Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge - Part 10

From the NY Times - Reporter Jess Bidgood (JB) talks with reporter Michael S. Schmidt (MS):

JB: ...A judge temporarily blocked this Trump effort to bar international students from Harvard. Is that good news for Harvard? Is this over?

MS: It’s not over at all. For now, it allows foreign students to continue to attend Harvard. But what it doesn’t remove is the question of what’s going to happen. If you’re an international student at Harvard, are you going to be like, “OK, cool, I’ll just go to school in the fall, and I’ll be checking the federal docket to see if the restraining order is still in place”? I’d imagine that for international students, this makes the prospect of attending Harvard feel deeply uncertain — even unappealing. Where would the university find itself, even if it wins?

Even if Harvard runs the table in court, it’s still persona non grata with the Trump administration, and that means that it’s going to continue to face investigations, including from the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Trump has stripped extensive federal funding from Harvard. Let’s say a judge gives back all of that money for this year. Half of the university’s research budget comes from the federal government. Where is Harvard going to get the money in the year after that, and the year after that? If you’re a researcher, do you want to be doing research at a school where your funding is in question? ...

JB: What’s happening at Harvard behind the scenes?

MS: Harvard officials have privately determined they are in a major, major, major crisis with very few, if any, good off ramps. If you’re a law firm and you get hit with an executive order, you can go to court and get a restraining order. You can go back to work and things are semi-normal. Harvard is much more complicated than that.

JB: Is there anything happening behind the scenes to de-escalate this?

MS: Harvard’s board, as far as we know, won’t let the university go back to the table. The board members don’t trust that you can negotiate with Trump. And the things that Trump keeps hitting Harvard with are so destructive. How could you go back to the table?

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/us/politics/trump-harvard-international-students.html.