Welcome back to After the First 100 Days, Inside Higher Ed’s weekly roundup of news from the Hill to the Oval Office. I’m your host, Katherine Knott, IHE’s news editor, who loves a short week after a holiday.
It’s Day 130 of the second Trump administration, and Harvard University can still enroll international students, thanks to a court order handed down last week and extended Thursday. But President Donald Trump thinks the university should have to cap its international student enrollment at 15 percent. (About 27 percent of Harvard’s students are non-Americans.) He’s also pledged that Harvard will lose. Or rather, get “their ass kicked.”
But let’s talk about the Fulbright scholarship. Our Liam Knox reported this week that the Trump administration intervened in the selection of scholarship recipients, adding a new final review stage and rejecting finalists whose research deals with race, gender or climate change. The unprecedented intervention has angered Fulbright advisers and led to whiplash, confusion and frustration for would-be Fulbrighters. And as a result, fewer people received the prestigious scholarship.
“There did not used to be this kind of partisan layer to the process, and I’m deeply worried about knowledge generation in these fields,” said Christopher Martel, an education professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. “These things have ripple effects, and I think the intent here is probably to silence research in certain areas.”
In Other News: The administration is continuing its crackdown on international students at institutions not at Harvard. Earlier this week, the State Department paused all student visa interviews as it prepares for a new policy to vet applicants’ social media. Then Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration will begin revoking Chinese students’ visas. That’s a deeply concerning move to some experts—Chinese students make up a quarter of the 1.1 million international students in the U.S.
On Tap for Next Week:
- Education Secretary Linda McMahon will be on the Hill for two hearings. On Tuesday, June 3, she’ll testify before a Senate appropriations subcommittee, and then on Wednesday, she’ll head to the House Education and Workforce Committee.
- On Thursday, the Senate HELP committee will vote on more nominations for key posts at the Education Department, such as the head of the Office for Civil Rights.
That’s it for Week 19. We’re heading into the summer and planning some fun stories for you. What else do you want to know more about? Let me know at katherine.knott@insidehighered.com. (And thanks to those who wrote in last week.)
As always, if news breaks this afternoon or over the weekend, you can find the latest at InsideHigherEd.com. In the meantime, I’ll be visiting the baby elephant at the St. Louis Zoo. His name is Jet. Have a good weekend!
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