Friday, May 30, 2025. Annette’s Roundup for Democracy.
Welcome, dear friends.
Always quick to foster hatred, Trump recently has been using the existence of students from other countries in our colleges as part of his perverse America First populist propaganda - hate foreigners, hate other nations, hate excellence.
He wants Americans to think of these students as just a higher version of immigrants he has cast as THE ENEMY in his Campaign of Hatred - richer but still foreign - taking up places that should rightly go to Americans.
These students, who usually pay full tuition, have been providing our colleges with billions of dollars all during this century, essentially subsidizing the tuition of American students. Trump casts them as taking, not giving to America.
International students collectively pay about $43 billion annually to American colleges and universities, primarily through tuition and housing expenses. This figure is based on data from the 2023-24 academic year.
Trump and his ilk refuse to recognize that there are communities of scholars, researchers and others, connected across borders, who work in sync to advance knowledge and improve our lives.
Some don’t return home. If they do, their love of America and their relationships in America help strengthen the prospect of world peace.
Some stay in America. These are the Americans of the past who have driven American leadership in multiple fields for decades. And unless Trump chases them away, they will continue to do so in the future too.
The most recent data shows that about 41% of international students who graduate from U.S. universities remain in the country long-term.
The retention rate varies by degree level:
• About 17% of international students with a bachelor’s degree stay.
• About 50% of those with a master’s degree stay.
• About 75% of PhD recipients stay.
Welcome, dear friends. We are working to make Trump and his ilk a blip. Some day soon, people of goodwill will work together for a better future for all. Welcome.
Colleges Across U.S. Fear Chill on Enrollments of Foreign Students
The opening session of the world’s largest international-education conference had just begun on Tuesday morning when across the San Diego convention-center hall, Slack messages began to ping and alarmed emails thudded into inboxes.
Amid the welcoming remarks, many of the 8,000 attendees at the conference of NAFSA: Association of International Educators were learning of the latest news to shake the field: The U.S. Department of State had suspended all new student-visa appointments — at the height of student-visa application season. Seventy percent of all student visas issued last year, nearly 270,000, were awarded during the peak summer months.
“It’s not an accident it happened now,” said Fanta Aw, NAFSA’s chief executive and executive director, said of the pause, which the State Department said is needed to put in place a plan to screen all foreign students’ social-media accounts.
“I think the end goal is to shake up higher ed and create fear,” Aw said.
In San Diego, the mood was at once dispirited and defiant, dazed and dismayed. Nearly 500 people packed an early morning session on Wednesday on potential legal and regulatory changes. “I just gave up on keeping these slides up to date. The type keeps getting smaller and smaller,” said Steve Springer, director of regulatory practice liaison for NAFSA, who was one of the speakers.
The visa-interview pause, Springer told the crowd, could be “catastrophic or a horribly timed bump in the road” if it is quickly lifted. A internal State Department cable sent to embassies and consulates said no additional appointments should be scheduled until further guidance is issued, which is “anticipated in the coming days.” Previously booked appointments seemed to be largely honored on Wednesday.
In addition to sessions, NAFSA attendees flocked to receptions and networking events hosted by colleges, international-education companies, and foreign delegations. Some said the gathering gave them a welcome feeling of solidarity, despite the mounting challenges.
“Being here is kind of like collective therapy,” said one international-student adviser queuing up at the Parq Nightclub Tuesday night to get into the always-boisterous Brazil Party. Like many conference-goers, she asked that a reporter not use her name because of political sensitivities. “I’m from Texas,” she said. For the next few hours, she hoped to dance the day’s stresses away.
For international education, there has been a lot of stress to absorb. Earlier in the spring, thousands of students had their legal status abruptly terminated by the government, often for minor legal infractions, although after a wave of lawsuits, officials reversed course.
The visa-interview suspension capped a week of bad news: The nominee to oversee the student-visa system vowed to end work authorization for recent international graduates, a move that could seriously dent the appeal of American colleges. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned foreign students who had not updated their employment records that they could face deportation.
And the Trump administration took the unprecedented step of revoking Harvard University’s authority to enroll international students as part of an all-fronts showdown with one of the nation’s most prestigious institutions. Other colleges could be next, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in announcing the decision: “Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country.”
(Harvard filed suit, and a judge granted an emergency restraining order blocking the university’s decertification.)
The weaponization of the student-visa system against Harvard rattled one long-serving senior international administrator. Terminating a college’s ability to host foreign students typically only occurs if an institution closes, makes significant changes to its academic programs, and or has abused the student-visa system.
But it was the suspension of visa appointments that caught the attention of the president and provost at the administrator’s private institution. Throughout Tuesday, they peppered the administrator with emails about what steps to take and how to reassure several hundred incoming international students who could be affected by the freeze.
Increased awareness by campus leaders of the challenges facing international education was a sort of grim silver lining to Tuesday’s news, the administrator said. When the government targeted Harvard, “it was about them. Now it’s about us.”
Tuition paid by international students is a crucial revenue source for many colleges, and they are a major talent pipeline for graduate programs, particularly in the sciences.
The NAFSA conference itself reflects the big business that international education has become — the convention center’s cavernous expo hall was filled with booths offering international-recruitment assistance, evacuation services for study abroad, specialized software for tracking overseas travel, and more. College degrees are now one of the United States’ largest service exports.
“Our president is a businessman — he should get that,” said Balaji Krishnan, vice provost for international affairs at the University of Memphis. “These are the easiest export dollars we can get as a country.”
One of the biggest challenges, he said, was the uncertainty created by the administration. A “glass three-quarters-full guy,” Krishnan said he hoped that the visa-interview freeze would be unfrozen soon. “My biggest concern is that it put in the minds of all of these students, when is the next shoe going to drop?”
Many conference-goers were asking the same question. “What’s next, the four horsemen of the apocalypse,” one joked.
Springer, the NAFSA regulatory director, ran through a laundry list of possible executive orders and regulatory changes still to come, including funding cuts for academic exchanges and reforms to optional practical training, the program that allows international students to work in the United States for one to three years after graduation. The administration could also revive ideas that were proposed but never enacted during the president’s first term, like a time limit on student visas.
Given the uneasy relationship during Trump’s first four years in office, NAFSA and other international-education groups had been bracing for his return to office and even doing scenario planning. Still, said Rachel Banks, NAFSA’s senior director for public policy and legislative strategy, “the pause on visa interviews was not something on our bingo card.”
Many conference-goers said they felt flattened by the succession of administration actions. And there was one more: “The U.S. will begin revoking visas of Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a social-media post late Wednesday afternoon.
“Please,” one woman said during another standing-room session on policy and advocacy, “tell us what we can do.”
Some opposition campaigns have had impact — the State Department lifted a funding freeze after educators sent some 25,000 letters to Congress, asking lawmakers to intervene.
But given that many directives have not come through normal channels, “it’s a question of what action to take and when is the right moment to take action,” said Mark Overmann, executive director of the Alliance for International Exchange.
Representatives of federal government agencies, like the Departments of Homeland Security and State, typically hold question-and-answer sessions during the annual meeting. Since the original conference program was released several months ago, planned government speakers pulled out, including some who canceled as recently as Friday.
What Will Trump’s Presidency Mean For Higher Ed?
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Keep up to date on the latest news and information, and contact our journalists covering this ongoing story.
In a written statement on the visa-interview pause, a State Department spokesperson said that “the Trump administration is focused on protecting our nation and our citizens by upholding the highest standards of national security and public safety through our visa process.”
In the absence of concrete information, colleges and recruitment providers said they felt at a loss to advise current students or reassure those who had expected to get visas for the fall. Roger N. Brindley, president of Acumen, which does international consulting to American colleges, called a visa “a statement of trust. It’s going to take time to wrestle back that trust.”
That trust could extend to colleges’ global partnerships. “What do we do when Brand USA is on fire?” said Kirsten Feddersen, vice president of partnerships for IDP, an international-recruitment company. Colleges, she said during a panel on navigating geopolitical shifts, would need to find ways to distinguish themselves as institutions.
Although 45 percent of this year’s conference attendees are from overseas, there are fears that the policies of an “America First” president could diminish the United States’ desirability as a global collaborator and undermine its preeminence as a destination for top foreign students. “It’s a real possibility and an unfortunate one” that global education and exchanges could bypass a less-hospitable United States, said Francisco J. Marmolejo, a longtime international educator and president of the Qatar Foundation’s higher-education arm.
Pico Iyer, an author whose remarks opened the conference, urged attendees not to be discouraged despite the current headwinds. “The world right now is swinging like a mad pendulum,” he said. “Don’t be distracted by the moment. Try to step back.” (Chronicle of Higher Education).
One more thing.
Harvard’s graduation was on Wednesday.
In his second Baccalaureate address, Harvard President Alan Garber stressed to the Class of 2025 the importance of education, and those who impart it, for advancing knowledge.
“The best way to acknowledge Harvard — and what this time has meant to you — is to advocate for education,” Garber told students gathered at Tercentenary Theatre on Tuesday afternoon. “Everything we might achieve — morally, scientifically, technologically, and even economically — is grounded in knowledge. Where else are you more likely to find a path to knowledge and all that it unlocks for humanity than in education?”
Garber’s address capped this year’s interfaith ceremony celebrating undergraduates, a tradition dating back to Harvard’s first Commencement in 1642. The president’s plea to stand up for education comes amid funding cuts to the University by the federal government that will affect research across disciplines, including medicine and Garber’s area of expertise — economics. (Harvard Gazette)
Live Updates: Judge Will Block Trump From Barring Foreign Students at Harvard, For Now.
The decision was a victory, at least temporarily, in the university’s confrontation with the White House, which has sought to undercut its finances and influence.
A federal judge in Boston said on Thursday that she would block President Trump’s effort to prevent Harvard from enrolling international students, part of the administration’s all-out battle to undermine the university’s finances and global influence.
The judge’s decision was a victory for Harvard, at least for now, in its ongoing confrontation with the White House, which has already seen the university stripped of billions of dollars in federal funding.
The result came as 9,000 students were gathered in Harvard Yard to receive their diplomas at a graduation ceremony filled with symbols of protest against Mr. Trump. Sporadic cheers broke out as students learned of the judge’s decision, which is meant to preserve the current system while Harvard fights the White House in federal court.
Harvard’s lawyers have said that international students were panicked and seeking to transfer. “I want to maintain the status quo,” Judge Allison D. Burroughs said in the hearing on Thursday. “People are terrified.”
The Trump administration continues to seek options for restricting the flow of foreign students into the country. It has described visa holders as “agitators,” and President Trump has argued that more of their admissions spots should go to Americans. Late Wednesday, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said that officials would begin to “aggressively revoke” the visas of some Chinese students.
[There are roughly 275,000 Chinese students in the United States, about 20 percent of all student visa holders. India is the only nation that sends more students to the United States.]
In the Thursday hearing in federal district court in Boston, the judge voiced concerns that the government was in violation of that earlier order by attempting to prevent foreign students from enrolling. She cited complaints in a filing late Wednesday by Harvard, which included examples of its students being hassled at airports.
The Trump administration had attempted to forestall the judge’s decision by sending a last-minute notice offering the university an additional 30 days to respond to its demands just hours before squaring off against Harvard’s lawyers in federal court.
While lawyers for the government argued that a court order blocking the Trump administration’s action would be unnecessary given the extension, Judge Burroughs said she wanted to issue an injunction anyway, repeating concerns that student visas were being delayed or rescinded.
“I have to say that I would feel more comfortable if an order were in place,” Judge Burroughs responded, agreeing with a lawyer for Harvard, Ian Gershengorn.
Mr. Gershengorn argued that an order was still necessary because of what he called the Trump administration’s ongoing violations of the school’s First Amendment rights, and suggesting that the new notice from the government was merely another step in the government's maneuvering.
“There seems to be a different set of rules, procedures for Harvard,” he said, adding that the “harms we are suffering are real and continuing.”
International students make up about a quarter of Harvard’s student body, and are critical to the university’s academics and finances. The school had asked for the extension so that international students, many of whom had left campus for the summer, could return to Harvard for their studies while the litigation continues.
An extension would also clear the way for incoming first-year students from abroad to proceed with their plans.
Jason A. Newton, a Harvard spokesman, said in a statement that Harvard would “continue to take steps to protect the rights of our international students and scholars, members of our community who are vital to the University’s academic mission and community — and whose presence here benefits our country immeasurably.”
———
A murmur went through the crowd at Harvard’s commencement ceremony, followed by some sporadic cheers, as students and families began to learn of a federal judge’s decision to block the Trump administration’s effort to prevent Harvard from enrolling international students.
As the graduation ceremony began, Alan Garber could say only “Welcome” before the crowd rose to its feet for a long, deafening ovation in support of the university president and his effort to resist the Trump administration. He then welcomed “students from around the world, just as it should be,” earning a longer ovation.
Just a reminder.
Free speech, government control and international students are only part of Trump’s attacks on Harvard. There’s always Trump’s determination to end grants affecting medical and scientific research.
At least 350 Harvard medical grants were terminated by the Trump administration. Here are some of them - ABC News
Amid the Trump administration's battle with Harvard University, hundreds of grants worth millions of dollars for medical research have been canceled.
The White House has accused Harvard of allowing antisemitism to go unchecked on campus and of not ending diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
In a letter on April 11, the Trump administration argued Harvard "failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment" and proposed terms including changing the school's governance, adopting merit-based hiring, shuttering any DEI programs and allowing "audits" to ensure "viewpoint diversity." The administration then said it was withholding $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and $60 million in multi-year contract value to the institution.
Harvard has taken steps such as renaming the Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging to the Office of Community and Campus Life. Additionally, Harvard's president said the school is committed to making changes to create a "welcoming and supportive learning environment" but argued the Trump administration's requests go too far.
At least 350 grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF) and elsewhere been canceled at Harvard Medical School, excluding the School of Public Health and the School of Engineering, a Harvard University faculty source told ABC News.
Harvard has said the loss of research funding interrupts work on topics including tuberculosis, chemotherapy, pandemic preparedness, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. The school has also said the Trump administration’s threats have endangered its educational mission.
The Trump administration did not immediately reply to ABC News' request for comment.
This includes research for studying antibiotic resistance, identifying the earliest precursors of breast cancer, breaking barriers to deliver effective drugs for Alzheimer's disease, studying microbial evolution and researching cures for ALS.
Scientists at Harvard say the cancellations of their research grants are collateral damage in the battle with the Trump administration and worry some scientific breakthroughs will never be discovered.
"I will say that receiving a grant from the NIH is very challenging," David Sinclair, a professor in the department of genetics at Harvard Medical School, told ABC News. "It takes years of work and a lot of effort. You have to go through peer review, and it can take years to get this money, and when you get it -- I've literally dropped to my knees with gratitude of receiving one of these grants. These are a big deal, and they literally are our lifeblood, and to just have that terminated is devastating."
What do I say to her'? Sinclair was inspired to find a cure for ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), a debilitating neurological disorder, after his partner's mother was diagnosed with it.
"We've watched her descend from an active, healthy lady in her 70s to now, where she's on a breathing machine and being saved by a tube," he said. "And our house is an ICU unit with nurses 24/7 and for us, it's a race against time."
Sinclair said within the last month, his lab had a breakthrough using artificial intelligence to find both synthetic and naturally occurring molecules that may reverse the aging process and treat ALS.
Sinclair received word on May 15 that two grants of his were being terminated. One was an NIH grant awarded to Sinclair's lab on a project to reverse the aging process and the second was a career award given to a postdoctoral researcher in his lab on the ALS project.
The career award grant was paying for the salaries of the researcher and two people working under her. Now all three are effectively without salaries unless another form of funding can be found.
Sinclair said in the interview that he had not told his partner's mother that the ALS grant has been canceled.
"I just feel so concerned for the patients who, like my partner's mother, are counting on us scientists to find treatments and cures for what ails them," he said. "And what do I say to Serena's mom? I haven't talked to her yet. What do I say? That the research that looked so promising is now terminated? That her life is counting on us, and she's just one of millions of people in this country who are counting on the research at Harvard Medical School to make the breakthroughs that will literally save their lives."
Similarly, on a search for stopping debilitating diseases, Joan Brugge, director of the Ludwig Center at Harvard Medical School, was studying how to identify the earliest precursors of breast cancer with a goal of designing treatments to prevent them from becoming cancerous.
The work was supported by an approximately seven-year grant from the NIH's National Cancer Institute totaling at about $600,000. The grant was in its sixth year with 1.5 more years left.
Another canceled grant was a fellowship for a postdoctoral researcher in Brugge's lab. These grants support costs such as training, tuition and fees and child care, according to the NIH.
These kinds of things are going to affect our ability to make progress in the way we want," Brugge told ABC News. "This is not right. Why should Americans be deprived of potential benefits from this research?"
Claims of antisemitism Steven Shuken, a postdoctoral researcher at the Gygi Labs at Harvard Medical School, was studying what the barriers are in developing treatments for Alzheimer's disease.
He said drugs don't penetrate the blood-brain barrier very well, resulting in failures to receive FDA approval to treat Alzheimer's disease.
"They seem to have some effectiveness at some dose, but once you get up to the high dose that you need to see the effect, there are these terrible side effects that come up," he told ABC News.
In order to improve future drugs' efficacy and reduce side effects enough to make them safe and effective for Alzheimer's patients, Shuken teamed up with Boston Children's Hospital to see if they could leverage the chorid plexis, a section of the blood-cerebral spinal fluid barrier, as a pathway without side effects.
Shuken had been awarded a K99/R00 grant, which is for postdoctoral scientists completing research that will eventually lead to a tenure-track or an equivalent faculty position.
The K99 portion supports one to two years of postdoctoral research training and the R00 portion supports up to three years "contingent on the scientist securing an independent, tenure track faculty position," according to the NIH.
Two weeks ago, he received news that the K99 grant – which was awarded last year for two years – was terminated and there is no policy that supports activating an R00 on a K99 that's been terminated, effectively terminating the R00 as well.
Shuken said no reason was given for the grant terminations, but he said he did see the letter sent to Harvard from the NIH citing antisemitism.
Trump and other members of his administration have accused the university of fostering antisemitism on its campus, specifically related to pro-Palestinian demonstrations amid the Israel-Hamas war.
"Harvard's failure to protect students on campus from anti-Semitic discrimination -- all while promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry -- has put its reputation in serious jeopardy," Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a letter in March.
The administration's joint task force, made up of the Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services and the General Services Administration, is conducting a review of Harvard, saying it is part of an effort to remove alleged antisemitic conduct and harassment.
Last year, a federal judge in Boston ruled that Harvard "failed its Jewish students" and must face a lawsuit over antisemitism on campus. Some Jewish students had claimed Harvard had been indifferent to their fears of walking through the campus and facing alleged harassment from pro-Palestinian protesters.
However, some Jewish students and faculty members, such as Shuken, said he has not experienced antisemitism during his time at Harvard. He said if there is antisemitism occurring on the main campus, he's not sure why retaliatory grant cuts are affecting the university's medical school.
"I will note that I work at the Harvard Medical School quad, which is a half-hour shuttle ride away from the main campus," he said. "So even if there is antisemitism on the main campus, which -- as far as I can tell -- is dramatically exaggerated in certain news outlets, if it's happening over there, it's not happening where I work."
Michael Baym was also affected by the grant terminations at Harvard. He said there is a disconnect between the political battle raging between the Trump administration and Harvard and the grants awarded to the medical school that were cut as a result.
"Our lab studies bacteria. None of the content of this research is related to a contemporary political or is part of a contemporary political battle," he told ABC News. "There's no sense in it. It's bacteria; how can bacteria be antisemitic?"
Harvard has said it is resolved in its commitment to combatting antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias.
Grants are not gifts to Harvard Baym's laboratory at Harvard Medical School studies the biology of how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics and what things keep them from gaining resistance. The World Health Organization has called microbial resistance one of the world's top public health and development threats.
Earlier this month, Baym learned that five grants to his laboratory and researchers in his lab were being terminated. This included an NIH five-year flexible award to support all basic research in the lab and two NSF grants, one to help study bacteriophages that kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and the other to help study the basic biology of the vectors of antibiotic resistance.
Additionally, an NIH graduate student grant for a project looking for new bacteriophages was terminated as well as two NIH postdoctoral fellowships that were on the same grant. The total cost of the grants canceled was $4.35 million.
Baym said what he thinks many people don't understand is that the grants are not monetary gifts from the government to a rich, private university. They are contracts awarded by panel of impartial experts directly to researchers and to projects. In this case, the researchers happen to conduct their work at Harvard.
"That's what's being cut," he said "These grants, this is not a gift to build a dorm. This is a research contract that's being terminated, right."
Michael Desai, a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard, who was also subject to grant terminations, agreed, saying the grants don't support operations of the university and Harvard's endowment, valued at $53.2 billion, cannot cover all the costs of grants that were terminated.
"There's all kinds of specific purposes that donors have designated for their money to be spent on," he told ABC News. "The other thing is that Harvard already spends roughly 5% of the endowment every year. The way to think about it is a retirement account … and it's supposed to last for hundreds of years, rather than dozens."
"If they spend more than they already are, then it will, over the course of 10 to 20 years, just be gone, and the university would have to shut down," Desai added.
Fear of losing scientists to other countries At the time of the terminations, Desai's work was focused on microbial evolution and population genetics, which looks at how microbial populations -- microorganisms -- adapt to new conditions.
Desai had three grants terminated on May 15, two from the NIH and one from the NSF.
The NIH grants totaled about $300,000 to $350,000 per year in direct costs plus a little under $200,000 per year in indirect costs, and the NSF grant was about $100,000 per year in direct costs and another $69,000 in indirect costs, Desai said.
Desai said he wasn't surprised the grants were terminated due to news that the Trump administration was planning on freezing grant money, but he expressed concern for the younger scientists whose research and salaries were being supported on these grants.
There's a battle, as we all know, between Harvard and the Trump administration," he said. "It centers around things that have absolutely nothing to do with science. There's broad support for the kind of science we and many other people at Harvard are doing. I don't think it's an intended target, but it's certainly getting caught up in the battle."
Desai emphasized the broader impact grant freezing could on have U.S. scientific dominance, highlighting the potential for young American scientists to go aboard or international scientists to not come to the U.S.
"Over the past 15 years that I've been at Harvard, I can't think about how many hundreds of emails I've gotten from the smartest people in China and India and Europe and all over the world asking if they could come work with me or my colleagues across the country and basically bring all of their talents to essentially work for us, to work for trying to increase the United States' technological dominance in the world," he said.
Desai went on, "I kind of worry that 10 years from now, our smartest students are going to be writing professors in research institutes in China hoping that they can go do science to make China stronger. The bottom line is if we don't invest in this stuff, other people certainly will." (ABC News)
