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The Department of Education announced it's frozen two billion dollars in
federal funding. It's considering a further 1 billion in cuts right now and
also another move by the Trump administration. In the past 48 hours it
blocked the University from enrolling foreign students and now Harvard says
it's suing for alleged government violation of the First Amendment right.
And in the past few minutes we're hearing that a judge has blocked the
ability of the US government to stop students being barred from coming to
university. Let's go to the US. Let's bring in Mike Gonzales, a Republican
education policy expert. Mike, it's great to talk to you on the program tonight.
Let me first get your reaction to the news from this court judgment.
Hi, thanks for having me on. Look, I think just Harvard failed to read the room.
It's been trying to doggedly fight as it sued the Trump administration, says he
has a right to get government money. Harvard gets close to half a billion
dollars a year from the taxpayer. It gets more from the taxpayer than it gets
from student tuition. It doesn't have a right to this, nor does it have a right
to admit foreign students. It happens to have 27% of its student body is made up
of foreign students. A lot of these, not all by any means, but a significant
percentage will be from mainland China, and they pay full tuition. So what
happens in the US, as opposed to here in Europe, I'm in Europe by the way,
is that tuition is very elevated. At Harvard it must be close to a
hundred thousand dollars a year. That's what it is at Columbia. I just put my
son through Columbia, I know it's very high. But only a certain number of
students pay that high tuition fee. The foreign students do, especially the ones
from the PRC, from mainland China. This will really hurt China, this will really
hurt Harvard where it really will feel it.
But that's not bad, I mean it's a good point in terms of something that's been
going on for years, that increasing amount of tuition fees, maybe about
five thousand every single year, and suddenly you've got a situation where,
let you say 90, nearly a hundred thousand a year per year, you're coming
out with a debt, if you're there for four years, it's Harvard or a big
university like Yale, up to 400,000. Now that clearly is an issue in
itself, but it's not the issue that the letter was about. That was about
anti-semitism, it was about the left sort of kind of giving a vision of policy
and of teaching that was not in line with how the Trump administration wanted
schools to be run. Now there's a temporary order now stopping this going
ahead. The US District Judge Alison Burroughs has said that at the moment,
a point that she's made, is to say without its international students,
Harvard is not Harvard, this has to be reconsidered. Give me your thoughts on
the restraining order right now, the fact that you've got legally a sense of
this is going too far. Well that has just happened, I haven't looked at it, I
got off a plane from Washington. But look, this is going to end up in the
Supreme Court. A lot of these, as you know, these nationwide injunctions, judges
making decisions that apply to the whole country and making decisions that really
lie not in the judiciary, but in the executive of the legislature, and that is
going to be now going to the Supreme Court and it's going to be decided once
and for all. You're absolutely right that what is at stake here is the
anti-Semitism, but also DEI. The Trump administration has issued several
executive orders and its Department of Education issued a dear colleague
letter to universities saying you must cease and desist using this diversity,
equity, and inclusion, which obviously sound very, these are good words, but the
left has twisted them into meaning the opposite. And the case the Trump
administration is making, and I agree with the Trump administration in this
case, is that the usage of DEI breaks the civil rights act injunction
against making decisions based on race. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act says
that if you take federal money and you're an educational institution, you
cannot make decisions based on race. DEI makes decisions based on race. Harvard
has said to the Trump administration, we're going to continue to
practice DEI. A whistleblower just came out, Omar Sultan Haq, and says
that Harvard is actually using race to still make admissions decisions
against what the Supreme Court said two years ago. So that is really what the
battle is. You've kind of got an unstoppable force. It's a privilege, and I
don't see how Alan Garber, the president of Harvard, is making this First
Amendment case on this. I just think he's going to lose on this. He could
win on other issues, but not on this one. And again, the Trump administration has
been very, very smart by going after Harvard on these foreign students,
because why? It's such a high percentage of the student body, and it represents
more than 27% of what it gets in tuition. It's going to represent maybe
close to 40% of what it gets in tuition. Mike, good to talk to you this evening.
Thank you. Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation and Republican Strategist on
Education. Thanks for your time. Thank you. Stay with us here on Worldview. We'll be in
Cannes in just a moment. I'm Nathalie Savarikas, France24's Athens correspondent.
I'll be bringing you the latest from Greece and Cyprus live here on news and
other TV programs. So join me here on France24. Nathalie Savarikas, one of the
200 France24 correspondents around the world.
On April 25th, 2015, a devastating earthquake struck Nepal. There were
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Every family lost at least one or two members, and some even five. Ten years
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