Trump against Harvard; judges against Trump
Here we go again.
Trump issued an order “revoking Harvard’s participation in F-1 and J-1 visa programs, under which foreign students attend Harvard.” The administration had asked Harvard to provide information on its foreign students’ participation in “illegal and violent activities,” and Harvard’s reply was not considered adequate. Harvard sued, and an injunction was issued against the administration.
John Hinderaker, who wrote the post I just linked, believes that the administration will lose this particular case, and even that they probably expect to lose it because they have arbitrarily dispensed with certain statutory requirements. He considers this particular action against Harvard to be more political than legal.
On the other hand – as pointed out at Legal Insurrection:
The judge made the ruling without a Trump lawyer present. As I stated in my blog yesterday and today, DHS gave Harvard 72 hours to respond to requests.
As Margot Cleveland pointed out, there is “no reason the court couldn’t have set [an] afternoon hearing.”
I suppose this one may end up going to SCOTUS as well.
One particularly interesting aspect of this case is how it highlights the extreme dependence a university such as Harvard has on foreign students. They pay full tuition for the most part, unlike many of Harvard’s regular students. The percentage of foreign students is twenty-seven percent of Harvard’s enrollment.
John Hinderaker is very legal minded, I think there is much beyond the legal shenanigans going on here, and Harvard has much to lose even if they “win”. They won’t be the same whatever goes down.
I think of Cambridge and Boston as the Barony of Harvard. Harvard says jump, and the police, politicians, and courts ask how high. I first noticed that attending a court proceeding for a protester back in 1968. Yeah, I’m slow 🙂
They’re not dependent on their foreign students. They are merely post-American. They have an abnormally large endowment income stream and they could reconfigure their admissions policies to recruit competent domestic applicants who can pay full freight. Please note, schools like Harvard reject > 90% of all applicants.
==
If we had sensible public policies regarding inter-state and international recruitment, price discrimination could be practiced only one way: offering discounts on a uniform tuition charge and uniform room-and-board charge. Schools would also be required to make audited disclosures of date about their matriculants, such as the median board and achievement test scores of various demographic segments, the mean discount on tuition and room-and-board, and the share of the student body receiving discounts. Also, if we had sensible policy, visas for students, teachers, and their dependents would be distributed by via multiple price auction. The number of visas offered for auction each semester would be a function of the total population of temporary residents in the United States and the quantum of time on visas tossed into a secondary market exchange when their recipients left before their visa expired. Schools would have to purchase a visas or secondary market time sufficient to cover the time they sought to enroll or employ the beneficiary. One shot, know renewals or supplementary purchases. Columbia and Harvard want to recruit foreigners, they’d have to pay for it. Were we sensible.
If you are promoting a globalized narrative or agenda, I suppose you really do need a globalized student body to make it work.
Presumably the main concern with this judge supported lawfare is if the appeals take so long that not enough is done by the 2026 midterms, we may not prevail a year from now. I hope I am proven wrong, but right now I don’t sense that that Trump’s and other MAGA republican’s arguments that this is all the Democrats doing and fault are yet having the impact and effect that we need to retain (and increase) the R’s in the Congress after the midterms.