So the Division of Homeland Safety announced right now. A number of tentative ideas; if it seems that I’ve erred in my understanding of the details or of this system, I will replace them as vital:
[1.] Unsurprisingly, pupil and alternate customer visas are issued solely to individuals who can present that they are surely college students and alternate 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 Student and Exchange Visitor Program.
[2.] Equally unsurprisingly, establishments have to supply various information 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 lead to SEVP termination….
Harvard College overtly refused to supply the required info requested and ignored a observe up request from the Division’s Workplace of Normal Council. Secretary Noem is following via on her promise to guard college students and prohibit terrorist sympathizers from receiving advantages from the U.S. authorities.
I can not communicate to what Harvard’s alleged failures had been, or whether or not they’re adequate beneath the statute to justify decertifying it.
[3.] On the similar time, as with different broadly obtainable advantages, the federal government usually cannot deny them based mostly on the viewpoints that Harvard expresses, declines to express, or tolerates and indirectly supports. And the letter means that the federal government’s actions stem at the very least partly from such viewpoints. Think about, as an example, the checklist of “Info about Harvard’s poisonous campus local weather”:
- A joint-government process pressure found that Harvard has did not confront pervasive race discrimination and anti-Semitic harassment plaguing its campus.
- Jewish college students on campus had been topic to pervasive insults, bodily assault, and intimidation, with no meaningful response from Harvard’s leadership.
- A protester charged for his function within the assault of a Jewish pupil on campus was chosen by the Harvard Divinity Faculty to be the Class Marshal for commencement.
- Harvard’s own 2025 internal study on anti-Semitism revealed that just about 60% of Jewish college students reported experiencing “discrimination, stereotyping, or damaging bias on campus because of [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 advised the coed 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 recognized 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 be expression, even when the particular person chosen is being charged for assault—simply as, as an example, an anti-abortion establishment could be exercising its First Modification rights by honoring somebody who was accused of punching an abortion clinic worker. Folks could effectively 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, however it appears to me that the focusing 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 possible with a request for a preliminary injunction. The court docket will at that time presumably have extra details on what precisely Harvard allegedly did mistaken, and why the Administration really focused Harvard; I look ahead to seeing what’s disclosed in that course of.
