Raskin: Trump looking to ‘exact vengeance’ on Harvard with foreign student block:
“Harvard has turned into a hotbed for anti-American, anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist agitators that put American students at risk,” she continued. “They’ve repeatedly failed to address the serious issues plaguing their campus, despite warnings, and now they’re facing the consequences.”
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, when announcing the foreign student ban, said the administration was holding the elite school accountable for “fostering violence,” not doing enough to combat antisemitism and “coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus.”
The administration’s task force for combating antisemitism said earlier this month that Harvard has “failed to confront the pervasive race discrimination and anti-Semitic harassment plaguing its campus.” A Harvard University Police Department report, released in October last year, found that a number of hate crimes reported to law enforcement at the school doubled, going from five to 10 between 2022 and 2023.
There are no mentions of DEI, affirmative action, wokeness, etc. in the article.
Trump’s war on Harvard has everything to do with its perceived failure to sufficiently police antisemitism/anti-Israel speech on its campus at the behest of his wealthy donors (Ackman, David Sacks)–and nothing to do with DEI, wokeness, student loan debt bubble, credentialism, etc. as I correctly predicted months ago.
Trump sees anti-Israel speech and protests at Harvard as tantamount to an attack on the Jewish state itself. Foreign students are also perceived as somehow being more inclined to harbor antisemitic views, although I don’t think the evidence bears this out. The majority of foreign students do not have particularly strong views on Israel.
Moreover, American Jews tend to be liberal overall as a voting bloc. It’s ironically White Protestants who are the staunchest and most reliable defenders of Israel and Jewish interests in America, since the early ’80s with Reagan, not Jewish Americans, who are more ambivalent or divided on the issue.
Therefore, I predict there will be no longstanding changes to Harvard, nor any attenuation of credentialism. The GOP does not care about student loan debt, DEI, wokeness etc.–only that Israel is protected and off-limits to criticism. The GOP did nothing for a generation as campuses continued to push wokeness and as student loan debt has surged. The GOP are only opposed student loan debt forgiveness, not policy that would make Americans less reliant on degrees, which are increasingly a necessity for obtaining a middle-class job.
Employers like credentialism, even in spite of wokeness, because it makes hiring easier. In the past, employers did not have cost-effective ways to screen for competency at scale. Applicants had to be interviewed individually instead of automated resume screening. Now this cost is shifted to the public in the form of student loans.
My long-standing criticism has been that the ‘mainstream right’ gets the framing of this issue is wrong. It’s not so much that college is about pushing left-wing ideology, although there is a lot of that, but that it’s mostly about credentialism. The vast majority of students attend college for the credential, not to be radicalized. Take away the credentialism and enrollment will fall to the levels of the ’60s.