In Trump’s Orders, Harvard’s Most International School Sees a Crisis

At the Harvard Kennedy School, the Trump administration’s attempt to revoke Harvard’s eligibility to enroll international students — temporarily blocked in court — could eliminate nearly 60 percent of the student body.

HKS is Harvard’s most international school, and the proportion of international students there has grown over recent years, reaching a record high of 59 percent in 2024. The announcement that international students might have to transfer or face deportation sent shockwaves across the Kennedy School — as students feared being displaced and faculty worried that the Kennedy School’s identity as a global center for public policy scholarship could hang in the balance.

It’s “like the worst fear that international students had has suddenly become true,” said Magdalena Larreboure Donoso, a Chilean Ph.D. student studying environmental politics at HKS.

When Larreboure was admitted to the Kennedy School, she said, “I called my dad immediately, and then, like six minutes later, probably all of Chile knew that I got into Harvard.”

Now, she faces complete uncertainty over whether she’ll be able to continue her studies in the United States at all.

“There’s not much that we can do right now. There’s no planning that we can do to try to fend for ourselves,” Larreboure said. “This is something that will happen to the whole of Harvard or to no one.”

The mood at the Kennedy School is “pretty cataclysmic,” said Daniel I. Mellow, Laurreboure’s partner, who is studying for his master’s in public administration in international development at HKS.

After Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced on Thursday that the administration had revoked Harvard’s Student Exchange and Visitor Program certification, which allows it to enroll international students, Harvard swiftly sued to block the order. A federal judge granted a temporary restraining order within hours.

On Friday, shortly after Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 announced the University’s lawsuit in an email to affiliates, HKS Dean Jeremy M. Weinstein wrote a message to the school condemning the termination as “unlawful and wrong” and supporting international students.

“The perspectives and experiences that each of you bring to campus enrich our learning, sharpen our research, and increase our impact,” Weinstein wrote. “You are at the heart of HKS, and an essential part of our identity and intellectual community.”

Large swaths of HKS’ curriculum are dedicated to teaching students who are already public officials or policymakers — many of whom hail from outside the United States.

The Kennedy School’s mid-career master’s in public administration degree offers a specialized fellowship program for leaders in developing or transitional countries. International students make up 87 percent of enrollees in the Kennedy School’s MPA in international development degree, which trains students to craft social and economic policy for low-income areas and countries. And Belgium’s future queen, Princess Elisabeth, is a public policy student at HKS.

Mellow is one of the few U.S. citizens in the international development MPA program.

“Our program can’t exist under any recognizable form without the international students,” he said. “It’s a huge benefit for me as an American student to be around these people who I know are very soon going to be, like, the finance minister of Ethiopia or the environment minister of Peru.”

At a school dedicated to studying public policy and solving global problems, HKS Economics professor Jason Furman ’92 said international students are “absolutely central” – especially in the classroom. He teaches an international economics class where he said the majority of his students come from abroad.

“The Americans would learn less well without international students along for the ride,” Furman said.

HKS professor Archon Fung, the director of the Ash Center for Innovation and Democratic Governance, said the Ash Center depends on the insights of scholars from other countries — including authoritarian regimes and weaker democracies — to achieve their mission of finding ways “to make democracy stronger and deeper and more resilient.”

HKS Professor Cornell William Brooks, a former president of the NAACP, said that SEVP removal would affect the learning of both international and domestic students by depriving his class of a global frame of reference. In his course on social justice, civil rights, and criminal justice reform, he said, he values being able to teach an international audience.

If Brooks teaches about the Holocaust and Germany’s reparations program, he said, students from Germany won’t be in the class anymore — nor will Jewish students who are Israeli. International students would not be present to learn about the global flow of ideas behind historical atrocities — like how the Nazis and South Africa’s apartheid regime both studied American Jim Crow laws to sculpt programs of persecution in their own countries.

“The vacuum extraction of international students from the Kennedy School via this autocratic power grab represents an intellectual diminishment of the Kennedy School, the intellectual diminishment of Harvard,” Brooks said.

Some professors have met with international students to support them as Harvard’s campus has been rocked by uncertainty and fear.

“We’re trying very, very hard to have community conversations, to try to understand what this deeply uncertain and rapidly changing situation is like,” Fung said.

Brooks said professors have been facing existential questions about their school’s mission and future.

“We’re talking about, ‘How do we continue to do our work?’” he said. “How do we continue to be the Kennedy School we think we are called to be?”

“We’re regarded, I think, as one the best, if not the best, policy school in the world,” Brooks said. “Well, that presumes having the world within the policy school.”

—Staff writer Tanya J. Vidhun can be reached at tanya.vidhun@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @tanyavidhun.