May 24, 2025.

On Thursday, the Trump administration told Harvard University that because it had not handed over information on foreign students' protest activities,

violent activity, and coursework, the university had lost

the privilege of enrolling foreign students. Secretary of Homeland Security, Christy Noem,

said this decision was based on the administration's determination to enforce the law and root out

the evils of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in society and campuses.

This argument has always been a thinly veiled way to use actual anti-Semitism to destroy universities,

a reality illustrated by Trump's hosting last night of cryptocurrency investors whose coins are

literally named things like,

the Jews. Harvard promptly sued, noting that the administration has engaged in an

unprecedented and retaliatory attack on academic freedom at Harvard, and calling the attack a blatant violation of the First Amendment, the due process clause, and the Administrative Procedure Act.

With a stroke of a pen, the lawsuit reads, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard's student body, international students who contribute

significantly to the university and its mission. Hours later, Judge Allison Burroughs of the

U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts granted Harvard's request for a temporary

restraining order, barring the administration's change from taking

effect. She wrote that the new policy would cause immediate and irreparable injury to Harvard.

While President Donald J. Trump might well have his own reasons for hating a university

famous for its brain power, the anti-intellectual impulse behind Trump's attacks on higher education

has a long history in the United States.

That history reaches at least as far back as the 1740s

when European-American settlers in the western districts of the colonies

complained that men in the

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