Yascha Mounk writes:

The best way to understand Donald Trump’s administration, Ivan Krastev told me a month ago, is as a “revolutionary government in the form of an imperial court.” And the most important thing about revolutionary governments is that they quickly develop an unstoppable dynamic of their own, one in which the logic of events pushes its originators to ever more radical actions which they themselves might not have anticipated taking a few months or weeks ago. “You’re not running the revolution,” Krastev remarked with his inimitable lucidity, “the revolution is running you.”

In no field of public policy is this insight more applicable than in the administration’s attacks on some of the country’s—and the world’s—most eminent universities. Since taking office, Trump has targeted universities in a bewildering variety of ways: by cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation; by significantly reducing the percentage of federal grants which flows to universities, allowing them to maintain laboratories and other key research facilities; by attempting to deport international students who engaged in pro-Palestinian activism, irrespective of whether it was violent or peaceful; by threatening to increase taxes on returns from the endowments of “woke” universities; and by singling out particular institutions, including Columbia and Harvard, with threats that they would no longer be eligible for any federal funding at all.

Even among this litany of increasingly radical attacks on higher education, the Trump administration’s latest broadside against Harvard stands out for the extent of its cruelty. In a letter she promptly posted on X, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, informed Harvard that, “effective immediately,” she was revoking the institution’s ability to certify foreign students and visitors for visas. Unless courts intervene or the administration makes a U-turn, this will force the vast majority of Harvard’s 6,793 international students, over a quarter of its overall student body, to leave the university. Some might be able to transfer to other American institutions; most would in a matter of days or weeks have to abandon their studies and return to their countries of origin.

Trump’s action would deeply disrupt the lives and the careers of thousands of talented young people, the vast majority of whom have done absolutely nothing to provoke the administration’s ire against their institution. It would have a highly negative impact on important research happening across the university, with some leading labs in fields from medical research to quantum physics effectively ceasing to function. It would lastingly damage America’s hard-earned reputation as the world’s most coveted destination for ambitious researchers. In short, it would lead to the most remarkable—and the most distinguished—exodus of talented students in the history of American higher education. [Continue reading…]