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DHS threatens Harvard implicit overseas students
Washington — Hundreds of U.S. universities and colleges, including Harvard, Princeton, Penn, Brown, MIT, Cornell and Tufts issued a joint letter Tuesday condemning President Trump's "political interference" successful the nation's acquisition system.
The determination comes a time aft Harvard University sued the Trump administration, which announced an archetypal backing frost of $2.2 billion and aboriginal signaled its volition to suspend an further $1 cardinal successful grants. The moves came aft weeks of escalation betwixt the medication and Harvard, which had rejected the administration's demands to alteration galore of the school's policies and leadership, including auditing the pupil assemblage and module for "viewpoint diversity."
"We talk with 1 dependable against the unprecedented authorities overreach and governmental interference present endangering American higher education," Tuesday's missive read.
"We are unfastened to constructive betterment and bash not reason morganatic authorities oversight. However, we indispensable reason undue authorities intrusion," it said, adding: "We indispensable cull the coercive usage of nationalist probe funding."
Mr. Trump has sought to bring respective prestigious universities to bottommost implicit claims they tolerated field antisemitism, threatening their budgets and tax-exempt presumption and the enrollment of overseas students.
The missive said the universities and colleges were committed to serving arsenic centers wherever "faculty, students, and unit are escaped to speech ideas and opinions crossed a afloat scope of viewpoints without fearfulness of retribution, censorship, oregon deportation."
"Most fundamentally," the missive reads, "America's colleges and universities hole an educated citizenry to prolong our democracy.
"The terms of abridging the defining freedoms of American higher acquisition volition beryllium paid by our students and our society. On behalf of our existent and aboriginal students, and each who enactment astatine and payment from our institutions, we telephone for constructive engagement that improves our institutions and serves our republic."
Mr. Trump's confrontations with universities has seen him endanger to chopped national backing astatine schools beyond Harvard implicit their policies meant to promote diverseness among students and staff.
The president has besides pursued a wide-ranging immigration crackdown that has expanded to overseas students.
The White House has publically justified its run arsenic a absorption to uncontrolled "antisemitism" and the tendency to reverse diverseness programs aimed astatine addressing humanities oppression of minorities.
The medication claims protests against Israel's warfare successful Gaza that swept crossed U.S. assemblage campuses past twelvemonth were rife with antisemitism.
Many U.S. schools, including Harvard, cracked down connected the protests implicit the allegations astatine the time.
Several apical institutions, including Columbia University, person besides bowed to demands from the Trump administration, which claims the acquisition elite is excessively progressive.
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