An International student considers Harvard

Kristi Noem to Harvard:

“I am writing to inform you that effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked.”

Maybe it's a negotiating point, soon to be dropped, like tariff threats to Europe. Maybe it is real. Unlike admissions and faculty hiring, issuing visas for foreign entry is a place where the federal government has full authority to tell Harvard how things are going to be. Trump could do this, and stick with it.

It is hugely disruptive to Harvard. 

Its students make plans far in advance as they negotiate a delicate network of admissions, programs, faculty relationships, and finances. Now everything is up in the air, their futures like that of a spider hanging over a fire dangling on a tiny strand of web held by the arbitrary hand of Donald Trump. [This is the image of souls dangling over the fires of Hell, at the whim of almighty God, in the famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by Jonathan Edwards. The image was intended to demonstrate your helplessness and God's power. Trump has power here.]

Sandford Borins is Canadian. He was a "foreign student" while  a classmate at college, although then and now Canada barely seems "foreign" to me, which is why Trump's tariffs on Canadian goods seems so wrongheaded. Borins is an emeritus professor at the University of Toronto, where he taught public management. He maintains his own website, https://sandfordborins.com, where this commentary appeared this morning. In his guest post he explains the shirt he is wearing. I will add that it is taken in the same room, diplomas over his shoulder, where readers of this blog saw a photo of Borins wearing the high honor of the King Charles III Coronation Medal, in honor of Borins' public service.

Guest Post by Sandford Borins

Will I be deported?

I graduated from Harvard College in 1971, a member of what Harvard’s then-President Nathan Pusey called the “worst class ever,” because so many of us were radical in our politics. As an international student from Canada, it took me some time to find my place in this political world. I was radicalized by the Johnson Administration’s escalation of the Vietnam War, the Democratic Party’s selection of Hubert Humphrey as its candidate in 1968, and the policies of the Nixon Administration.

First Amendment Rights

I worked for Senator Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 Massachusetts primary, canvassing in a working-class Boston neighbourhood, but with little success. I went to more than a few teach-ins and protest marches, and for a while identified with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and attended some of their meetings. As SDS grew more extreme and violent, I parted company with it.

I was a reporter for WHRB, the student radio station, and I covered a meeting of the SDS Weather Underground, held in a basement auditorium at Boston University, intended to find recruits for the “Days of Rage” in Chicago in October 1969. The featured speaker was national president Mark Rudd, who came out of hiding. His followers paraded around the room, brandishing furniture legs (their weapon of choice for smashing capitalism), and chanting from Black poet Amiri Baraka’s protest song “Who will survive, America? Very few niggers and no crackers at all [sic].” At some point they barricaded the doors to fight off an attack from the archenemy, the Progressive Labor Party. I was taking notes covertly, then snuck out to a payphone, from which I filed a very skeptical story, all the while glancing anxiously over my shoulder.

The zenith of radicalism at Harvard was the occupation of University Hall in April 1969, which led to arrests and academic discipline for the student occupiers. As an international student with a visa that needed to be renewed each academic year, my sense of self-preservation led me to skip the occupation. The distinction I drew was between exercising First Amendment rights – political advocacy, peaceful protest, and journalism – and breaking the law. While classmates argued that the occupation of a building constituted civil disobedience and should be treated leniently, I did not want to test this argument with the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Jewish Journalism

Over time I found my voice in the nascent Jewish student movement. We attempted to combine radical domestic politics with support for Israel (which put us at odds with the New Left) and a commitment to freedom for Soviet Jews. Jewish students were starting newspapers throughout the U.S. and Canada, as discussed in a 1971 article in The New York Times. In my senior year and into graduate school, I was an editor of Genesis 2, the Boston paper. In 1972, I interviewed Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern during the New Hampshire primary and ultimately wrote the editorial endorsing him for the presidency. I tried to refute the argument Jewish conservatives were already making that the Democrats’ affirmative action proposals would limit opportunities for Jews.

These experiences were seminal and an essential component of my postsecondary education. Under the protection of the First Amendment, I was defining my values and learning how to act in the arena of public advocacy.

The Situation Today

As a thought experiment, consider someone just like me, an international student at Harvard (or indeed any other U.S. university today) interested in public affairs. I’m sure I would have posted opinions on social media, an affordance that did not exist fifty years ago. My presence at protest demonstrations would have been preserved on video, either surveillance or cellphone. Government policy has also changed. My social media footprint and video captures would provide enough information for the Trump Administration to arrest, detain, and possibly deport me.

What would I do in this difficult situation? Go silent, to avoid creating fresh evidence to be used against me? If arrested, use the courts to fight deportation, either as an individual case or part of a class action? Leave the U.S. altogether, to avoid either of these unpalatable alternatives?

If I was not already enrolled and was contemplating where to study, I would only go to a society that gives international students basic democratic rights, such as freedom of speech and assembly. For me, that would eliminate the U.S. under the Trump Administration, just as it would eliminate autocratic states such as Turkey.

The mere fact of writing this blog post and others, for example one discussing Trump’s tyranny as a set of innovations in American government, has likely ensured that I am now inadmissible as a visitor to the U.S. But I will not keep silent.

Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com/ Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.