has also been traveling with him on official visits, the Pentagon said.

The Brussels meeting, which took place on the sidelines of a February conference of NATO defense ministers, was a gathering of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a U.S.-led forum of some 50 nations that periodically meets to coordinate on production and delivery of weapons and other support for Ukraine. At the closed-door discussions, national representatives routinely present confidential information, such as donations to Ukraine that they don’t want to be made public, according to officials.

You can get past the paywall and read the rest if you click the link at http://www.memeorandum.com.

Defense News: Hegseth’s younger brother is serving in a key role inside the Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s younger brother is serving in a key position inside the Pentagon as a Department of Homeland Security liaison and senior adviser, Hegseth’s office confirmed.

The high-profile job has meant meetings with a UFC fighting champion, a trip to Guantanamo Bay and, right now, traveling on the Pentagon’s 747 aircraft as Hegseth makes his first trip as defense secretary to the Indo-Pacific.

Phil Hegseth’s official title is senior adviser to the secretary for the Department of Homeland Security and liaison officer to the Defense Department, spokeswoman Kingsley Wilson said in a statement Thursday.

“Phil Hegseth, one of a number of talented DHS liaisons to DOD, is conducting touch points with U.S. Coast Guard officials on the Secretary’s Indo-Pacific trip,” which includes stops in Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines and Japan, Wilson said in response to a query by The Associated Press….

It’s common for the Defense Department and other federal agencies to have liaisons. Each military branch sends liaisons to Capitol Hill. The Pentagon, State Department and others all use interagency liaisons to more closely coordinate and keep tabs on policy.

But it is not common for those senior-level positions to be filled by family members of the Cabinet heads, said Michael Fallings, a managing partner at Tully Rinckey PLLC, which specializes in federal employment law.

Based on Phil Hegseth’s publicly available resume, his past experience includes founding his own podcast production company, Embassy and Third, and working on social media and podcasts at The Hudson Institute.

He sounds about as qualified as his older brother Pete.

That’s all I have for you today. What’s on your mind?