Education
How Trump’s crackdown on Harvard and other universities is affecting the world
Universities are an easy target for right-wing populists. Polls show that a lot of Americans consider them too liberal, too expensive and too elitist, and not entirely without reason. But the fight between the Trump administration and Harvard is something more: It has become a test for the president’s ability to impose his political agenda on all 2,600 universities in the United States. Students, professors and scientists are all feeling the pressure, and that could undermine the dominant position that American science has enjoyed for decades.
What does that mean for the world?
European countries are wooing U.S.-based scientists, offering them “scientific refuge” or, as one French minister put it, “a light in the darkness.” Canada has attracted several prominent American academics, including three tenured Yale professors who study authoritarianism and fascism. The Australian Strategic Institute described this moment as “a once-in-a-century brain gain opportunity.”
In the mid-20th century, America was seen by many as a benign power, committed to scientific freedom and democracy. It attracted the best brains fleeing fascism and authoritarianism in Europe.
Today, the biggest beneficiary could be China and Chinese universities, which have been trying to recruit world-class scientific talent for years. Now Mr. Trump is doing their work for them. One indication of the success of China’s campaign to attract the best and brightest is Africa, the world’s youngest continent. Africans are learning Mandarin in growing numbers. Nearly twice as many study in China as in America.
Could America gamble away its scientific supremacy in the service of ideology? It has happened before. Under the Nazis, Germany lost its scientific edge to America in the space of a few years. As a German, my brain may wander too readily to the lessons of the 1930s, but in this case the analogy feels instructive. Several of my colleagues covering the fallout from the crackdown on international students and researchers pointed to Hitler’s silencing of scientists and intellectuals.
No one region can currently replicate the magic sauce of resources, freedom, a culture of risk-taking and welcoming immigrants that made America the engine of scientific innovation. But if it tumbles as a scientific superpower, and potential breakthroughs are disrupted, it would be a setback for the whole world. I spoke to my colleagues who are reporting on this, and here’s what I found out.
Higher education
There’s going to be fallout. We’ve talked to researchers at Harvard whose funding was cut, including those working on tuberculosis, and another who engineers fake organs that are useful in the study of human illnesses. There have been all sorts of different projects disrupted that could have led to some major breakthrough. When research is interrupted, there is no way of knowing if it would have led to a breakthrough that the world will now have to do without. But the impact might actually be more heavily felt on small regional public universities that had already lost some of their public funding and were relying heavily on international students to pay the bills. So if the United States is continually viewed as an unwelcome place for international students there will be ripple effects throughout the system.
Politics
It’s smart to think about this in terms of political calculus instead of ultimate goals. It matters little to the Trump administration if it’s dragged into court over and over again, or even how many of those lawsuits it wins. They view Harvard as an avatar for all universities that have become incubators of liberalism and are hostile to conservatives. And what better university in the world to send a message that, in their view, slows down the march of liberalism in universities. That would be a major victory for this administration. If Trump officials have any measure of success, it will be whether they can create a roadmap for imposing their political agenda on the other 2,000-plus colleges in the United States.
Global economics
Even before Trump, American researchers were saying we have a problem with the supply of domestic science, math and engineering talent. And that’s something that takes a generation to fix. It’s not something that’s done overnight. Some, we’ve already seen, are looking to do research elsewhere because, one, their funding has been cut, and, two, they’re very worried about academic freedom. Can they study what they want? We haven’t seen people ask these questions since the McCarthy era, the anti-liberal ideological war of the 1950s. Take climate change: there’s basically a repudiation by conservatives in power of what most of the scientific community considers established trends and facts based on evidence. It’s very difficult for foreign countries to compete financially, but what I have noticed in all of their pitches courting American scientists — whether it’s in Australia or Europe or Latin America — is that they’re offering them freedom of inquiry and respect of facts.
Canada
We have seen a movement of American academic and scientific talent to Canada. And that reinforces the clear success of Canadian institutions before this all happened. I spoke to Timothy Snyder, a prominent American academic who recently moved to Toronto. He told me that this is a huge opportunity for Toronto. He said the city could become what London, Paris and New York were in different periods when the great and the good moved there to think about democracy and talk about the future. Canada, and especially the University of Toronto, he believes, have a special role to play in fostering an ideological counterpull to Trump’s America in this moment of great turmoil. It’s not so much that people are setting up an American resistance in Canada, but rather that the city is part of a global intellectual resistance to Trump.
India
I don’t sense a big change in the mood in India yet. The United States still holds a lot of soft power and remains very attractive to Indians. In fact, many Indians are seeing something that is pretty familiar to them. They’re saying, “Welcome to the world as we have experienced it for the past few years.” The government under Narendra Modi has definitely cracked down on free speech. It has tried to quash dissenting voices, and it has also leaned on academics and has tried to squeeze certain research institutions that it considers too liberal. And there has been a demonization of the Muslim minority, which make up about 15 percent of the population. There are a lot of similarities to Trump’s America. Everyone in the world is just trying to understand what Trump’s actions mean for their own countries. So India’s experience can be instructive in making sense of this moment.
China
China really wants to become a center for international education, because it sees that as a key ingredient for building its reputation as a global superpower. American universities have long been a source of American soft power. China wants Chinese universities to be a source of Chinese soft power. And now Trump is doing their work for them. You can see that in China’s rhetoric and messaging. It’s trying to portray itself as open and international, everything that the Trump administration is turning away from.
In reality, China isn’t a model of openness. There are a lot of restrictions on and suspicions toward foreigners in general, and that includes foreign students. But against the backdrop of what Trump is doing, China’s message may seem more convincing. Will it work? So far China has had the most luck with Chinese-born scientists who have studied and worked in America. They already had been riding out a wave of anti-Asian racism in the United States, as well as accusations of being spies. But now, if they also don’t have the resources to do their work because Trump has cut research funding, there is no reason for them to stay. Meanwhile, China has been pouring huge amounts of money into research and development. And so they are well positioned to take advantage of this brain drain.
Africa
Young Africans have this sense that the world is changing, that there’s a shift underway. And instead of going to the West, instead of lining up outside the American embassy and facing visa rejections, many are heading to new educational hubs — and especially to China. China enters the conversation because it provides the kind of opportunities young students are looking for. Many are attracted by the scholarships, by the easier access to visas, the affordable tuition and the comparatively cheap cost of living, which is prohibitive for so many people. And this shift is happening even as China trains thousands of African officials annually in fields such as science, technology and military strategy.
It’s not that young Africans wouldn’t choose Harvard if they were offered a chance. It’s all about opportunity for them. And where there is opportunity, soft power follows. America used to have that. Students were going there not just because they wanted a world-class education, but because they saw America as a symbol of modernity, democracy and progress – values they hoped to bring back home. Today, that image has been eroded, and China stands to gain the most from it.
Europe
One university, Aix Marseille University, in southern France, immediately offered 15 positions to American researchers in reaction to the Trump administration’s policies. It began as a symbolic gesture. The university president said, “We’re offering a light in darkness.” What that one university is doing for individual American researchers is amazing. But it’s just a small drop in the bucket. There is an international system generating leaps and bounds in science, the motor and the anchor of which has been the United States. And if you get rid of the motor and you get rid of the anchor, it’s pretty hard to rebuild those things on the fly.
For example, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have these databases that they have maintained and that scientists around the world use. Some of the people I spoke to in Europe said, ‘Look, if we’re only going to spend 100 million euros, it would be much smarter to secure these databases.’ It’s not just that the United States has been a center in terms of people coming together and pushing science forward; it’s also been the data library for scientists everywhere. Think of all the health data that USAID has been financing around the world. It’s gone. Universities and researchers say that what’s at stake are not just individual jobs, but the greater research ecosystem.
Science
A lot of scientists said to me that they’re seeing the possibility of America tumbling from this position of scientific supremacy as Germany did under Hitler. What happened to Germany in the 1930s was not something anybody saw coming. All of a sudden, in a historical blink of an eye, the whole picture changed.The United States took over as the scientific superpower, using a lot of German scientists and a lot of German concepts and ideas. The question today is: is that happening again? And if so, who will take the lead? Could it be Europe? Could it be China? It’s hard to imagine somebody graduating with a physics degree from the University of Utah and then moving right to Beijing and continuing as before, raising kids in the suburbs, right? But one thing to keep in mind is that the smartest people in the world are also the least limited in their mobility. Scientists are wanted everywhere. They’re the ones who will fly free. Where they’ll land I’m not sure, but you just cannot keep them if they don’t want to be there. They’re too smart and too mobile.
Students at Cornell University had gathered on Thursday for an evening of debate over the war in Gaza and the long-running conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The debate rapidly escalated after the event, during a walk with the university president to the parking lot.
As students posed critical questions and surrounded his car, the university’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, said that the students banged on his vehicle when he tried to drive away, an accusation they deny and that video provided by the students does not show.
The confrontation on the Ithaca, N.Y., campus was a reminder of the lingering tensions over the war between Israel and Hamas and how universities responded to student protests, even as on-campus demonstrations have largely subsided.
The evening had been billed as a civil dialogue between supporters of Israel and backers of the Palestinian cause.
As night fell and the debate ended, Dr. Kotlikoff, who had spoken at the event, walked to his vehicle, a black Cadillac SUV. The video shows it slowly reversing, as a handful of students stand behind and around the vehicle recording the incident. The car stops in front of one student, brushing him. It then accelerates and bumps into the student, causing him to stumble.
A second student screamed that the car had run over his foot, though video does not show a clear angle of that happening.
“You’re running a student over? Am I allowed to stand here?” Hudson Athas, 21, the student who was bumped, said before the car lurched.
Dr. Kotlikoff continued backing up and left the parking lot. Emergency medical technicians arrived and checked the foot of the second student, Aiden Vallecillo, a 22-year-old senior, who was not seriously injured.
The students’ campus organization, Students for a Democratic Cornell, described Dr. Kotlikoff’s behavior as “reckless.” In a statement released by the university, Dr. Kotlikoff described himself as the victim of the incident, saying he had experienced “harassment and intimidation” that was aimed at “silencing speech.”
Dr. Kotlikoff said that he had been followed to his car by a group of students who were “loudly shouting questions” at him. In his telling, the students had been “banging on the windows” of his car and blocked his exit. The video does not show the students hitting his car.
The students who confronted Dr. Kotlikoff on Thursday said they were objecting to the suspension of student demonstrators and measures that they said stifle free speech on campus. Those include restrictions on protest, as part of the school’s “expressive activity policy,” which was adopted in March 2025.
It was not their intention to block his car, they said.
Dr. Kotlikoff said that he waited to back out until he saw space behind his car and was able to “slowly maneuver my car from the parking space.”
Like many universities in the United States, Cornell erupted with student protests in the spring of 2024 over the Israel-Hamas war. And since October 2023, when that war began, the university has issued more than 80 disciplinary actions, including suspensions, against students that it says have infringed on “the rights of others.”
The suspended students include the leader of the campus encampments movement, Momodou Taal, a Ph.D. student in Africana studies whom the Trump administration sought to deport. Immigration officials had taken similar action against students at other universities whom they had accused of antisemitism.
Mr. Taal and other Cornell students shut down a campus career fair in 2024 that included weapons manufacturers. Facing removal by immigration authorities, Mr. Taal left the United States last year.
The school says that its policies surrounding demonstrations was enacted to combat “harassment, intimidation, shutting down events and threats of violence.”
Dr. Kotlikoff, who is a veterinarian, was appointed president of Cornell in March 2025 after an eight-month interim appointment. He had been the university’s provost from 2015 to 2024.
Thursday’s roughly two-hour event was an installment in an ongoing Israel-Palestine debate series and began ordinarily enough, with Dr. Kotlikoff introducing the discussion, which featured Norman Finkelstein, an author and political scientist.
Dr. Finkelstein’s remarks centered around Israel’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel students also debated over the university’s policies on free speech and expression.
As he was leaving Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall, where the debate took place, Mr. Vallecillo and another student, Sophia Arnold, also a senior, asked Dr. Kotlikoff how the university could be reporting some students for misconduct while also deciding the outcome of the disciplinary actions against them.
In one of the videos that were provided to The New York Times by the students, Dr. Kotlikoff said that the university “has the responsibility and the accountability to make sure everyone in this community is protected.”
In an interview, Mr. Athas, who is a junior, said that Dr. Kotlikoff had not given him enough warning that he was backing up. He was unsatisfied with the president’s responses to their questions.
“We want to see the reversal of these draconian policies,” Mr. Athas said.
Stephanie Saul contributed reporting.
U.S.A. at 250
Yale’s Bicentennial Schlock collection offers a window into the star-spangled commercialism that swept the country 50 years ago.
The Beinecke Library at Yale is home to countless treasures, including a Gutenberg Bible, an original printing of the Declaration of Independence and hand-drawn maps from the Lewis and Clark expedition.
But on a recent afternoon, in the basement reading room, Joshua Cochran, the library’s curator of American history, reached into one of a dozen archival boxes loaded on a cart and carefully unwrapped a humbler item — a paper cup imprinted with the image of Paul Revere’s lantern.
Also in the boxes were sugar packets with presidential portraits, a Bicentennial burger wrapper and, taped to an index card, a withered “all-American novelty condom,” emblazoned with the slogan “One Time for Old Glory.”
And then there was a rumpled piece of plastic, which on closer inspection turned out to be a “Ben Franklin kite” stamped with the words of the Declaration.
“History is not just about presidents and kings and diplomats, but a lived daily experience for people,” Cochran said. “Looking at this collection, it really reminds you of the everydayness of history.”
The Bicentennial Schlock collection, totaling just over 100 artifacts, is one of Yale’s quirkier holdings. Assembled in 1976 by the historian Jesse Lemisch, it endures as a lively (if a bit grungy) testament to the star-spangled commercialism that swept across the country in the run-up to the 200th anniversary of American independence.
Today, it can be hard to grasp the scale of the swag. By the time the confetti stopped falling, according to one estimate, more than 25,000 items had been produced, from a limited-edition replica of George Washington’s sword to independence-themed toilet paper.
This being the 1970s, the commercialism prompted a countercultural pushback, along with charges that “Buy-centennial” huckersterism had sold out the true radical spirit of ’76.
“You know damn well that we’re going to be inundated for two years with an attempt to sell a plastic image of America to sell cars and cornflakes,” the activist Jeremy Rifkin, a founder of the People’s Bicentennial Commission, an anti-corporate group, told The New York Times in 1974. “To me that’s treason.”
Lemisch, as a lifelong man of the left, was politically sympathetic. But as both a scholar and a self-described “terminal Bicentennial freak,” he also saw an opportunity.
“How many of us,” he wrote in The New Republic in 1976, “are lucky enough to see the central passion of our creative lives translated into the Disney version, and for sale, in this translation, in every supermarket?”
Lemisch, who died in 2018, was not the only one cataloging the goofier manifestations of the Bicentennial. The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich., has a trove of memorabilia, including a can of “Bicentennial air.” And the University of Central Florida has a “Bicentennial Junk” collection. But Lemisch’s comes with an intellectual pedigree forged in the history wars of the ’60s and ’70s.
Lemisch, who got his doctorate from Yale in 1963, was part of a generation of social historians who challenged both the conservative bent of scholarship on early America and what they saw as the historical profession’s complacent, complicit relationship with American power.
In his influential 1967 essay “The American Revolution Seen From the Bottom Up,” he argued that the Revolution wasn’t just a top-down affair but also a genuinely democratic uprising driven by the aspirations of the artisan and working classes, which were ultimately thwarted by wealthy elites.
He also pushed for democratization of the archival record. In a 1971 essay called “The American Revolution Bicentennial and the Papers of Great White Men,” Lemisch lamented that the ambitious and well-funded scholarly editing projects undertaken for the anniversary neglected rabble-rousers like Thomas Paine and Sam Adams, to say nothing of women, Black Americans and Native Americans.
Those projects, he argued, reflected the “arrogant nationalism and elitism” of the 1950s that historians, like the nation itself, were already leaving behind.
The schlock collection had its origins in an undergraduate class Lemisch taught at the State University of New York, Buffalo, in the spring of 1976. The course included scholarly reading, but Lemisch also instructed the students to gather as much Bicentennial junk as they could find.
“We owe it to Those Who Will Come After Us to preserve and interpret these priceless relics,” he wrote in his syllabus. “Let us fill a time capsule with a deeply embarrassing heritage for 2076.”
Forget the quality commemorative items from the Franklin Mint and Colonial Williamsburg. He wanted “real schlock, available schlock, cheap schlock,” ideally costing less than a dollar. And it needed to be properly documented.
“Please,” he wrote, “do not bury me in unannotated schlock!”
Lemisch and his students organized a museum-style exhibition in Buffalo in October 1976. As news stories about this unlikely “Schlock Czar” spread, he started getting fan letters from people across the country, along with additional specimens.
A woman from Brooklyn sent “a piece of Bicentennial Patriotism good enough to eat.” A woman from Muncie, Ind., contributed stars-and-stripes paper surgical caps worn, to her surprise, by the team that had recently operated on her.
Two correspondents sent Lemisch the identical sanitary disposal bags, printed with the Liberty Bell, that had suddenly appeared in the women’s bathroom in their campus library.
“Although the Bicentennial has passed, I can still remember my amazement at being confronted with ‘200 Years of Freedom’ upon entering the toilet,” a student at Rutgers wrote.
At first Lemisch reveled in the public interest. But the attention — someone in San Jose, Calif., he claimed, had even named an omelet after him — left him feeling ambivalent.
“By the time I cut off the interviews,” he wrote in The New Republic that November, “I had become Bicentennial Schlock.”
Still, he staged a revival of the exhibition in New York City in August 1977, at the headquarters of a union. In 1981, he donated the collection to Yale.
“I believe that future researchers will find the material a distinctive collection for reconstructing Americans’ views of the past in 1976,” he wrote at the time.
Since then, Cochran said, it has seen use by classes and researchers. And an Uncle Sam Pez dispenser is currently on view in the Beinecke’s new exhibition, “Unfurling the Flag: Reflections on Patriotism,” alongside non-schlock like Yale’s first printing of the Declaration and a typescript draft of Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again.”
“We want to prompt people to think about where their ideas about patriotism come from,” Cochran said. “The Bicentennial was a formative moment for a lot of people, when the iconography was inescapable.”
Today, you can find the same Pez dispenser on eBay, along with tens of thousands of Bicentennial listings running heavily to coins, stamps, plates and ersatz Paul Revere pewter. But Lemisch’s collection includes many items so lowly — wet wipes, dry-cleaning bags, plastic straws in patriotic sleeves — that they may survive nowhere else.
Patriotic Dixie cups and cereal boxes might seem to epitomize the kind of populist “history from below” that Lemisch championed. But he saw things differently.
Bicentennial schlock, Lemisch wrote in The New Republic, had “floated down from above, and responded to no popular longing to celebrate the Bicentennial.” It was “the Watergate of patriotism” — a “healthy demystification” that made Americans “wisely cynical” about the official history they were peddled.
“Since Schlock was the Bicentennial’s most pervasive manifestation and perhaps its most enduring heritage,” he wrote, “it almost seems, emotionally speaking, as if there was no Bicentennial at all.”
Today, historians take a more sanguine view. For all its tensions and contradictions, they argue, the Bicentennial added up a powerful cultural moment. It spawned both new scholarship and a boom in popular history, powered by a more emotional, personal way of relating to the past. And Lemisch’s deadpan museum — along with the delighted public response to it — was very much a part of it.
And this year’s Semiquincentennial? Then, as now, there has been debate over its focus and political meaning, which has intensified as President Trump has moved to put his own stamp on the anniversary. And while there are plenty of exhibitions and events on tap across the country, there has been much less investment and enthusiasm overall.
Which isn’t to say there is no merch. The websites for both America250, the nonpartisan federal planning group created by Congress in 2016, and Freedom 250, an alternate effort backed by President Trump, offer tasteful hats, mugs, playing cards and pickleball paddles. But so far, unapologetic 1976-style schlock appears thin on the ground.
You could chalk the schlock gap up to shifts in consumer culture, growing political polarization or the fact that schlock — or slop? — has moved online. But even back in 1976, Professor Lemisch struggled to draw definitive conclusions.
“What does Bicentennial Schlock mean?” he wrote. “I don’t exactly know. I find that deeply embarrassing.”
“More research,” he added, “is needed.”
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