Round-up: Trump v. Harvard. Your Honour, you’re under arrest. U.S. troops out of South Korea? And more.

Analysis of the week's events

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Trump v. Harvard

Harvard is not just a university but also a symbol. Of educational excellence. Of globalization. Of government-academic collaboration on important research. And of what some see as a snobby, snooty elite.

I spent a year working at Harvard and I saw evidence of all of these things. The culture warriors who make up the Trump administration see them too, and they’ve decided that Harvard represents pretty much everything that they stand against. And they’ve set out to destroy it.

Earlier this year, Trump demanded that Harvard effectively give up its independence. The demands that the administration put forward included giving the government a role in deciding who could study at Harvard and who would be hired there. They would also allow the government to “audit” the viewpoints of the faculty, effectively allowing them to police speech at the university.

The excuse for these demands was an alleged crisis of antisemitism at Harvard and other elite universities. But the demands went way beyond combating that. It was particularly ironic that conservatives, who have spent years trying to pose as protectors of “freedom of speech”, would claim the right to dictate what sort of speech was or was not allowed at Harvard.

Harvard defiantly refused to bow to these demands, leading the administration to cancel a slew of massive federal grants for various research projects at the university. Now it’s gone even further.

In an extraordinary move, yesterday the Trump administration announced that it would revoke Harvard’s right to admit foreign students. This is a massive blow to the bottom line of the university. About a quarter of its student body is from abroad, and they typically pay extremely high fees for the privilege of attending.

The administration is able to do this because in order to study at Harvard, those students need visas - something that the federal government has to grant or deny. By simply cutting off the visas, the government can do enormous damage.

More broadly, this is an example of the Trump administration weaponizing banal tools of the federal government in extraordinary ways. Since World War II, many U.S. universities have grown close to the government, relying on funding streams from Washington and making the fruits of their research available to the state (often, the military). This is what made so many vulnerable to the cut-off of grants. You can argue that this over-reliance on the federal government was a risky and ethically dicey move that many universities should have avoided.

But visas are an even more basic, neutral tool of governance - the sort of thing that is just supposed to happen, albeit according to certain rules. To turn them into a weapon in such a brazen way is a sign of how little is sacred in U.S. politics anymore - how Republicans will use every tool available to try to beat down their enemies. And to see one of the educational jewels of the world assaulted by an administration made up of vaccine and climate denialists is, to put it mildly, tough to endure.

The good news for Harvard is that the administration’s move is highly likely to be illegal, as are the demands it made of the university in the first place. A court, hopefully, will put a stop to this - although whether the administration will go along with the court order or not remains to be seen.

Frankly, the brazen illegality only makes the move even more senseless - it’s just culture war fodder for Trump’s base. But so much real damage is being done along the way.

Mr. Mayor and Your Honour, you’re under arrest

One of the most disturbing sub-plots of the Trump administration so far - and another example of the brazen weaponization of federal power - has been its arrest of government officials. The administration has arrested a state judge in Wisconsin, Hannah Dugan, and the mayor of the city of Newark. It has also charged a Democratic Congresswoman, LaMonica McIver, with two counts of assault for trying to stop agents arresting the mayor, Ras Baraka, also a Democrat (obviously).

There is little parallel to this in American history. Lawmakers and judges have broad immunity for anything done in carrying out their duties, and traditionally prosecutors have interpreted this very liberally. They represent other branches of the U.S. government - the legislature and the judiciary - with their own constitutional responsibilities and duties. Those duties include protecting the constitution against a would-be tyrant arising in the executive branch. No wonder, then, that Trump wants to put them in their place.