A Chinese Student Learns the American Way
Em. Prof. M. Mark Hoffer asks, 'Why Do We Teach Foreign STEM Students?' (Letters, May 5). He writes that the reason we host foreign students isn't to 'abduct them' but 'to teach and train them so that they can return to their country and share what they've learned.'
For decades our universities have endorsed the notion that taking so many Chinese students was good for this reason—that they could return to their homeland to share the democratic values they picked up in the U.S. A few years ago, I asked one of my Chinese graduate students about this idea. In response, he told me the story of his girlfriend at our university who was the child of communist elites in China—an increasingly common thing in recent years. She caught a minor illness and went to our student health center. She checked in at the desk and took her place in line where she waited over an hour to be seen by the medical staff. When she returned, she told her boyfriend: 'This American system is awful! If I had been in China, I would have told the desk who I was and walked right to the front of the line.'
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Fox News
16 minutes ago
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TIMELINE: Inside the evolving relationship between Trump and Musk from first term to this week's fallout
The fallout between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump is an evolving situation marked by a public blowup on Thursday, but their relationship ties back to Trump's first term and even earlier. A November 2016 CNBC interview with the Tesla CEO, who's now the richest man in the world, took a critical tone of the now president just days before he was elected president in an upset that signified the strength of the populist movement. "Honestly, I think Hillary's economic policies and her environmental policies particularly are the right ones, you know, but yeah. Also, I don't think this is the finest moment in our democracy at all," Musk said. "Well, I feel a bit stronger that probably he's not the right guy. He just doesn't seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States," he later added in the interview. During Trump's first term, Musk was part of some of his economic advisory councils, which often includes CEOs, but ultimately left his post because he disagreed with the president's move to exit the Paris Climate Accords. "Am departing presidential councils. Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world," Musk posted at the time. The two continued to have an on-and-off relationship, but there were some positive signs in May 2020. "Elon Musk, congratulations. Congratulations, Elon. Thanks, Elon. For Elon and 8,000 SpaceX employees, today is the fulfillment of a dream almost two decades in the making," Trump said at the Kennedy Space Center in May 2020. And at the SpaceX Demo-2 launch, Trump said he and Musk communicate regularly. "Well, I won't get into it. But, yeah — but I speak to him all the time. Great guy. He's one of our great brains. We like great brains. And Elon has done a fantastic job," he said. Fast forward to 2022, when Musk purchased Twitter and renamed it X, and brought back Trump's account that November, after it was suspended after the events of Jan. 6, 2021. In 2022, Musk also announced that he would vote Republican, but indicated he would back Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis if he opted to seek the nomination. DeSantis launched his campaign on X in a "space," a virtual public event forum, with Musk, who also reportedly significantly financially backed the Florida governor, according to The Wall Street Journal. However, a major turning point was in July 2024, after the assassination attempt of Trump at a rally in Butler, Penn. "I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery," Musk posted. Musk then campaigned for the president, including a famous moment when he was jumping on stage at his comeback rally in Butler. "I want to say what an honor it is to be here and, you know, the true test of someone's character is how they behave under fire, right?" Musk said at the rally. "And we had one president who couldn't climb a flight of stairs and another who was fist pumping after getting shot." "This is no ordinary election," the tech CEO continued. "The other side wants to take away your freedom of speech." "Just be a pest to everyone," he added. "You know, people on the street everywhere: Vote, vote, vote!" The tech billionaire spent roughly $300 million through America PAC to boost swing state voter efforts, including Pennsylvania. By the time the presidential election rolled around, Trump and Musk appeared to be close friends as the Tesla CEO was with Trump in Mar-a-Lago on election night. Over the next few days, Musk remained in Florida and was reportedly advising Trump on appointments and policy as the transition to a new administration kicked off. A week later, shortly before Musk and the new president appeared at a SpaceX launch together in Texas, Trump announced that Musk and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy would be heading up the Department of Government Efficiency in an effort to rid the government of waste, fraud, and abuse. Trump described the pair as "two wonderful Americans' and although Ramaswamy left that post in January and is now running for governor in Ohio, Musk stayed on and quickly became the face of an agency that made him the main target of attacks from Democrats pushing back on spending cuts that they argued were too drastic. Protests erupted nationwide against Musk and DOGE including violent outbursts at his Tesla dealerships that tanked the company's stock and were labeled as acts of "domestic terrorism" by the Justice Department. 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"I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing," Musk said. Two days later, Musk announced his official departure from DOGE. "As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending," Musk said, adding that the effects of DOGE "will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government." DOGE, which fell short of Musk's initial goal of slashing $1 trillion in spending which Musk said he still remains optimistic will happen in the future, will continue its work without Musk, who said, "I look forward to continuing to be a friend and adviser to the president." 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Travel Weekly
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Advocacy efforts by ASTA, ACTA take the stage at AMG's confab
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40 minutes ago
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How a Supreme Court decision backing the NRA is thwarting Trump's retribution campaign
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Lawyers representing Harvard, faculty at Columbia University and others are also leaning on the decision in cases challenging Trump's attacks on them. 'Going into court with a decision that is freshly minted, that clearly reflects the unanimous views of the currently sitting Supreme Court justices, is a very powerful tool,' said Eugene Volokh, a conservative First Amendment expert who represented the NRA in the 2024 case. For free speech advocates, the application of the NRA decision in cases pushing back against Trump's retribution campaign is a welcome sign that lower courts are applying key First Amendment principles equally, particularly in politically fraught disputes. In the NRA case, the group claimed that Maria Vullo, the former superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services, had threatened enforcement actions against the insurance firms if they failed to comply with her demands to help with the campaign against gun groups. The NRA's claims centered around a meeting Vullo had with an insurance market in 2018 in which the group says she offered to not prosecute other violations as long as the company helped with her campaign. 'The great hope of a principled application of the First Amendment is that it protects everybody,' said Alex Abdo, the litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute. 'Some people have criticized free speech advocates as being naive for hoping that'll be the case, but hopefully that's what we're seeing now,' he added. 'We're seeing courts apply that principle where the politics are very different than the NRA case.' The impact of Vullo can be seen most clearly in the cases challenging Trump's attempts to use executive power to exact revenge on law firms that have employed his perceived political enemies or represented clients who have challenged his initiatives. A central pillar of Trump's retribution crusade has been to pressure firms to bend to his political will, including through issuing executive orders targeting four major law firms: Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale and Susman Godfrey. Among other things, the orders denied the firms' attorneys access to federal buildings, retaliated against their clients with government contracts and suspended security clearances for lawyers at the firms. (Other firms were hit with similar executive orders but they haven't taken Trump to court over them.) The organizations individually sued the administration over the orders and the three judges overseeing the Perkins Coie, WilmerHale and Jenner & Block suits have all issued rulings permanently blocking enforcement of the edicts. (The Susman case is still pending.) Across more than 200-pages of writing, the judges – all sitting at the federal trial-level court in Washington, DC – cited Vullo 30 times to conclude that the orders were unconstitutional because they sought to punish the firms over their legal work. The judges all lifted Sotomayor's line about using 'the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression,' while also seizing on other language in her opinion to buttress their own decisions. Two of them – US district judges Beryl Howell, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, and Richard Leon, who was named to the bench by former President George W. Bush – incorporated Sotomayor's statement that government discrimination based on a speaker's viewpoint 'is uniquely harmful to a free and democratic society.' The third judge, John Bates, said Vullo and an earlier Supreme Court case dealing with impermissible government coercion 'govern – and defeat' the administration's arguments in defense of a section of the Jenner & Block order that sought to end all contractual relationships that might have allowed taxpayer dollars to flow to the firm. 'Executive Order 14246 does precisely what the Supreme Court said just last year is forbidden: it engages in 'coercion against a third party to achieve the suppression of disfavored speech,'' wrote Bates, who was also appointed by Bush, in his May 23 ruling. For its part, the Justice Department has tried to draw a distinction between what the executive orders called for and the conduct rejected by the high court in Vullo. They told the three judges in written arguments that the orders at issue did not carry the 'force of the powers exhibited in Vullo' by the New York official. Will Creeley, the legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said the rulings underscore how 'Vullo has proved its utility almost immediately.' 'It is extremely useful to remind judges and government actors alike that just last year, the court warned against the kind of shakedowns and turns of the screw that we're now seeing from the administration,' he said. Justice Department lawyers have not yet appealed any of the three rulings issued last month. CNN has reached out to the department for comment. In separate cases brought in the DC courthouse and elsewhere, Trump's foes have leaned on Vullo as they've pressed judges to intervene in high-stakes disputes with the president. Among them is Mark Zaid, a prominent national security lawyer who has drawn Trump's ire for his representation of whistleblowers. Earlier this year, Trump yanked Zaid's security clearance, a decision, the attorney said in a lawsuit, that undermines his ability to 'zealously advocate on (his clients') behalf in the national security arena.' In court papers, Zaid's attorneys argued that the president's decision was a 'retaliatory directive,' invoking language from the Vullo decision to argue that the move violated his First Amendment rights. ''Government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors,'' they wrote, quoting from the 2024 ruling. 'And yet that is exactly what Defendants do here.' Timothy Zick, a constitutional law professor at William & Mary Law School, said the executive orders targeting private entities or individuals 'have relied heavily on pressure, intimidation, and the threat of adverse action to punish or suppress speakers' views and discourage others from engaging with regulated targets.' 'The unanimous holding in Vullo is tailor-made for litigants seeking to push back against the administration's coercive strategy,' Zick added. That notion was not lost on lawyers representing Harvard and faculty at Columbia University in several cases challenging Trump's attacks on the elite schools, including one brought by Harvard challenging Trump's efforts to ban the school from hosting international students. A federal judge has so far halted those efforts. In a separate case brought by Harvard over the administration's decision to freeze billions of dollars in federal funding for the nation's oldest university, the school's attorneys on Monday told a judge that Trump's decision to target it because of 'alleged antisemitism and ideological bias at Harvard' clearly ran afoul of the high court's decision last year. 'Although any governmental retaliation based on protected speech is an affront to the First Amendment, the retaliation here was especially unconstitutional because it was based on Harvard's 'particular views' – the balance of speech on its campus and its refusal to accede to the Government's unlawful demands,' the attorneys wrote.
