Jay Greene
Subject: Terminating Visas for Foreign Students at Harvard
Bio: Senior Research Fellow in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is Terminating Visas for Foreign Students at Harvard.
Our speaker today is Jay Greene who is most famous for being my New Trier High School Debate Partner. Jay is also a Senior Research Fellow in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation. I want to hear from Jay about the escalating dispute between Harvard and the Trump Administration over the disclosure of Harvard’s foreign students who engage in illegal activity, commit violence, or threaten their fellow students. Harvard has refused to play ball and as a result the Federal Government is attempting to cancel all the current and future visas for Harvard’s foreign students.
Buckle up.
Jay, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Jay Greene:
Harvard and the Trump administration are once again in a dispute. This time it is over whether Harvard is entitled to enroll foreign students without providing information on whether those students are complying with the rules of their visas.
The Department of Homeland Security stripped Harvard of the ability to enroll international students, but Harvard obtained a temporary restraining order until the court can consider the matter.
International students are guests in our country who must abide by certain rules. If foreign students break laws, violate the civil rights of their fellow students, are suspended from school, or provide support for designated terrorist organizations, they can have their visas revoked.
Many people wrongly believe that free speech protects foreign students to chant “Globalize the Intifada” or “We are Hamas.” Foreign students do not have the same free speech rights as US citizens do. The Immigration and Nationality Act states any alien who endorses or espouses terrorist activity is inadmissible.
Foreigners who support Hamas after they arrive on campus can be removed. There's good reason to believe that foreign students at Harvard and other elite universities have been violating these conditions of their visas but are being shielded as if they were sanctuary cities.
Several elite universities will not suspend or expel rule-breaking students. The President of MIT acknowledged that protesting students who occupied the main building at MIT were not suspended from classes because of concerns about collateral visa issues. A US House committee report found that Harvard failed to impose formal discipline on any students because refusing to arrest rule-breaking students hides from federal authorities.
The Department of Homeland Security has demanded from Harvard disciplinary records of all foreign students as well as videos of protests that would allow identification of rule-breaking foreigners. Harvard objects that this information would violate student privacy. The court will ultimately decide but even if Harvard prevails, the Trump administration can deny visas for students planning to study at Harvard with problematic track records. Because of the doctrine of consular non-reviewability, courts are unable to reverse administration decisions about who is denied a visa to enter the US.
Harvard will lose. The longer these disputes drag on the more Harvard suffers financially, reputationally and operationally. Rhetoric about solidarity among universities is empty talk. Other institutions are eager to offer attractive packages for relocating research labs and enrolling talented students fleeing Harvard's troubles. The vast majority of foreign students who follow the rules can remain in the United States. They'll continue someplace other than Harvard.
The more the public learns about Harvard's rampant antisemitism and enabling student misconduct the worse Harvard looks. It took centuries for Harvard to build its reputation, but it will only take a few years to destroy it. Harvard's leaders should be seeking to reach an agreement to stop the bleeding.
Larry Bernstein:
This is escalation on both sides.
Jay Greene:
Harvard receives like a quarter of its total revenue from the federal government directly or indirectly through research grants also subsidized student loans. The Trump administration is going through all of the sources of revenue that the federal government provides to Harvard and discontinuing it.
In addition, Harvard needs permission from the government to operate. The Department of Homeland Security for visas to be granted to students at Harvard who are not citizens. Those visas have to be granted without the ability of judges to review it.
Larry Bernstein:
It's a stock and flow issue. There are the current foreign students at Harvard and there are the future foreign students.
Jay Greene:
The Department of Homeland Security has told Harvard that as of this fall it will not be eligible to participate in the SEVP, which is the program that allows US universities to enroll foreign students on visas. None of the students currently at Harvard with foreign visas would continue at Harvard. Their visas would not be revoked. They could transfer to another university and remain in the United States.
Future students who wish to study at Harvard from abroad will need new visas, which the administration has complete discretion over granting. There's a doctrine called consular non-reviewability that prevents the judiciary from reviewing the denial of a visa to students who come into the US.
So, Trump can choke off their flow of foreign students in the future even if he can't disenroll the students at present.
Larry Bernstein:
I'd like to go through the list of demands in the Homeland Security letter that was sent to Harvard. There were seven items. Provide relevant information regarding each student visa holder's known illegal activity and whether that activity occurred on campus.
Jay Greene:
It's already required of Harvard that it inform the federal government if students enrolled at its institution with foreign visas are engaged in criminal activity.
Larry Bernstein:
Why do you think Congress included that in the legislation?
Jay Greene:
Because foreign students are guests in our country and they have to behave appropriately. That privilege of being in the United States can be revoked. They don't go to jail; they just can't stay here.
Larry Bernstein:
Individuals who are known to be dangerous or engage in violent activity.
Jay Greene:
That's consistent with the first demand. Harvard objects that the terms are not defined and doesn't know how to comply because it doesn't know what dangerous means.
Larry Bernstein:
Individuals who are known threats to other students or university personnel.
Jay Greene:
It's completely reasonable. Harvard in its litigation says that because the term is not defined, that it is unable to comply.
Harvard wanted this to escalate. They could have asked for more time. They could have asked for clarification on what these terms meant. They want this fight. It's unclear to me what is Harvard's end game. They're going to lose because Harvard is more dependent on the federal government than the federal government is on Harvard.
Larry Bernstein:
Individuals who have known to deprive the rights of other classmates.
Jay Greene:
This is the concern that foreign students are involved in civil rights violations of their fellow students and that would be reason for their revocation of the visa.
Larry Bernstein:
Individuals who have left Harvard due to violent activity, acting in a dangerous way, or depriving the rights of people on campus.
Jay Greene:
Once students enter the US on a visa they often stay by enrolling in graduate school. If they misbehaved at Harvard, the Trump administration wants to know about these students so that they can potentially revoke their visas if they're enrolled somewhere else.
Larry Bernstein:
Disciplinary actions taken by making threats to other students or by participating in protests that impact their non-immigrant student status.
Jay Greene:
Current practice already requires Harvard to report foreign students who are disciplined for misconduct to the Department of Homeland Security. It's pretty clear that Harvard and several other universities are hiding this information and failing to discipline students who engage in misconduct. You can avoid having foreign students deported if you don't arrest them for criminal activity and suspend them for rule breaking. Harvard seems determined to do neither of those things. Columbia and MIT have done the same. We're seeing the equivalent of sanctuary cities where you have entities refusing to enforce laws on misbehaving foreigners so that those foreigners are not deported.
Harvard is not exempt from the laws of the country. It doesn't get to decide that it doesn't want to enforce rules on foreigners because it wants those foreigners to remain here when normally those foreign students would be subject to criminal prosecution and revocation of their visa.
Larry Bernstein:
They want to know if a visa holder has obstructed the school's learning environment and whether that student is taking the minimum required coursework to maintain its student status.
Jay Greene:
It is already standard practice that if a student is not fully enrolled the university has to inform the Department of Homeland Security because a condition of a student visa is that you're enrolled full time.
Larry Bernstein:
The lawsuit that Harvard filed in response. We've been doing this since 1954 and we've never had a problem. We've always been good university citizens. You've only given us a few days to comply with this long list of demands. A lot of this requires 30 days, and then after 30 days we have a chance to respond if you've got questions. Why do you think it's so challenging for Harvard to provide this information in a timely way?
Jay Greene:
Don't think it's challenging at all. They have the disciplinary records for all the students. They have the videos of all the protests. They could muster those in a day or two and turn them over.
Larry Bernstein:
You think it's not true that they need time?
Jay Greene:
They didn't ask for time. They filed the lawsuit right away.
Harvard certainly has a right to dispute the demands and they may well prevail. But it doesn't matter because even if they win, they're going to lose and they deserve to lose.
I don't think that your listeners care whether the Trump administration followed the steps of revoking their ability to participate in the SEVP program. It substantively doesn't matter. What matters is whether the Trump administration is asking reasonable things of Harvard and whether Harvard is behaving reasonably in response. I think it is clear that Harvard is shielding its foreign students and is doing it at the expense of American students.
The Trump administration has motives some impure and some pure. The impure ones do not nullify the pure ones. Even if the Trump administration is looking to punish Harvard, which I suspect the Trump administration is doing, they have the pure motivation of protecting the civil rights of American students.
Even if the people listening to this program hate Trump and think that Trump is motivated by bad things, it doesn't mean that he's not making true arguments about the need for Harvard to enforce rules, not shield its foreign students from the consequences of breaking those rules, and making sure that it protects the civil rights of the American students by exposing foreign students who break rules to potential deportation.
Larry Bernstein:
In the lawsuit Harvard says that this is not about foreign students. This is all about viewpoint diversity to put conservatives on the faculty, to have conservative students and have more conservative curriculum. This has never been about the foreign students. It's never been about antisemitism. This is about viewpoint diversity on campus. And we need to allow Harvard to determine its own faculty, its own students. This is about speech on campus and the government's actions are out of bounds.
Jay Greene:
The Trump administration legally cannot force Harvard to improve its viewpoint diversity. But the Trump administration has been complaining repeatedly about the lack of viewpoint diversity at Harvard, the lack of conservatives among the faculty and in the student body. There's confusion here of what is legal and what is sensible politically. Harvard thinks that if it prevails in court that it wins. But this is shockingly politically naive because laws can be changed such that Harvard's autonomy can be reduced. And the more that Harvard proves the point that they are not reasonable in offering diversity of viewpoints, the more that they are going to lose politically even as they win legally.
The Trump administration understands politics better than those smart people at Harvard.
Larry Bernstein:
You say Harvard is not that smart about politics, Jay, did you get a PhD in politics at Harvard?
Jay Greene:
I did. I have two degrees from Harvard. The problem is arrogance and hubris. Harvard is so full of itself that it can't imagine that people don't appreciate it, don't love it, don't admire it as much as it admires itself. It's a sad reality for academics that they live off of status. Think of academia like you think of your junior high experience, that there's a scramble to be in the in-group. In academia people sacrifice, struggle, give up money to win this status game. The top of that status game is Harvard.
Trump realizes that there's a very large segment of the population who vote in elections who don't care about Harvard, but to the extent that they know anything about it, hate it. I got two degrees there and I don't feel great about it at the moment.
Larry Bernstein:
In Harvard’s first lawsuit, they complained that Donald Trump was threatening their tax status and that the President of the United States did not have the right to encourage an audit. And in the recent House bill in reconciliation included an income tax at 21% for those endowments in excess of $10 billion. This was a direct hit against Harvard.
Jay Greene:
They can object to whether it's legal for Trump to threaten Harvard's nonprofit status. But as you correctly point out, Trump can convince the Congress to pass a law imposing a tax on nonprofit foundations like Harvard with an endowment over a certain amount. That is the theme here, even if it wins in court, it's going to lose politically because it is wrong for Harvard to insist that it is autonomous in not offering an ideologically diverse education to its students while demanding subsidies from taxpayers.
If they say, we know how to handle our Jews. We're not violating their civil rights. Even if they win in court, they're going to lose, because people see how egregious the behavior is. Harvard's own 311-page report on antisemitism documents in detail how bad things have gotten. I think that the American public was already inclined to be hostile to Harvard, and Harvard is playing into that politically at every step of this dispute with Trump.
Larry Bernstein:
I'm a huge fan of Steven Pinker. I loved his book The Language Instinct. I've read a half a dozen of his books. He's spoke a couple of times in my book clubs. He's an incredibly bright and he's at the top of his field, but he seems incredibly tone deaf as it relates to antisemitism at Harvard.
Steven Pinker had an op-ed in the New York Times on Sunday, May 25th, 2025. He entitled the article Harvard Derangement Syndrome, and said that Harvard is an enormous source of good in the sciences. And then he says that he's Jewish, that these assertions by the Trump administration that there's numerous Title VI civil rights violations against Jews has no basis. He's never seen or heard of any examples of antisemitism. He seems oblivious of the recent 311-page antisemitic report that Harvard released in which they investigated their own antisemitism on campus.
One of the items on the list was that there was tremendous fear on behalf of Jewish students to which Pinker said, I don't understand how this can't be possibly be true. I don't believe the evidence that Harvard has put forth. What do you make of Pinker's describing this as both Harvard derangement syndrome and that the description and analysis provided in Harvard's own report does not reflect reality on the ground.
Jay Greene:
There is a Harvard derangement syndrome but I think Pinker suffers from it. The most ridiculous part of that piece that Pinker wrote for the New York Times is he says, I've been here 20 years and I've never experienced any antisemitism, and I don't know of any other prominent professor who has either. The list of other names who are obviously subject to antisemitism at Harvard like Alan Dershowitz, Larry Summers, Ruth Wisse. Now, he could say, I think you're oversensitive but he can't deny that these people have suffered abuse as a result of being Jewish.
Lecturing the public about how great Harvard is and all the good things it does so hand over the money is not a very good political strategy.
Larry Bernstein:
In Pinker's piece, he highlights the real benefits that foreign students bring to Harvard in terms of their diversity of ideas and that he can't believe that the Trump administration is going to sacrifice cancer research for political purposes even if there are a few bad apples.
Jay Greene:
It's because Harvard wants to lead the resistance that it is going to suffer. Research being done at Harvard could be done somewhere else.
One other point I want to make about Pinker. Harvard curates the kinds of Jews that it has both by selecting them and by rewarding and punishing them for behaving in certain ways.
Steven Pinker is a lifelong atheist. He is highly secular. I’m glad that he gets to be that kind of Jew. But he should be open-minded and tolerant of other kinds of Jews who might not be as consequence free as he is of bad-acting fellow students. He should try walking around campus with a kippah and an I-Heart-Israel t-shirt for a month and see how life is. You should be allowed to be at Harvard and be that kind of Jew. Unfortunately they're not; they're driven out. Over time, the only kinds of Jews that we get at Harvard are Steven Pinker Jews who swear that everything's fine. But the point of Trump's actions is not to protect Pinker, it is to protect the other Jews who should be there who aren't.
Larry Bernstein:
I'm going to play an audio interview with Alan Dershowitz who is an Emeritus Professor in Harvard Law School.
Alan Dershowitz:
…sixty years at Harvard and they're being let off easily. It's not that they tolerated antisemitism, they taught it. They taught it in the divinity school. They taught it in the public health school. That's the conclusion that the Harvard report reached. This man who killed these two wonderful young people was stimulated, incited by what is being taught at places like Harvard and Columbia, and there is blood on the hands of professors and students who are calling for globalized intifada. What does a globalized intifada mean? The actual intifada, 4,000 innocent people were killed. They were blown up in buses and pizza parlors, and when people say globalize the intifada, what they're saying is kill Jews. And that's coming from Harvard. That's coming from Columbia, and it has to stop. And cutting off funds. Look, in 1935, Harvard was admitting Nazi students, Nazi faculty. They were sending faculty over to German universities.
Wouldn't every liberal have been thrilled if the visas had been cut off from the Nazi students and if funding had been cut off? Well, you can't distinguish between that and what's going on today on college campuses. What's going on today on college campuses is what the clan did in 1955 when they intimidated black students on campus. Now that the shoe is on the other foot and the victims of all this violence and discrimination are Jews, liberals can't simply say, “oh my God, it's a matter of academic freedom.” If it wasn't a matter of academic freedom in 1935 and 1955, then surely universities have an obligation not to foment and incentivize the kind of killings that we're going to see, and it's going to get worse. I have to go now and get security guards. I have been told by law enforcement officials that I am not safe because I am a highly visible pro-Israel supporter, and I have a target on my back, as do many other pro-Israel supporters.
Source: Fox News
Larry Bernstein:
Let's go over that Alan Dershowitz tape. The first point he makes is that Harvard foments antisemitism in its teachings and in its social intercourse to oppose Israel, support Hamas and other organizations against the Jews. Do you agree with Dershowitz's assertion?
Jay Greene:
I do. I think that the antisemitism at Harvard is something that the faculty at Harvard are helping promote. It was also part of the administration's DEI ideology. When Harvard admits so many foreign students it includes well-behaved earnest students and some agitators who arrive in the US with the purpose of creating trouble.
Harvard is allowing that critical mass in and enabling it to act without consequences against Jews. They're also anti-American. The Trump administration is completely right in calling out the lack of viewpoint diversity as part of this broader problem that creates civil rights violations at Harvard.
Larry Bernstein:
I was surprised to hear that Harvard had 7,000 foreign students. Tell us about the increasing number of foreign students at the top Ivy League schools and what it means that they view themselves to be a global instead of an American institution?
Jay Greene:
It was thought that foreign students would improve the educational environment by bringing different perspectives and that foreign students would learn about how the American political system works and bring that knowledge back home to spread American values around the globe.
We shouldn't be against having foreign students in the United States. It's a question of dose. What's good at a small dose is lethal at a high dose. When Obama started his presidency, there were half as many foreign students in the US as there are today. It ramped up in the last 20 years so that we now have 1.1 million foreign students in the US.
They come in with virtually no scrutiny and once in they can stay forever. There's a student at Columbia who was arrested for deportation but was ordered to be released. He graduated this spring from Columbia after 17 years as an undergraduate. Now, there are two possibilities about that student. One is he's an independently wealthy eccentric lover of learning. Another possibility is that he's a paid foreign agent at different elite universities to foment trouble.
And we should understand that our porous borders and our open foreign student program will invite bad acting foreign governments and organizations to plant agents in our country and make trouble. Qatar and Iran and we also know that the Chinese are also active in planting agents among students at US universities for the purpose of stealing intellectual property, spying on US national security and fellow Chinese students. A recent report out of Stanford, every Chinese student that they talked to said that they have a minder that someone contacts and grills them for information about their activities.
We have to think about the extent to which the foreign student program serves American interests and not the university's. I don't understand why a sensible American administration that's seeking to protect American interests should let in 1.1 million foreign students and let our elite institutions, our best and brightest be where a third of the students are foreign where the values being taught are increasingly foreign and not American values. This seems like a bad idea for training the future leaders of American corporations and government.
Larry Bernstein:
To get 1.1 million students you need a visa program that is open and fluid, but it leaves America at risk. It needs a partner, supposed to be the university, and the university can play ball and say we're observing this young student on campus and government heads up this one is a bad apple. Congress passed rules how universities are supposed to interact with the Department of Homeland Security removing bad actors from the system. Why would the universities be in opposition to these objectives? Why do they view themselves not as partners but opponents? Harvard is saying that's not our job. Doesn't it mean much greater scrutiny?
Jay Greene:
Your question gets at the heart of this issue, which is the federal government can't possibly vet 1.1 million foreign students in the US with visas. They can't possibly make sure that they're good actors and not agitators or spies.
They have to do it in a matter of months between when students are accepted and when they need to enroll. This is a very difficult thing for the federal bureaucracy to manage. And they depend on the universities to tell them when foreign students break rules, when foreign students engage in criminal activity that would require scrutiny by the Department of Homeland Security and potentially revocation of those visas. And if the universities refuse to cooperate and actively undermine that process by refusing to discipline because they don't want those foreign students to have their visas revoked, then they're undermining the foreign student visa program and they're making that program impossible to operate for every university and not just for Harvard.
It's important for the administration to make an example of Harvard here so that all the universities understand that they have a responsibility to ensure that the students here on foreign visas are behaving appropriately, following the rules and laws of this country. This is the very heart of the matter is how the universities have not cooperated.
This is a real problem when faculty think I'm just advancing knowledge and all of humanity should benefit from this knowledge. This was the same argument used by spies during the Manhattan Project. The problem is that these elite universities think of themselves as global, don't think they have to follow the laws, don't have to promote the values and interests of the countries in which they reside.
20% of professors come from abroad. Students come here with foreign visas, they go on to PhD programs, then they get hired and form a critical mass of the faculty at elite universities. This could be bringing in the best talent from around the world but it also could be that we're fundamentally changing the values and priorities of these institutions.
Larry Bernstein:
In the late 1950s and early 1960s after Sputnik, the US government employed American educational institutions to step up its math and science programs to compete in the Cold War. And then in the late 1960s, there was agitation on campus related to the Vietnam War and demands by protesting students that we should end ROTC on campus, particularly at Harvard, that we should end work in the sciences with the US military, and that the university should oppose the foreign policy of the United States particularly the war in Vietnam.
Jay Greene:
Let me reference a book that was written by Samuel Huntington, who was one of my dissertation advisors at Harvard, American Politics: Promise of Disharmony. Students were protesting at Harvard against Vietnam. They were protesting Huntington himself since he was an advisor to the administration on the Vietnam War. But he noted that the way that people protested was to call upon their elders to adhere to American principles to denounce the existing ruling elite for failing to live up to American principles and values.
What's changed is that we now have protestors who are not protesting because they want America to be its better self, but because they oppose America and its founding principles. Standard liberals on campus used to be critics of America living up to its values but now the criticism is against American values themselves and fundamentally opposed to the American project in the world.
Larry Bernstein:
FIRE has a ranking of all the universities in the United States for free speech. Where does Harvard rank?
Jay Greene:
Harvard is at the bottom. It's hilarious for Harvard to discover the importance of free speech on campus when Harvard was uninterested in free speech until two years ago. It's also convenient that free speech was not important when there was microaggressions that might make disadvantaged groups feel bad. But free speech is now very important when people chant “Globalize the Intifada” and want to go kill Jews.
Harvard took official positions on public matters and issued statements for a variety of causes. But now they've suddenly discovered the virtue of institutional neutrality. Now that Jews are getting the raw end of the stick, they're discovering that it's important for universities not to take sides but to maintain neutrality.
Larry Bernstein:
I end each episode with a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about the Trump administration's demand for accountability of its foreign students?
Jay Greene:
Last time you asked me this I was optimistic that Harvard was going to come to a deal, and I'm a little less optimistic about that. There are lots of other universities in the United States that are doing important work that can be the recipients of talent and ideas from Harvard, places like Vanderbilt, Washinton University of St. Louis, Duke, the University of Florida, and the University of Texas. These are all fine institutions that can be the beneficiaries of Harvard's misfortune. What we're seeing here is a real crisis for Harvard but not a real crisis for American higher education. American higher education is going to come out of this improved because it will learn lessons about responsibility and will be more focused on its true mission.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Jay for joining us.
If you missed the last podcast, the topic was AI and Robotics. Our speaker was Myron Scholes who is the Frank E. Buck Professor of Finance Emeritus at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Myron was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his groundbreaking work in Options Theory. Myron explained why AI needs to work with humans due to uncertainty and the importance of exceptions.
Myron is an investor and on the board of a robotics company that focuses on installing solar panels in the inhospitable desert. Myron discussed the challenges that robots face and how AI can improve their performance.
I now want to give a plug for next week’s podcast with Max Boot to discuss his new biography of Ronald Reagan.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, AI and Robotics, here.
Share this post