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My first days as a Brit at Harvard coincided with the horrors of 9/11. In need of comfort and unable to tear ourselves away from the news, teenagers of all nationalities squashed on to sticky seats and watched the towers fall again and again on the common room TV. All shocked. All together. That moment, and the days that followed, taught me more about the strength of a community outside my own than anything since.
No longer. Last week, in the latest escalation of the US president’s fight against Harvard, the Trump administration banned the university from enrolling international students “effective immediately”. The reason? Harvard’s alleged failure to act against antisemitism and the teaching of “woke” ideology. “Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country,” read the ominous statement from Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security.
A warning to do what? Bend the knee to the president obviously. (Harvard hasn’t and the ban has been temporarily blocked in the courts.) But Trump’s move also holds a larger unintended warning about ideas, academic freedom and America’s involvement with the rest of the world.
There’s a certain kind of courage required in packing up your life as a young person and moving to another country. The education you receive is not just of the intellectual variety. You become a hybrid, a person for whom some of your most formative years bear the fingerprints of a culture that is not your own. A person who, regardless of where you ultimately end up, holds an enduring fondness for a place that you chose rather than one you were born in simply as part of the strange genetic lottery.
Like all good relationships, this goes two ways. International students may go home but the Americans they live, study and party with do not. The influence of those different to yourself lingers on both sides, a life-long reminder that more is out there, that ideas flow from everywhere.
Twenty-seven per cent of the student body at Harvard is international. But many other US academic institutions have an even higher share. In 2023-24, there were more than 1.1mn foreign students in the US. To look at this using Trump’s favourite bottom line, that’s an awful lot of money.
Yes, Noem may be concerned about the use of tuition fees to “help pad . . . multibillion-dollar endowments” but you don’t have to be an economist to know that these students are also spending their money elsewhere. Their contribution was estimated at $43bn in the last academic year. Some of this boost to the US economy will last beyond graduation. Many will meet romantic or business partners and remain. But stay or go, the lives they build will all owe something to America, whose soft power only grows as a result.
And now? Well, international students are attracted to ideas — both academic and those they hold sacred about the country they choose to make their own. America is a goal, an escape, a meal ticket, a chance, a refuge, an adventure and a challenge — often all at the same time. But few will want to go somewhere where they may be snatched off the streets or turned away at the airport. And so they will look elsewhere and the US will lose out.
Meanwhile, academic freedom — that precious, historic, intangible driver of progress that has been part of the American dream for so long — will slowly wither. Ideas may not be subject to border control but the people who have them surely are. Innovation requires freedom to explore, to roam, to bring in the best the world has to offer and capitalise on it. The ability to invent a life-saving drug or create the next tech giant is hard enough to find without stepping back from the global community. Just ask Elon Musk.
The fight in courts over Harvard will run and run. But around the world, a new generation who had been preparing for their great American adventure will be formulating backup plans. I keep thinking back to my own excited international cohort two decades ago. United by nothing but individual dreams of America and a sense that the world had enough room for all of us.
alice.fishburn@ft.com
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