The Trump administration has said it is halting Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students and has ordered existing international students at the university to transfer or lose their legal status.
As with much here in the UK, foreign students are near the only ones who pay full freight.
So, all very fun. It’s also more than a bit controlling, no?
Quite right too.
The German company where I used to work was infiltrated by clever chaps who had gone to Harvard and they drove it into a wall.
The Business School has probably done more harm to Germany’s economy than the RAF.
ps Lammy went to Harvard too apparently.
Proof of the pudding if there ever was one.
Isn’t being a little controlling rather the point. A university benefits from certain provisions because it’s presumed to be a societal good for the nation. But libertarian market forces means it becomes a societal good for other nations. What exactly is the benefit of educating foreign students apart from their money?
Strategic thinking BiS old chap
It is so they can go and bugger up their own countries.
We should encourage more foreign students to take PPE degrees. That has worked remarkably well here in the UK.
“We should encourage more foreign students to take PPE degrees”
The problem is getting them to go home afterwards, which so far has proved to be a bit of a problem.
What is the point of providing state-subsidised tertiary education to your geopolitical competitors?
Back to the 60s. A small state university sector educating the intellectual elite of those born here, for the public good. Polytechnic vocational training, again for the public good. Then a private sector of whatever size educating whomever the hell they like, to whatever level they like, for full fees. And proper apprentices whose training can take them right to the top of the company. No credentialism.
“ps Lammy went to Harvard too apparently.”
The thing I realised about universities is that there’s really little rigour about subjects and colleges. Oxford University’s computer science syllabus includes “decolonisation” which makes it a joke. But people will wet their pants that you went to Oxford.
They’re like brands of anything. People still pay a fortune for expensive cars even though Toyotas have been better built for decades. Stanford and MIT get more Nobel Prizes in recent years.
What is the point of providing state-subsidised tertiary education to your geopolitical competitors?
You get some other country to send its brightest (or occasionally richest) minds, you funnel some of them into research, the rest into business. You teach them the benefits of your society and build ties with friends and colleagues. Some of them you recruit into your intelligence agencies. You discover what (and how) they’re being taught and you establish yourself as an authority on various subjects.
Of course there are downsides – it works both ways. But “Our institutions of higher knowledge work best if we prevent them from talking to anyone we don’t approve” is an a approach that has been fairly well shown to fail.
As I have said multiple times, I think the system is so irredeemably borked that we can no longer go on playing by the old rules on our side and wondering why the other side is taking over our countries, driving their economies into the ground, castrating our children, importing new populations, and jailing those who dare to disagree with any of this. On that basis, fuck them, and Go Trump!
But if we must play the game of pretending everything is basically normal, just a bit weird, then it depends.
Kristi Noem says it to to ‘hold Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus’.
On the first part, they pretty clearly are guilty of this, and not just at Harvard. Students in dishcloths invading libraries and causing a fucking chow row where others are trying to study could and should be removed from the university, but aren’t.
(This is the nest in which yesterday’s murderer of the young Jewish diplomat couple in DC was reared, too – if that matters.)
But the more serious allegation – that Harvard is a) ‘coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party’ and b) doing nothing to stop it despite being warned to do so – makes it an open and shut case to me.
The only issue is that we have to trust Noem, and we all have an inbuilt distrust of governments; I’m nit sure I see any way around this (and my instinct, FWIWieNM, is that they are coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party).
I don’t know the details at Harvard. I do know I trust Trump and Noem.
AndyT, I was talking about state-subsidised, i.e. the free tertiary education I and others of my age enjoyed. The only reason for a nation-state to provide that is to improve the stock of the population, not to have it leak away. Foreigners can go private.
And we’ve educated China to be able to crush us. They’ve infiltrated our institutions, rather than vice versa. That worked out well, didn’t it?
And we’ve educated China to be able to crush us.
You have to have a hell of a romantic view of the UK to think that we (population 67 million) were going to be able to stop China (population 1.4 billion) from educating themselves if and when they chose to do so.
Trump is making the same mistake, thinking he can magically withhold technology from them – he’s done more to accelerate technological advancement in China in the last six months than they have in the last two decades.
“And proper apprentices whose training can take them right to the top of the company.”
The trade unions destroyed that system – no point in pretending that governments were the guilty party except insofar as they allowed the unions to enjoy their absurd legal privileges.
I can remember my father predicting in detail how it was all going to end and he was dead right.
As for “controlling”, the fuss is really about Harvard exempting itself from any need to obey US federal law. They are lucky that it’s only financial and bureaucratic penalties being imposed – a bit of jail time for the Harvard ruling class would sober the buggers up.
I hope they burn Harvard to the ground. Enemy territory gets the B-29 treatment.
Next stop: the “yoonis”.
O/T – the current headline on telegraph news reads:-
Stocks plunge as Trump threatens 50pc tariffs on EU
The FTSE is down 0.24%, the Dow 0.65% and the various eu indices (hit hardest?) between 1 & 2%.
Plunge? Just F-off telegraph, this is getting boring.
John – it’s interesting how the market reaction to Trump tariff FUD has been mostly to shrug. We were told his tariffs would cause an immediate crippling global recession and chaos in the supply chain, while “valuable allies” would desert the US, Americans would suffer Venezuela style shortages, tornados, wars, cats and dogs living together (in sin!), etc.
All that’s happened so far is US jobs numbers are up, eggs and petrol prices are down. Other countries are queuing up to sign deals with President Trump on more favourable terms to the Americans. He can’t keep getting away with this!
PS – we were also told mass deportations would destroy the economy, lol.
We were also told that Trump was a xenophobic, racist, fascist, Nazi yet when I look at whom he has appointed to senior jobs I see an Egyptian, a Cuban, a Polynesian and several Indians.
Some xenophobe, some racist!
@AndyT at 11:07am
The whole idea of the US technology export restriction regime is to maintain a 5 year or better lead. The US understands that they will catch up to that technology level eventually, but it will cost them money, resources and effort to keep up. Meanwhile the US continues to develop technology based on the inside information they already have to maintain that technological lead. It is a treadmill, but better than just handing them the information.
And they will catch up faster if we teach them everything we know, become institutionally beholden to them, succumb to their institutional pressure, and make it easy for them to carry out industrial espionage, all of which the UK university sector has done
Well done, chaps.
UPDATE
A judge has issued a restraining order preventing the Trump administration from removing Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students.
This was tediously expected.
@ MG No surprise Harvard has a slew of tame Judges to call upon…
But.. does this one actually have this thing called “jurisdiction” in the matter involved?
It’s fun to watch though…
Harvard “Intelligentia” : You cannot do this!! You cannot touch us!!!
Trump: Melania dear… Hold My Beer….
AndyT said:
“You get some other country to send its brightest (or occasionally richest) minds, you … teach them the benefits of your society”
That’s funny!
Dearieme – We were also told that Trump was a xenophobic, racist, fascist, Nazi yet when I look at whom he has appointed to senior jobs I see an Egyptian, a Cuban, a Polynesian and several Indians.
They’re quite the diverse bunch, these white supremacists.
MG – this is just the beginning, the President has plenty of levers at his disposal and four more years to pull them.
Harvard is about to learn good.
RichardT – That’s funny!
Yarp. Operation Paperclip accepted about 1,600 German refugees and within 15 years, they put America on the Moon.
Maybe the lesson is, only accept Nazi asylum seekers?
PS – remember Trump 1.0, when he did everything the GOP wanted of him (appoint “30 Silver” Pence his running mate, respect the malicious court obstructions on the promise that arch-RINOs would get right round to Doing Something in the Senate, allowed preposterously bemedalled war-loser generals and admirals to deceive him about US troop movements, etc)?
Strangely, none of the advice of Rinse Pubis benefited Trump, but his AG managed to be bullshitted into recusing himself from the Russiagate hoax on day one. When it was his job to shut that shit down, on day one. Remember Mueller? Mueller? Mueller? Trump is the most investigated man in FBI history, and they couldn’t find anything so the shite State of New York brought in new laws and kangaroo courts.
Anyway, he’s back, and he’s not taking anyone’s shit, to the point where he’s openly slapping down idiotic “world leaders” live on teevee. You love to see it. Trump is a lion.
The whole idea of the US technology export restriction regime is to maintain a 5 year or better lead. The US understands that they will catch up to that technology level eventually, but it will cost them money, resources and effort to keep up.
They’re ahead in vehicle design, battery manufacture, robotics, automation, AI, and a lot of base engineering (there’s a reason we still make so much in China and it’s not because labour is cheaper). The parochial view of 20 years ago is incredibly outdated, but unfortunately most policy ‘experts’ in the West are in their sixties or older. Their universities turn out more engineers and computer scientists than America, which is busy shutting down it’s colleges.
On the whole Harvard thing – it’s pretty embarrassing if this all kicked off because they turned down his son.
AndyT, we’ve been training Chinese engineers for decades. Didn’t you hear them say “So long and thanks for all the fish” when they fucked off back to China with everything we’d taught them – seasoned with a bit of espionage – and set up brand new green-field facilities with which to out-compete us?
We’ve taught them what they needed to know. They’re off now, training new generations themselves. Huawei even train the Japs, FFS.
AndyT, we’ve been training Chinese engineers for decades.
I work with them, and these companies on a daily basis. The idea that American colleges keep some secret sauce knowledge that can be protected from evil foreigners, or handed out like special favours is… to put it mildly… bloody ignorant.
And the idea that America can “stay ahead” of a race they’ve already lost, by playing some silly game over students is even more ignorant. This is going to kill funding for colleges, kill research programmes and international co-operation and push America even further behind.
I shouldn’t be complaining because it might even give UK colleges a bit of a boost, but it’s a shame to see otherwise decent people shooting themselves in the foot because someone’s nose is out of joint.