MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Thousands of students could be forced to leave the country or abandon plans to come after the Trump administration revoked Harvard University's ability to sponsor international student visas. The administration says it is acting on national security grounds. Harvard says the move is unlawful and that it's part of a pattern of political retaliation against schools that resist overreaching federal oversight. Ryan Enos is a professor of government at Harvard, and he's with us now to tell us more about how the campus is reacting. Good morning, Professor Enos. Thanks for joining us.
RYAN ENOS: Good morning. I'm happy to be here.
MARTIN: So how are people on campus responding, and how do you respond to this?
ENOS: Well, you know, like myself, and I think a lot of people on campus, of course, we saw this coming in some ways 'cause we've seen how Donald Trump operates. He operates as an authoritarian, and this is what they do, they keep trying to come and bend people to their will and keep attacking them. But even though we saw this coming, I mean, people are devastated. These are - these international students, our friends and our colleagues, they're our students who are some of the most amazing people we know, and they are being attacked in this political game that Donald Trump is playing.
MARTIN: Is your understanding that students would have to transfer immediately? I mean, there are students who are about to graduate in a matter of a couple of weeks. There's students who've already committed to coming. What's your understanding of what happens?
ENOS: So like a lot of people, there's a lot of confusion, and I think that also goes with the way a lot of these things coming out of the Trump administration goes. They issue a letter, and then they say it was a mistake and nobody quite knows what to make of it and so on and so on. The word that I'm getting - and I should emphasize that this is, in many ways, speculative - is that the students that are set to graduate in less than a week now will be allowed to graduate. But for everybody else, it is up in the air. And, of course, students can't just transfer on a dime. You can't turn around and say, oh, I'm going to go to another university. And so in many ways, they're in complete limbo now, and nobody knows what's going to happen.
MARTIN: I want to ask you about this claim that the administration seems to be making about national security concerns, alleging Harvard is vulnerable to foreign influence. Is this a new complaint? Because as I understand it, I mean, I think we've been made privy to these letters that the administration has sent to Harvard's administration previously. It's making the complaints that I think people know about the treatment of Jewish students, about its commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, etc. But this complaint about national security concerns, what do you think that means?
ENOS: Yeah. You know, I was sitting with a group of people yesterday - professors and graduate students who are very knowledgeable about what goes on in the news - and this sort of made our jaw drop when we read it because it was something we had never heard about. People all of a sudden were getting on Google and trying to understand this. And as far as we can tell, this is something that has just sort of been pulled out of the air to allege to Harvard - at Harvard. And I think that's very telling because it signals that, in many ways, the Trump administration is searching for reasons. They're looking for these pretexts to attack Harvard because it's not about policy. It's not about national security. It's not about anything else. It's about trying to punish their political enemies.
MARTIN: So Harvard has responded aggressively, and it's challenging these demands legally. But in your op-ed in the Harvard Crimson titled "First They Came For Columbia," you argue that silence from other institutions is enabling this kind of behavior. What do you want to see from your peers? And we have about 30 seconds left.
ENOS: Yeah. You know, we want them to stand up. This is an attack not just on higher education but on civil society more generally, and it's not just an attack on Harvard. And I hope that other institutions and I hope that the American people see what this is. This is an attack on the rule of law in the United States, and we need to all stand up and collectively push back against this.
MARTIN: That's Ryan Enos. He's a professor of government at Harvard University. Professor Enos, thank you so much for joining us.
ENOS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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