Attention to the Unseen

Sarah Viren writes: In January 2024, Maura Finkelstein finished teaching her first classes of the semester, unaware they would be her last as a professor. This was on a Wednesday at Muhlenberg College, a campus stippled with red doors meant to represent both hospitality and the college’s Lutheran roots. As Finkelstein prepared to go home, she noticed a text from someone claiming to be the college’s provost, Laura Furge. “I had just done the online phishing training,” she told me…

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The Guardian reports: The University of Michigan is using private, undercover investigators to surveil pro-Palestinian campus groups, including trailing them on and off campus, furtively recording them and eavesdropping on their conversations, the Guardian has learned. The surveillance appears to largely be an intimidation tactic, five students who have been followed, recorded or eavesdropped on said. The undercover investigators have cursed at students, threatened them and in one case drove a car at a student who had to jump out…

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CNN reports: College and university leaders have been privately negotiating with a deputy to top Trump aide Stephen Miller in hopes of avoiding the same aggressive targeting of Harvard University, a person familiar with the matter said, as the administration looks to escalate its attacks on the Ivy League institution and other schools. The higher education leaders, who have had granular conversations with senior White House policy strategist May Mailman in recent weeks, are asking what signals they need to…

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Adam Serwer writes: The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall. Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and…

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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…

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A lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal, in response to the Trump regime’s attempt to destroy Harvard University by excluding foreign students, says: Non-citizens accounted for more than half of doctoral degrees in AI-related fields in 2022. Many have gone to work at U.S. companies like Nvidia or started their own. The National Foundation for American Policy finds that “immigrants have founded or cofounded nearly two-thirds (65% or 28 of 43) of the top AI companies in the United…

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In April, the New York Times reported: Xiaofeng Wan, a former admissions officer at Amherst College, now works as a private consultant to international students who want to come to the United States. This week, as he held meetings in China with prospective students, he sensed a deep uncertainty among their parents. “They really don’t know whether they should send their children to a country where they don’t welcome Chinese students or they see China as a hostile competitor,” Dr….

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The New York Times reports: The Trump administration on Thursday halted Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, taking aim at a crucial funding source for the nation’s oldest and wealthiest college in a major escalation in the administration’s efforts to pressure the elite school to fall in line with the president’s agenda. The administration notified Harvard about the decision after a back-and-forth in recent days over the legality of a sprawling records request as part of the Department of…

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