Putting Pressure on Higher Education: Defunding and Deporting
by Russell A. Berman
A version of this article originally appeared in Die Welt on April 4, 2025. It is published here by permission.
Nearly simultaneously with the Hamas attacks on Israel of October 7, 2023, a coordinated program of vicious activism spread across American universities. Denunciations of Israel went hand in hand with harassment of Jewish students. University property was destroyed, barricades were built to limit access to campus facilities, and buildings were occupied and vandalized. Slogans expressing solidarity with the war dead in Gaza were quickly overshadowed by giddy celebrations of Hamas, whose flag and headbands became ubiquitous. Moderate students who might empathize with a two-state solution were pressured into endorsing a globalized intifada—a term that means carrying terrorism and random killing into the heart of America. Bring October 7 to Harvard and Berkeley. “Free Palestine” turned into “Death to America” and “Kill the Cops.” We were not facing a Habermasian “reasoning public sphere” engaged in liberal political discussion and the free expression of opinion. Far from it. This was organized violence, destructive chaos, and hatred.
Nor was this an accident. Commenting on the deteriorating situation on the campuses, the Director of National Intelligence—in the Biden administration—Avril Haines pointed to the role that foreign powers, notably Iran, were playing in inciting the violence: “In recent weeks, Iranian government actors have sought to opportunistically take advantage of ongoing protests regarding the war in Gaza, using a playbook we’ve seen other actors use over the years. We have observed actors tied to Iran’s government posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters.”1 The same Iran that had attempted assassinations of Iranian dissidents in the United States—reminiscent of the Mykonos killings in Berlin in 1992—was also planning to kill President Trump himself. And it was this Iran that acted as a prime mover behind the campus chaos. That national security concern is certainly reason enough for the federal government to become involved in the universities, but there are two more. The systematic attacks on Jewish students and the failure of university administrators to defend them represent a breach of the obligation to protect civil rights. In addition, the entrenched ideologized swamp at the universities has included extensive advocacy for Hamas, clearly an illegal act of support for an officially designated terrorist organization.
In many cases—but not all—university leaders failed to address the glaring problems. A kind interpretation of this failure of leadership is that typical administrators are just not equal to the challenge. Perhaps some, in the manner of naive liberals, preferred to regard criminal activity as freedom of expression, as if persecuting a minority or celebrating terrorists were just allowable opinions, indistinguishable from others in an age of cultural relativism. These are the administrators who have no moral compass. A more pessimistic—and realistic—explanation is that there is sympathy for left-wing antisemitism throughout the academic bureaucracy.
Because the academic world could not act to correct these conditions, the Trump administration has had to step in. Of course, one would prefer it if society or the private sector would regulate itself, but the universities have failed in this task of self-administration. A long overdue correction is underway now. The federal government could not stand by in the face of these three disasters: the civil rights abuses inherent in the systematic antisemitism that has defined the protest movement, the celebration and support for the Hamas terrorists, and the intentional subversion of American institutions by the Iranian enemy.
The Trump administration has begun to pursue a two-pronged strategy in order to force needed reforms in the universities: one prong directed at the institutions, the other at the activists themselves. As far as the institutions are concerned, it is important to understand how much all universities, including private ones, are dependent on financial support from the federal government. This support primarily involves funding for research projects in the sciences and medicine. By suspending this funding, the government is putting enormous pressure on universities, demanding that they fix the problems before the funds are released. This strategy has incited an important intra-university conflict among different sectors. Withholding funding hurts the various natural sciences fields and medicine, but it is no secret that it has been the humanities that have been highly ideologized and “woke.” It is there that aggressive activism and racial obsession have been nurtured. It is the humanists who have given antisemitism and terrorism an intellectual veneer. It is the humanists who have trampled on ethical sensibility by teaching the activists that the end justifies the means. If the universities want to regain their federal funding to continue their genuinely important research in the natural sciences, they will have to fix their humanities problem.
Universities will also have to begin to uphold their own disciplinary policies against disruptions. All the institutions ravaged by protests had sets of rules, but most failed to enforce them. If the universities had adhered to their existing policies, the situation might not have gotten out of hand. This failure of the administrators allowed the protests to metastasize, which in turn opened the door for government pressure.
At the same time, the government is also going after activists directly. At stake are not alleged criminal activities but instead violations of immigration regulations: the targets are therefore international students on student visas. According to Secretary of State Rubio, approximately three hundred student visas have been canceled because of activism inconsistent with existing code. The number may be higher by now. Who has this affected? Only a few names are known at this point; some former students have chosen to leave the country, while others are being held in detention awaiting hearings, as their lawyers challenge their arrest. The details in each case will be important, including the specific proof that the government can present to show what each student did. Yet because these are immigration administrative deliberations, not criminal proceedings, the burden of proof is low.
However, the principle matters. Defenders of the activists claim that they have a right to free speech that has been curtailed. In contrast Secretary Rubio has countered that any applicant for a student visa who arrives at an American consulate and announces support for Hamas or another terrorist organization would be promptly turned down; and therefore an international student already in the United States who begins to support Hamas or engage in violent demonstrations should have the visa withdrawn. The U.S. government is not obligated to provide student visas to individuals who call for “death to America.” As the famous Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson reportedly declared decades ago, “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” Nor is the American government obligated to welcome foreign proponents of Jew-hatred or any other racism. Importing antisemitism is not productive for liberal democracies (a lesson that Germany should have learned, at the latest in the Dokumenta catastrophe). The pressure that the Trump administration is putting on the universities may restore them to their appropriate role as sites of learning and not of mob violence.
Topics: Israel Initiative
Russell A. Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he directs the Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World. He previously served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the United States Department of State and as a Commissioner on the Commission on Unalienable Rights. He is currently a member of the National Humanities Council. He is the Editor Emeritus of Telos and President of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.
“Statement from Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines on Recent Iranian Influence Efforts,” Office of the Director of National Intelligence, News Release no. 17-24, July 9, 2024.