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My first days as British in Harvard coincided with the horrors of September 11. Having needed comfort and unable to detach us from the news, adolescents of all nationalities have crushed sticky seats and watched the towers fall again and again on the television of the common room. All shocked. All together. This moment, and the days that followed, taught me more about the strength of a community outside of mine than everything since.
More now. Last week, in the latest climbing of the American president’s struggle against Harvard, the Trump administration prohibited the University from registering international students “immediately”. The reason? Harvard’s alleged failure to act against anti -Semitism and the teaching of “awake” ideology. “Let this serve as a warning to all university universities and institutions across the country,” read the disturbing mention of Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Internal Security.
What is a warning to do? Obviously fold the knee to the president. (Harvard did not do it and the ban was temporarily blocked before the courts.) But Trump’s decision also has a more important involuntary warning on ideas, academic freedom and America’s involvement with the rest of the world.
There is a certain type of courage required to pack your life as a young person and move to another country. The education you receive is not only intellectual variety. You become a hybrid, a person for whom some of your most formative years carry the fingerprints of a culture that does not belong to you. A person who, no matter where you end up meeting, holds a penchant for a place where you selected Rather than the one in which you were born simply as part of the strange genetic lottery.
Like all good relationships, it goes in two ways. International students can go home, but the Americans with whom they live, study and party. The influence of those who different linger on both sides, a reminder for life that more is there, that ideas flow from everywhere.
Twenty-seven percent of the Harvard student body is international. But many other American university establishments have an even higher share. In 2023-24, there were over 1.1 million foreign students in the United States. To see this using Trump’s favorite results, it’s a lot of money.
Yes, Noem can be concerned about the use of tuition fees to “help allocresses of several billion dollars”, but you do not need to be an economist to know that these students also spend their money elsewhere. Their contribution was estimated at $ 43 billion in the past academic year. Part of this increase in the American economy will last beyond obtaining the diploma. Many will meet romantic or commercial partners and will remain. But stay or leave, the lives they build will all owe something to America, whose soft power is only developing.
And now? Well, international students are attracted to ideas – both academic and those they are sacred to the country they choose to do their own. America is a goal, an escape, a meal ticket, a chance, a refuge, an adventure and a challenge – often at the same time. But few will want to go somewhere where they could be torn off from the streets or turn away from the airport. And so they will seek elsewhere and the United States will lose.
Meanwhile, academic freedom – this precious historical and intangible driver of progress that has been part of the American dream for so long – slowly withered. Ideas may not be subject to border control, but the people who have them surely. Innovation requires freedom to explore, walk around, ensure that the world has to offer and take advantage of it. The ability to invent a vital drug or to create the next technology giant is quite difficult to find without retreating the global community. Just ask Elon Musk.
The fight in the courts of Harvard will run and run. But around the world, a new generation that had prepared for their great American adventure will formulate safeguard plans. I continue to think about my own international cohort excited two decades ago. United by nothing other than individual dreams of America and a feeling that the world had enough room for all of us.
Alice.fishburn@ft.com
