American universities have been feared for a long time that the Chinese government will restrict the students of their country to attend institutions that cross the sensitive political lines of Beijing.
Universities still fear that consequence today, but the Chinese government no longer represents the most immediate threat. Now, as the last punishment was given to the preeminent academic justices of the Trump administration, it is our own government that represents the threat.
On May 22 letterThe Secretary of National Security, Kristi Noem, announced that she revoked the certification of the Student and Exchange Program of Harvard University, which means that the thousands of international students of the University must be transferred immediately or lose their legal status. Harvard can no longer register for future international students.
Noem cited Harvard's failure to deliver international disciplinary records of students in response to a previous letter and, disturbingly, the desire of the Trump administration to “eliminate the evils of anti -Americanism” on the campus. Among the most alarming demands in this last letter was that Harvard supplies all “any protest activity” videos for any international student in the last five years.
Harvard immediately defendant Noem and his department and other agencies, legitimately calling the revocation “a shameless violation of the first amendment”, and in a matter of hours a judge issued a temporary restriction order against revocation.
“That this serves as a warning for all academic universities and institutions throughout the country”, Noem wrote In X about punishment. And on Tuesday, the Administration stopped interviews for all new students visas.
This is not how a free country treats its schools, or international visitors who attend them.
Noem's warning, without a doubt, will be heard strong and clear. This is because universities, which depend on the dollars of the enrollment of international students, have already had reasons to worry about losing access to international students for displeasing censurial government officials.
In 2010, Beijing Revocado recognition From the accreditation of the University of Calgary in China, which means that the Chinese students of the Canadian school suddenly risked to pay a title that was worth little at home. The reason? The granting of the University of an honorary degree to Dalai Lama the previous year. “We have offended our Chinese partners for bringing the Dalai Lama, and we have a job to solve that problem,” a spokesman saying.
Beijing Restored Recognition more than a year later, but many Chinese students had already left. Damage done.
Similarly, when UC San Diego was the host of Dalai Lama as a starter in 2017, the punishment followed. The Chinese Scholarship Council suspended Financing for academics with the intention of studying at UCSD and An article In the state of state communication, Global Times recommended that the Chinese authorities “do not recognize diplomas or degree certificates issued by the University.”
This type of direct punishment does not happen very frequently. But the threat always exists, and creates fear that administrators take into account by deciding how their universities operate.
American universities must now fear that they suffer this penalty as well, but on an even greater scale: revocation of access not only to China students, but all international students. That is a great potential loss. In Harvard, for example, international students constitute a whopping 27% of the total registration.
Whether they recognize it publicly or not, university leaders are probably considering whether they need to adjust their behavior to prevent international student enrollment funds from drying.
Will our schools and universities increase the censorship and surveillance of international students? Do you avoid inviting the disadvantaged start speakers by the Trump administration? Do you press the academic departments against the hiring of any teacher whose comments from social networks or research areas will call Mercurial Government officials?
And, equally disturbing, will they be willing to admit that these calculations are now doing? Unlike direct punishments by the Trump or Beijing administration, this chilling effect is likely to be largely invisible.
Harvard could survive without the enrollment of international students. But a large number of other universities could not. The nation as a whole would also feel its loss: in academic year 2023-24, international students contributed A record of $ 43.8 billion for the US economy.
And these students, who have uprooted their lives for the promise of what American education offers, are the ones who will suffer the most, since they experience weeks or months of panic and agitation while they are used as pawns in this campaign to punish higher education.
If the Trump administration is trying to eliminate “anti -Americanism”, it can begin by surveying its own behavior in recent months. Freedom of expression is one of the most appreciated values in our country. Censorship, surveillance and punishment of government critics do not belong here.
Sarah McLaughlin is a senior scholar of global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the author of the next book “Authoritarian in the Academy: how the internationalization of higher education and censorship without borders threaten freedom of expression. “
