Trump Is Suppressing Campus Speech. Harvard’s Response Is Shameful.

From New York to just down the street in Somerville, the Trump administration has been cracking down on universities and international students’ freedom of speech.

In its apparent crusade to punish speech with which it disagrees, the Trump administration is eager to seemingly ignore the rule of law, the Constitution, and other values we claim to hold dear in this country. Paired with these oppressive actions is oppressive rhetoric that conflates legitimate speech with terrorism, thereby offering a disingenuous justification for their authoritarian actions.

In the face of this trend of shameless and violent intrusion onto campuses under dubious pretenses, Harvard’s lackluster response should be worrying — particularly the limited support it has provided to international students and faculty, who have been the focus of recent attacks.

The Trump administration’s pattern of oppression, beginning with promises to deport international students who protested against Israel while labeling them “Hamas sympathizers” and “pro-jihadist,” predictably spiraled from violent rhetoric to action.

Mahmoud Khalil, for example, is a green card holder — otherwise known as a lawful permanent resident — who has been detained, apparently for pro-Palestine organizing at Columbia University. The Trump administration has linked his actions, which ought to be defended by the First Amendment, to terrorism, claiming he poses a threat to American foreign policy.

One doesn’t even need to organize pro-Palestinian protests to become a target; simply attending one is enough to merit condemnation and threatened deportation, as the case of Yunseo Chung makes clear.

Most egregiously, merely publishing a pro-Palestine opinion piece — as many editors of this very paper have — can apparently result in being snatched off the streets and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for supposedly supporting terrorism like Rumeysa Ozturk, another permanent resident of the U.S.

What we see in these cases, along with the numerous others occurring with frightening frequency, is the Trump administration rhetorically associating seemingly constitutional acts of speech and protest with crime and terrorism. With this crackdown, free speech culture on campuses has become something criminal to expel from our country without hesitation.

Ironically, Trump does not genuinely seem to care about the risk of domestic terrorism. His actions actually indicate the exact opposite, as he recently cut funding to a national database tracking domestic terrorism, school shootings, and hate crimes and famously offered sweeping pardons for January 6 rioters.

Instead, the Trump administration is developing a framework for crushing and criminalizing free speech that opposes their goals. This project, which began from day one with its focus on pro-Palestine protests, could very easily spiral to include any dissent whatsoever.

Disappointingly, Harvard’s response to these attacks has been lackluster.

Harvard administrators’ intransparency and hostility to student protests following the Spring pro-Palestine encampment as well as Harvard’s more recent capitulation to external actors provided grim foreshadowing, revealing that Harvard is willing to kneel to power at the expense of its students and faculty.

This academic year, Harvard’s administration has provided weak support for international students, beginning with an initially restrictive winter housing policy followed by their recent relative silence and inaction regarding the very real threat to international students on our campus.

And in the past week, it has been University faculty — not the University itself — leading the legal charge against the Trump administration.

All Harvard has to show for itself is an email from Dean of Students Thomas G. Dunne containing a few resources for international students. This outreach is valuable, but it was far too slow — Trump’s initial threats of deportation of students came months ago.

Furthermore, it avoids calling these actions what they are: attacks against free speech. Hence, while this is a good first step for Harvard, it cannot be the last — the Trump administration is certainly not finished with their crusade against students’ rights, so Harvard must continue to defend them.

Even if we give the administration the benefit of the doubt and assume they are doing more behind the scenes, this approach is just not enough: Students are being hurt, threatened, and snatched off the street in real time as our administrators — whose primary responsibility should be defending the wellbeing of students — stay silent, leaving students to feel that they must fend for themselves.

Those who argue that acquiescence and silence is the best policy need look no further than Columbia, whose students and funding have been attacked despite their submission to right-wing pressure. Harvard appears to be on a similar trajectory — the Trump administration announced on Monday that it will review billions of dollars of Harvard’s federal funding.

This is a clear escalation of its attack on pro-Palestine speech on campus. Harvard must not yield in the face of this right-wing pressure. The conciliatory approach of Harvard President Alan M. Garber’s email regarding funding review misses the mark by treating the review as being pursued in good faith, ignoring the obvious insidious and chilling intention of the campaign developing under the guise of preventing antisemitism.

Others have called on Harvard to take more action to respond to the Trump administration. In addition to that, Harvard must recognize that while Trump might appear irrational, his administration’s approach is dangerously calculated: There is an unmistakable trend in developing a system for silencing free speech that will endanger expression far beyond the issue of Palestine.

These are messy times, and it is understandable that administrators might not immediately discern the correct course of action. But as the Trump administration trends towards violence, bigotry, and the condemnation of free speech as criminal, the University cannot continue with inaction and intransparency.

Harvard must stand up to prevent its community and other universities from falling. To do anything else is to sacrifice the values and mission it has fiercely defended since its founding. To do anything else is to stand by and let Veritas rot, waiting on others to defend it.

Layla L. Hijjawi ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Quincy House.