Trump’s Biggest “Fuck You” Yet to Higher Education and the Rest of the World

He and his regime are mounting an assault on the American mind. Why? Because ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.

Friends,

Yesterday, Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, notified Harvard University that “effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked.”

Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students. Existing foreign students must transfer to another university or lose their legal status.

This could affect more than a quarter of Harvard’s student body.

Noem said she did this because of the university’s “failure to comply with simple reporting requirements.”

Rubbish. There was nothing simple about the trove of information Noem demanded from Harvard — including the coursework of every international student and information on any student visa holder who had been involved in “illegal” activity — information beyond what Harvard is legally allowed to share with the government.

We are in deep authoritarian fascist territory, friends.

Trump is escalating his war against American higher education and against the rest of the world.

We will be the worse for this.

To Trump, the only useful non-Americans are those who invest in his crypto schemes and global resorts or gift him jumbo “palace in the sky” aircraft.

Yet global brains have been crucial sources of our scientific and economic advances. Since the end of World War II in particular, we have benefited enormously from talented students and faculty drawn here from all over the planet to learn, study, research, and innovate.

Once again, it will be up to the federal courts to stop this idiocy. The rest of us must speak out loudly and clearly against what is being done.

Here’s what I told the graduates from U. Cal. Berkeley’s School of Education at their commencement ceremony earlier this week (before I learned of the Trump regime’s latest move):

Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated citizenry. Slaveholders prohibited the enslaved from learning to read. Nazis burned books. Putin and Xi censor the media.

Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.

America’s founders knew this. They saw how easily emperors and kings could mislead uneducated publics. The survival of the new nation required a public wise enough to keep power within bounds. People imbued, in the language of the time, with civic virtue.

Jefferson assured Americans that if they could “enlighten the people generally … tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”

So America became the cradle of free, universal, public education.

I don’t have any easy answers to the many challenges we’re experiencing today in classrooms across the land, but we must never give up on these three basic educational ideals: free, universal, and public.

If we stop thinking about education solely as a private investment on the way to a good-paying job and see it as a public good, we’d give every child an understanding of the Constitution, the meaning and importance of the rule of law, and why no one should be above it.

This is, after all, what we demand of people who want to become naturalized citizens: They have to pass a civics test covering the organization of the U.S. government and the Constitution.

Civic education should instill in young people a passion for truth — enabling them to think critically, be skeptical (but not cynical) about what they hear and read, find reliable sources of information, apply basic logic and analysis, and know enough about history and the physical world to differentiate fact from fiction.

Such an education would also urge young people to communicate with others. With people of different races, classes, creeds, nationalities.

Teach them how to listen, to open their minds to the possibility their own views and preconceptions may be wrong, to discover why people with opposing views believe what they do.

Yet the current president of the United States does not appear to have learned any of this.

On the campaign trail, he vowed to “liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts who have infested our educational system.”

He has canceled federal exams that measure student progress and ordered his wrestling executive-turned-Education Secretary to shut most of her department.

He is attacking the freedom of speech of university students and professors, trying to deport international students and faculty solely because of what they say or write, and threatening to halt federal funds to universities that practice DEI.

He has gutted the funding of the National Institutes of Health, which provides a large portion of biomedical research, and the National Science Foundation, responsible for much of America’s engineering and computer research.

Along with certain governors, he is attacking the teaching in our schools of America’s shameful histories of slavery and Native American genocide.

He has cut funding for libraries around the country — which will jeopardize literacy development and reading programs, and reliable internet access for those without it at home.

I keep hearing that all this amounts to an “attack on the liberal state” or “the culmination of our culture wars.”

No. What’s really occurring is an attack on the American mind.

You who are soon to graduate from this wonderful school of education have chosen instead to enhance the American mind, to broaden it, to enlighten our young people, to expose them to a world of possibility.

May you educate like democracy depends on it.