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On a day already jam-packed with seriously bad news, Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s Department of Homeland Security opted to compound the calamities this afternoon by telling Harvard it no longer had the legal right to accept students from foreign countries. This pronunciamento was something of a two-fer: It both reduced the income Harvard receives from the tuition that foreign students must pay, and it kept foreigners out of the country. Actually, a three-fer: anti-elitist, anti-foreigner, and anti-knowledge. As for that third, never forget that the ‑ism that Trumpworld most fears and hates is empiricism.
It’s highly doubtful that the federal government can legally intervene in a university’s admissions policy, but we know that legalities are not something that the current administration considers or heeds. Conservative critics of federal overreach should be perturbed by this; whether they are, of course, is a different question.
One foreign-born empiricist—specifically, economist—whom Harvard has long employed is Bengali-born Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate. One foreign student who received his master’s in public administration from Harvard was Ban Ki-moon, a former secretary-general of the United Nations. Then again, the MAGA folks never liked the U.N., and the kind of humanistic economics in which Sen’s work was groundbreaking was way too egalitarian for them.
You get the picture. The breakthroughs that came from foreigners working at America’s elite universities have played a key role in establishing American dominance in a host of disciplines and in creating many of the technologies and advances that Americans depend on and enjoy. (See, e.g., the works of Fermi, Szilard, Wigner, von Karman, von Neumann, Bethe, Pei, Galbraith, or if you prefer, von Mises, etc., etc.) Of course, the administration’s ban also includes Israelis, and I’m obliged to report that while a young Bibi Netanyahu was a student at MIT, he also took some courses at Harvard. As of today’s Homeland Security diktat, however, it may require Bill Ackman’s millions to sneak the next generation of Bibis through Harvard’s back door.
Then again, given Trump’s brand of identity politics, Afrikaners and far-right Israelis may be exempt from this ban, along with the occasional AfD member and blood kin of Nigel Farage. Watch this space for any forthcoming details.
