Some of Harvard’s students and staff were stunned by the announcement, which has left thousands of international students in limbo as they mourn their connection to a university that many of them fought tooth and nail to attend.
“People who dreamed of coming to the United States to study, to absorb American traditions, to advance science … are now having their lives wrecked,” Larry Summers, President Emeritus at Harvard and former Treasury secretary, told CNN.
Summers said the Trump administration’s latest round of “attacks” come “without due process, without any indication of what specifically the problem is” and that the consequences “are mostly going to fall on peoples whose fault this surely isn’t.”
Jared, an 18-year-old in New Zealand, told CNN it was a “heart drop” moment when he learned he may not be able to start his undergraduate degree at the Ivy League school this fall.
“To me, it’s one of, if not the best school in the world,” Jared said, contrasting the news with the “really special moment” for him and his family when he learned in March he’d been accepted to Harvard to study Sociology.
Jared was in the process of applying for his student visa and preparing to move the 9,000 miles to Boston when he learned of the Trump administration’s announcement.
Now he’s in limbo and looking at other resources the university may offer, such as online learning.
“There’s really no use for me getting too worked up over something that I can’t control, you know. I’m just focused on doing what I can control,” he said.
Existing international students at Harvard are likewise faced with an uncertain future. Rising junior Karl Molden, from Austria, is traveling abroad and says he’s terrified he won’t be allowed to return to campus. International students have been nervously messaging each other, he said.
“Many of us have worked our entire lives to get to a university like Harvard, and now we need to wait around and see if we might have to transfer out and face difficulties with visas,” Molden said.
The Austrian junior said other international students he’s been in touch with are wondering if they will be able to complete summer internships – others worry they won’t get the same generous financial aid Harvard offers from another college.
Molden said international students are being used as a “play ball in this larger fight between democracy and authoritarianism.”
“Coming from Austria, I’m a little bit more familiar … with the authoritarian playbook and how authoritarians can kill democracies,” he said. “What I’ve been seeing in the US in the past few months is that.”
Some Harvard staff worry draining the university of its foreign students would debilitate the academic power of both the institution and, potentially, American academia as a whole.
Harvard economics professor and former Obama administration official Jason Furman called the measure “horrendous on every level.”
“It is impossible to imagine Harvard without our amazing international students. They are a huge benefit to everyone here, to innovation and the United States more broadly,” Furman said. “Higher education is one of America’s great exports and a key source of our soft power. I hope this is stopped quickly before the damage gets any worse.”