Latest news with #KennedySchoolofGovernment
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Harvard student fears visa loss as Trump administration targets international enrollment
A Harvard graduate student has described a "devastating" atmosphere of uncertainty on campus as the Trump administration appears to intensify its efforts to restrict international students at the prestigious university. "It's definitely been a roller-coaster ride," said Fangzhou Jiang, who has one semester remaining in his master's program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "Over the last week, everybody was really panicking about whether they should stay in the United States or depart immediately." A federal judge in Boston announced Thursday she would issue a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration's attempts to prevent Harvard from enrolling international students. The ruling marks a temporary victory for the university in its ongoing confrontation with the White House, which has launched multiple actions against the institution. The acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a letter Thursday giving the school 30 days to challenge the administration's revocation of the certification to enroll international students. MORE: Trump administration backtracks on Harvard foreign student policy The Trump administration has already frozen more than $3 billion in federal funding to Harvard and plans to cancel remaining federal contracts worth an estimated $100 million. President Donald Trump has also expressed interest in revoking the university's tax-exempt status. Tensions escalated further Wednesday when Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced officials would begin to "aggressively revoke" the visas of some Chinese students, sparking fresh concerns among the international student community. "Everybody is wondering about the plan for next year—whether we should take a leave of absence, whether we should go back home and finish our semester online, or wait for more guidance," Jiang said, who serves as vice president of student government on family affairs. For Harvard, where international students comprise more than a quarter of the student body, according to the university, the impact could be significant. Jiang emphasized that international students play crucial roles on campus, from conducting academic research to facilitating cultural exchanges. "Removing international students from Harvard will really not make Harvard the Harvard it has been for the last 400 years," Jiang said. "It's going to impact the amount of perspectives Harvard has. It will definitely weaken Harvard's international influence and reputation. It is definitely not in the best interest of American higher education or the United States as a nation." Jiang said that while the university has committed to protecting international students through legal actions and other means, specific guidance for the upcoming academic year is unclear. Based on experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, Jiang remains optimistic that online learning options could provide a solution if necessary. "The school has committed to protecting international students in whatever capacity," Jiang said. "I remain confident that the university will be able to provide measures to help us finish our education at Harvard." Harvard University did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment. Harvard student fears visa loss as Trump administration targets international enrollment originally appeared on
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Harvard student fears visa loss as Trump administration targets international enrollment
A Harvard graduate student has described a "devastating" atmosphere of uncertainty on campus as the Trump administration appears to intensify its efforts to restrict international students at the prestigious university. "It's definitely been a roller-coaster ride," said Fangzhou Jiang, who has one semester remaining in his master's program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "Over the last week, everybody was really panicking about whether they should stay in the United States or depart immediately." A federal judge in Boston announced Thursday she would issue a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration's attempts to prevent Harvard from enrolling international students. The ruling marks a temporary victory for the university in its ongoing confrontation with the White House, which has launched multiple actions against the institution. The acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a letter Thursday giving the school 30 days to challenge the administration's revocation of the certification to enroll international students. MORE: Trump administration backtracks on Harvard foreign student policy The Trump administration has already frozen more than $3 billion in federal funding to Harvard and plans to cancel remaining federal contracts worth an estimated $100 million. President Donald Trump has also expressed interest in revoking the university's tax-exempt status. Tensions escalated further Wednesday when Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced officials would begin to "aggressively revoke" the visas of some Chinese students, sparking fresh concerns among the international student community. "Everybody is wondering about the plan for next year—whether we should take a leave of absence, whether we should go back home and finish our semester online, or wait for more guidance," Jiang said, who serves as vice president of student government on family affairs. For Harvard, where international students comprise more than a quarter of the student body, according to the university, the impact could be significant. Jiang emphasized that international students play crucial roles on campus, from conducting academic research to facilitating cultural exchanges. "Removing international students from Harvard will really not make Harvard the Harvard it has been for the last 400 years," Jiang said. "It's going to impact the amount of perspectives Harvard has. It will definitely weaken Harvard's international influence and reputation. It is definitely not in the best interest of American higher education or the United States as a nation." Jiang said that while the university has committed to protecting international students through legal actions and other means, specific guidance for the upcoming academic year is unclear. Based on experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, Jiang remains optimistic that online learning options could provide a solution if necessary. "The school has committed to protecting international students in whatever capacity," Jiang said. "I remain confident that the university will be able to provide measures to help us finish our education at Harvard." Harvard University did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment. Harvard student fears visa loss as Trump administration targets international enrollment originally appeared on
29-05-2025
- Politics
Harvard student fears visa loss as Trump administration targets international enrollment
A Harvard graduate student has described a "devastating" atmosphere of uncertainty on campus as the Trump administration appears to intensify its efforts to restrict international students at the prestigious university. "It's definitely been a roller-coaster ride," said Fangzhou Jiang, who has one semester remaining in his master's program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "Over the last week, everybody was really panicking about whether they should stay in the United States or depart immediately." A federal judge in Boston announced Thursday she would issue a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration's attempts to prevent Harvard from enrolling international students. The ruling marks a temporary victory for the university in its ongoing confrontation with the White House, which has launched multiple actions against the institution. The acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a letter Thursday giving the school 30 days to challenge the administration's revocation of the certification to enroll international students. The Trump administration has already frozen more than $3 billion in federal funding to Harvard and plans to cancel remaining federal contracts worth an estimated $100 million. President Donald Trump has also expressed interest in revoking the university's tax-exempt status. Tensions escalated further Wednesday when Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced officials would begin to "aggressively revoke" the visas of some Chinese students, sparking fresh concerns among the international student community. "Everybody is wondering about the plan for next year—whether we should take a leave of absence, whether we should go back home and finish our semester online, or wait for more guidance," Jiang said, who serves as vice president of student government on family affairs. For Harvard, where international students comprise more than a quarter of the student body, according to the university, the impact could be significant. Jiang emphasized that international students play crucial roles on campus, from conducting academic research to facilitating cultural exchanges. "Removing international students from Harvard will really not make Harvard the Harvard it has been for the last 400 years," Jiang said. "It's going to impact the amount of perspectives Harvard has. It will definitely weaken Harvard's international influence and reputation. It is definitely not in the best interest of American higher education or the United States as a nation." Jiang said that while the university has committed to protecting international students through legal actions and other means, specific guidance for the upcoming academic year is unclear. Based on experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, Jiang remains optimistic that online learning options could provide a solution if necessary. "The school has committed to protecting international students in whatever capacity," Jiang said. "I remain confident that the university will be able to provide measures to help us finish our education at Harvard."
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump news at a glance: administration escalates Harvard feud; supreme court blocks religious school
The Trump administration escalated its feud with Harvard on Thursday, halting the university's ability to enrol international students and ordering existing international students at the university to transfer or lose their legal status. Homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, accused Harvard of 'fostering violence, antisemitism and coordinating with the Chinese Communist party on its campus'. Pippa Norris, a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, told the Guardian the move would 'benefit Oxford and Cambridge and many other academic institutions … America, again, is going to have problems as a result.' Previously, the Trump administration terminated a further $450m in grants to the university in May, after an earlier cancellation of $2.2bn in federal funding. In response to the federal cuts, the university – with an endowment of more than $53bn – filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration. US media reported that the White House notified Harvard about its decision after ongoing correspondence regarding the 'legality of a sprawling records request'. Kristi Noem justified the decision by saying: 'This action … is the unfortunate result of Harvard's failure to comply with simple reporting requirements.' A Harvard spokesperson called the government's action 'unlawful' in a statement to the Guardian on Thursday. Read the full story The US supreme court blocked a bid led by two Catholic dioceses to establish in Oklahoma the nation's first taxpayer-funded religious charter school in a major case involving religious rights in American education that challenged the constitutional separation of church and state. Read the full story House Republicans won passage of a major bill in a 215-214 vote to enact Donald Trump's tax and spending priorities while adding trillions of dollars to the US debt and potentially preventing millions of Americans from accessing federal safety net benefits. Trump cheered the vote passage and encouraged the Senate to pass the measure quickly. The bill threatens to reverberate across the US by costing more than 830,000 jobs, raising energy bills for US households and threatening to unleash millions more tonnes of the planet-heating pollution that is causing the climate crisis, experts have warned. Read the full story A new report led by the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, lays out a dark vision of American children's health and calls for agencies to examine vaccines, ultra-processed foods, environmental chemicals, lack of exercise and 'overmedicalization'. But the report ignores leading causes of death for children: firearms and motor vehicle crashes. Read the full story The Trump administration is trying to end a cornerstone immigration policy that limits the amount of time children can be detained by immigration officials. It also requires the government to provide children in its custody with adequate food, water and clean clothes. In a court motion filed Thursday, the justice department argued that the Flores agreement should be 'completely' terminated, claiming it has incentivized unauthorized border crossings and 'prevented the federal government from effectively detaining and removing families'. Read the full story A former FBI counterintelligence agent turned whistleblower has claimed he tried to gain access to Elon Musk in 2022 to warn the billionaire that he was the target of a covert Russian campaign seeking to infiltrate his inner circle, possibly to gain access to sensitive information. Johnathan Buma, who was arrested in March and is out on bail, claims in a new interview that efforts to target Musk were 'intense.' Read the full story Iran warned it would hold the US responsible for any Israeli attack on its nuclear sites, setting a tense backdrop for the fifth round of US-Iran nuclear talks. The FDA's advisory committee unanimously recommended that the newest vaccines for Covid should be updated to target a variant of strains currently on the rise, during a meeting on Thursday – the first since the Trump administration took office. Catching up? Here's what happened on .
Time of India
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Shock at Harvard after government says international students must go
Just before the Trump administration announced Thursday that it would bar international students from Harvard University, staff members from the university's International Office met with graduating seniors at the Kennedy School of Government, congratulating them on their degrees -- and on surviving the chaos of recent months. Then, within minutes of the meeting's end, news alerts lit up the students' phones. Chaos was breaking out again: Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, had notified Harvard that its permission to enroll international students was revoked. With that, the degrees and futures of thousands of Harvard students -- and an integral piece of the university's identity and culture -- were plunged into deep uncertainty. "There are so many students from all over the world who came to Harvard to make it a better place and to change America and change their home countries for the better," said Karl Molden, a student from Vienna who had just completed his sophomore year. "Now it's all at risk of falling apart, which is breaking my heart." The university has faced rapid-fire aggressions since its president, Alan M. Garber, told the Trump administration in April that Harvard would not give in to demands to change its hiring and admissions practices and its curriculum. After the government froze more than $2 billion in grants, Harvard filed suit in federal court in Boston. Since then, the administration has gutted the university's research funding, upending budgets and forcing some hard-hit programs to reimagine their scope and mission. (Join our ETNRI WhatsApp channel for all the latest updates) The end of international enrollment would transform a university where 6,800 students, more than a quarter of the total, come from other countries, a number that has grown steadily in recent decades. Graduate programs would be hit especially hard. Live Events You Might Also Like: Harvard's ability to enrol international students halted by Trump administration At the Kennedy School, 59% of students come from outside the United States. International students make up 40% of the enrollment at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health and 35% at the Harvard Business School . Because international students do not qualify for federal financial aid, and typically pay more for their education, they contribute disproportionately to the university's revenue, in addition to bringing diverse perspectives that enrich campus life and classroom discussions. "This will destroy the university as we know it," said Kirsten Weld, a professor who specializes in Latin American history and the president of the Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors. "Harvard is situated in the United States physically, but its students and faculty hail from all over the world. That is fundamental to the work and mission of the institution. You cannot take that away and have an institution left at the end of it." Fear and confusion spread quickly Thursday as international students flooded group message boards with anxious questions and refreshed their email inboxes. You Might Also Like: Inside the multi-agency attack Trump unleashed on Harvard University Sarah Davis, a second-year Kennedy School student from Australia who is scheduled to graduate next week, said she did not feel fully confident that she would receive her master's degree in public administration if her student visa had been rendered invalid. And even if she does receive her degree, Davis said, it is unlikely that she will be able to stay in the United States for the postgraduate job she has accepted. Her employment is contingent on continued sponsorship by Harvard under the government's Optional Practical Training program, which permits universities to sponsor the visas of international students for as long as three years after they graduate. "It's incredibly disappointing to have something you've worked so hard for be taken away in an instant," Davis said, "and to end up in limbo." Molden said he had broken out in a sweat as he read about the administration's action. You Might Also Like: Harvard legal fight supercharged by Trump foreign student ban "Getting into Harvard was the best thing that has ever happened to me in my life," he said. "I can't actually believe that this is happening." Alfred Williamson, 20, a student from Wales who just completed his freshman year, said that he and many of his international friends had already started to think about transferring to other universities. "I was messaging a friend from the U.K., asking if we could talk about whether we could transfer to Oxford or Cambridge," Williamson said. "People are taking this very seriously." "Everyone's freaking out," he added. "No one knows what to do." Yet even students who had already begun to consider leaving found themselves overwhelmed by the prospect of quickly finding a spot elsewhere -- and by the idea of leaving a place where they had invested so much. "To watch my dream and those of my international peers be turned into a nightmare is one of the hardest experiences of my life," Ella Ricketts, a freshman from Canada, said in a text message. "The thought of leaving the Harvard community -- the place where I feel most at home -- remains almost impossible to consider." Canada, China, India, Britain and South Korea are among the countries that send the largest numbers of students to Harvard, according to university data. Genia Lukin, a doctoral student from Israel in Harvard's psychology department, said that the Trump administration's latest pressure tactic -- deployed, like the rest, in the name of combating antisemitism -- would further harm people like her who have experienced antisemitism and anti-Israel bias on Harvard's campus. "This is not helping," Lukin said. The new crackdown seemed to throw the future of some programs into question. Jose Ignacio Llodra, a student from Chile who is set to graduate next week from the Kennedy School, estimated that 90% of students in his master's program had come from overseas. "The program is about how to bring international development to countries around the world -- without international students, it doesn't make sense," Llodra said. "Many of us came to the U.S. to study because the university system is the best in the world, and this policy might destroy this system." He said he was lucky that his student visa had been sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is about to receive a master's degree in business administration. Maria Kuznetsova, a graduate student from Russia, said the announcement Thursday had reminded her of things she experienced in her home country. "In the student chat groups, people are saying, 'Don't panic -- it's too early,'" said Kuznetsova, who is considering a move to Europe while also quickly applying for jobs in America in hopes of securing a work visa. "But I think that's detrimental, because then you don't prepare for the worst." Caleb N. Thompson, 20, an American student who serves as one of two presidents of Harvard's undergraduate student body, said the Trump administration's demands were a "blatant and unacceptable attack on our student body." "All of our classes are going to be affected, all of our clubs are going to be affected," he said. "Student life cannot be the way that it is if we do not have international students." Some students expressed confidence that the university would fight for them to stay. Others grappled with their apparent sudden powerlessness over the most basic facets of their lives -- where they would live, study and work. "We're being used like pawns in some game we have no control over," Williamson said.
