So the Division of Homeland Safety introduced in the present day. Just a few tentative ideas; if it seems that I’ve erred in my understanding of the info or of this system, I am going to replace them as needed:
[1.] Unsurprisingly, pupil and trade customer visas are issued solely to individuals who can present that they are surely college students and trade guests, and at acknowledged establishments that fulfill the visa program’s objectives. There are subsequently procedures each for certifying and decertifying instructional establishments as eligible for the Scholar and Change Customer Program.
[2.] Equally unsurprisingly, establishments have to supply varied info about college students and the scholars’ conduct. The DHS letter claims that:
On April 16, 2025, Secretary Noem demanded Harvard present details about the criminality and misconduct of overseas college students on its campus. Secretary Noem warned refusal to adjust to this lawful order would end in SEVP termination….
Harvard College overtly refused to supply the required info requested and ignored a comply with up request from the Division’s Workplace of Common Council. Secretary Noem is following by on her promise to guard college students and prohibit terrorist sympathizers from receiving advantages from the U.S. authorities.
I am unable to converse to what Harvard’s alleged failures have been, or whether or not they’re adequate beneath the statute to justify decertifying it.
[3.] On the identical time, as with different broadly accessible advantages, the federal government typically cannot deny them based mostly on the viewpoints that Harvard expresses, declines to precise, or tolerates and not directly helps. And the letter means that the federal government’s actions stem at the least partially from such viewpoints. Take into account, as an example, the checklist of “Information about Harvard’s poisonous campus local weather”:
- A joint-government process power discovered that Harvard has didn’t confront pervasive race discrimination and anti-Semitic harassment plaguing its campus.
- Jewish college students on campus have been topic to pervasive insults, bodily assault, and intimidation, with no significant response from Harvard’s management.
- A protester charged for his position within the assault of a Jewish pupil on campus was chosen by the Harvard Divinity Faculty to be the Class Marshal for graduation.
- Harvard’s personal 2025 inside examine on anti-Semitism revealed that nearly 60% of Jewish college students reported experiencing “discrimination, stereotyping, or detrimental bias on campus resulting from [their] views on present occasions.”
- In a single occasion, a Jewish pupil speaker at a convention had deliberate to inform the story of his Holocaust survivor grandfather discovering refuge in Israel. Organizers instructed the scholar the story was not “tasteful” and laughed at him when he expressed his confusion. They stated the story would have justified oppression.
- In the meantime, Professional-Hamas pupil teams that promoted antisemitism after the October 7 assaults remained acknowledged and funded.
A few of these behaviors are after all not protected by the First Modification (e.g., “bodily assault”). Alternatively, “selling antisemitism” and being “pro-Hamas” is protected by the First Modification. The identical is true of laughing at individuals who wish to inform tales about their Holocaust survivor relations is protected by the First Modification, as is excluding them from a a program (whether or not run by a pupil group or by the non-public college) until they alter their message.
Selecting somebody to honor as Class Marshal can also be expression, even when the particular person chosen is being charged for assault—simply as, as an example, an anti-abortion establishment can be exercising its First Modification rights by honoring somebody who was accused of punching an abortion clinic worker. Folks could properly condemn such expression, however I do not suppose the federal government can strip a college of participation in this system based mostly on such expression.
[4.] Extra broadly, even when the DHS hadn’t talked about the college’s or pupil teams’ constitutionally protected speech, and as a substitute targeted simply on nonspeech conduct, the federal government could not selectively implement even speech-neutral guidelines in ways in which intentionally goal folks or establishments based mostly on their constitutionally protected speech. (See, e.g., Hoye v. Metropolis of Oakland (ninth Cir. 2011), which held that the Metropolis’s viewpoint-discriminatory enforcement of an ordinance in a means that focused anti-abortion audio system violated the First Modification.) Maybe I am mistaken, nevertheless it appears to me that the concentrating on of Harvard right here has extra to do with Harvard’s ideological stances, together with its opposition to previous Administration calls for, than with an evenhanded, content-neutral enforcement of reporting necessities, antidiscrimination guidelines, and the like.
In any occasion, I hope Harvard fights this, fairly probably with a request for a preliminary injunction. The court docket will at that time presumably have extra info on what precisely Harvard allegedly did flawed, and why the Administration truly focused Harvard; I stay up for seeing what’s disclosed in that course of.
