If we are not professors or students, and/or are not employed in a university, why should we care about Trump’s war on students and on higher education? I think there are many reasons; but let’s start with the basic point that the infringement of the Constitutional rights of students, let alone their arrest and imprisonment for speaking out for Palestinians, is a violent attack on fundamental rights in a democracy, and thus an attack on all of us.
Here are some brief clips or notes about some of the most prominent cases of ICE kidnapping of people with green cards or student visas. The point here is to absorb some of the elements of terror these people experienced, and to assume that it is likely that this terror will spread to many more victims.
-- Mahmoud Khalil is the best known example of this terror. Like others, he was arrested because he allegedly spoke or acted in support of Hamas. Yes, ridiculous, but here we are. Here is an update from Democracy Now! about his case. He is currently (I believe) still in prison in Louisiana, pending his return to prison in New Jersey.
-- The most recent case is that of Tufts graduate student and Fulbright Scholars Rumeysa Ozturk, who was abducted by plainclothes ICE people outside her home yesterday in Somerville, Mass. Despite a court order forbidding it, she was sent to a prison in Louisiana pending deportation. Here is a vivid report of her arrest from The Guardian; today’s Democracy Now! has some good video of the 1,000-person rally in her support near Tufts, with many voices speaking out in her support.
-- South Korean-born Yunseo Chung, an undergraduate student at Columbia, last week sued Trump et al. For trying to arrest and deport her. She has lived in the United States since she was 7 hears old. Recently she was being hunted but not found by immigration people. According to a New York Times report, “Ms. Chung does not appear to have been a prominent figure in the demonstrations that shook the school last year. But she was one of several students arrested this year in connection with a protest at Barnard College.” On Tuesday, a federal judge ordered the Trump people to stop their efforts to report her. Newsweek reports that Yunseo is a straight-A student.
-- On Monday, according to this report from Democracy Now!, Georgetown scholar Badar Khan Suri “was ambushed by masked federal agents with the Homeland Security Department as he and his family returned to their home in Rosslyn, Virginia, after attending an iftar gathering for Ramadan. Suri was taken into custody without being charged with or accused of any crime.” He is now in prison in Louisiana. Though described in an excellent report by his academic supervisor at Georgetown as not a political activist, the real ICE target here is apparently his wife, a US citizen and the daughter of a (very) former advisor to Hamas.
-- And also from Democracy Now! this week was a report on the status of Cornell University student Momodou Taal, a pro-Palestinian activist who holds passports from the UK and from The Gambia (Africa). He was suspended from the university last year (and targeted for deportation) “for joining a demonstration calling on Cornell to divest from Israel and faced deportation until massive protests pressured Cornell to allow him to re-enroll, thereby extending his visa.” Momodou and two US citizens have filed suit against the Trump administration’s executive orders that target foreign nationals who it claims are national security threats.” The Democracy Now! Segment includes an extended interview with Momodou. CNN reports that Momodou’s student visa was revoked on March 14, and efforts to deport him continue.
This tiny data-base gives us something to work with in attempting to understand part of the Trump administration’s attack on students. First, it is targeting students who speak out or write in favor of Palestinian rights. Second, though not reported in my writing above, they target students or individuals who have been identified by Zionist supporters in the US such as Canary Mission, publicizing their whereabouts and urging – repeatedly – that ICE or the State Department take action against these purveyors of “anti-Semitism” and threats to Israel. Third, the US is using legal action based on two of the most absurd/anti-democratic laws in US history – the 1798 Aliens Act (intended to expedite the deportation of French citizens during a war-scare) and the Immigration and Nationality Act (informally, the “McCarren-Walter Act,”) of 1952, a Cold War relic passed to (among other things) enabled the swift deportation of communist or former communist/socialist immigrants. A hysterical response to a manufactured threat, indirectly aimed at labor unions and all dissent.
THERE HAVE BEEN MANY WISE REFLECTIONS by scholars and journalists on what all this means and why it is happening now. Let me link a few essays/observations I think are particularly insightful:
(Video) Law Prof. Katherine Franke Accuses Columbia of Empowering Trump by Agreeing to $400M “Ransom Note”
From Democracy Now! [March 24, 2025]
---- Education Secretary Linda McMahon says Columbia University is on track to regain its federal funding after the Ivy League institution yielded to the Trump administration’s demands on Friday. The demands include banning face masks on campus, hiring 36 new security officers with greater power to arrest and crack down on students and appointing a “senior vice provost” to oversee the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies. Students say they will continue to fight for Palestinian rights and for Columbia to divest from Israel, but free speech experts are sounding the alarm. “We have no idea what comes next, but groveling before a bully, we all know, just encourages the bully,” says Katherine Franke, former professor at Columbia Law School. [See the Program]
If Trump Can Deport Mahmoud Khalil, Freedom of Speech Is Dead
By Natasha Lennard, The Intercept [March 10, 2025]
---- There is no going back from this point: President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to deport a man solely for his First Amendment-protected activity, without due process. By all existing legal standards, this is illegal and unconstitutional: a violation of First Amendment protections, and the Fifth Amendment-protected right to due process. If Khalil’s green card is revoked and he is deported, no one can have any confidence in legal and constitutional protections as a line of defense against arbitrary state violence and punishment. Khalil’s arrest marks an extraordinary fascist escalation. … It is all the more vile that Khalil has been targeted for engaging in protected protest activity calling for an end to the U.S.-backed slaughter of his people. The Trump administration has consistently framed all pro-Palestine, anti-Zionist activists as Hamas supporters. It is worth stressing, though, that even if a protester did express support or sympathy for Hamas in a public speech, or on social media (and I’m not saying Khalil did), such expression is also protected by the First Amendment, a protection extended to citizens and noncitizens alike. [Read More]
The Weight of Fear: The Silent Erosion of Academic Freedom
By Samyuktha Kannan, Znet [March 24, 2025]
---- There was a time when the university was imagined as a space of intellectual risk, where thought could move freely, unrestricted by the anxieties of power or professional survival. That time is long gone. Today, for students and faculty alike, the act of writing – of producing knowledge, of articulating critique—is suffused with fear. Not the productive fear that accompanies intellectual rigor, but the dull ache and exhausting fear of consequence. … The neoliberal university does not need overt censorship; it has perfected the art of silent control. It is not that one is explicitly told what cannot be written—it is that over time, one simply learns what is too dangerous to say. … And so, without official prohibitions, entire fields of thought shrink. The range of permissible discourse is not policed through direct suppression but through precarity – through the quiet, unspoken understanding that dissent has consequences. … And so the university, once imagined as a site of knowledge production, becomes instead a space of careful omission, where what is not written, not spoken, not thought, tells us more than what remains. [Read More]
'This Doesn't Protect Us': Hundreds of Jewish Scholars Denounce Trump's Funding Cut to Columbia University
From Haaretz [Israel] [March 19, 2025]
---- More than 350 Jewish faculty, students, and scholars from universities across the U.S. have signed a public letter opposing the Trump administration's decision to cut federal funding to Columbia University, saying the move does not protect Jewish students and instead threatens the foundation of American higher education. The letter, which began circulating last week and continues to gain support, was written in response to the Trump administration's March 7 announcement, that about $400 million in federal funding to Columbia will be cut over what it claimed was the university's failure to adequately address antisemitism. … The university has until March 20th to comply to demands. In addition to funding cuts at Columbia, the government has placed about 60 other universities under review for how they're addressing antisemitism, with the looming threat of funding cuts. Among them are Brown University, Harvard, Yale, and UC Berkeley. [Read More]
And this just in - Columbia University Locked Its Campus and Unleashed a Contentious Debate, New York Times [March 27, 2025] - “Students and neighbors are suing the school, magnifying the broader complaint that institutions stifle free expression when they restrict access to public spaces following protests.” [Link].
AND THERE ARE MORE insightful essays on-line, and many more to come. As former Columbia law professor Katherine Franke says, Trump’s actions can be seen as trial balloons. What will work easily, what will be resisted and what won’t by the courts, and how can his window of lawlessness be expanded, starting with vulnerable pro-Palestinian students and moving on to law firms, non-profit organizations, and dissenting writers and media workers?
The key to Trump/Musk’s leverage over higher education is not the claims that Jewish students need to be “safe” and are threatened by pro-Palestinian agitation, but the very high level of funding – especially funding for scientific and medical research – that now makes up at many universities a larger share of income than is received by tuition paid by students/their families. This concern/leverage has been circulating in right wing circles for many years. A recent article estimates that the federal government spent $60 billion on scientific research in higher education in 2022. The so-called Carnegie Classification lists 146 US universities as significant research institutions. Recall that Trump’s leverage with Columbia, when it issued its “9 Demands” for reform, was only (!) $400 million. Columbia’s annual intake of federal grants and contracts (and sub-grants and sub-contracts) exceeds this. And the same is true for other Ivy and flagship universities throughout the USA – many of the places where student support for Palestinians and Gaza have been most intense.
From the standpoint of a university administration, therefore, what is the rational response, in the “best interests” of the university, when faced with the threat of what amounts to academic receivership or the collapse of its research establishment? There are many among university faculties and student bodies who would speak out in favor of defending academic freedom, free speech on campus, self-government by the university community, and many more good arguments. HOWEVER, we must recall that the universities – especially those with the most prestige – have been transformed in the last few decades to a state where administrative positions – not faculty positions, are the academic growth center. Moreover, a larger and larger proportion of undergraduate teaching is done by “adjuncts,” or part-time employees. According to a blurb for his book, as Benjamin Ginsberg told us in The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (2011), "Deanlets--administrators and staffers often without serious academic backgrounds or experience--are setting the educational agenda. The Fall of the Faculty examines the fallout of rampant administrative blight that now plagues the nation's universities. In the past decade, universities have added layers of administrators and staffers to their payrolls every year even while laying off full-time faculty in increasing numbers--ostensibly because of budget cuts.” In other words, unless the university faculty and students are able to regain control of university governance from boards of trustees and non-scholar administrative personnel, the fight against Trump’s defacto takeover of control of much of what modern and major universities do these days will be a dubious battle.
