JEFF CHILDERS

In related news yesterday, Reuters ran a story headlined, “Trump suspends entry of international students studying at Harvard.” Not only that, but according to a leaked cable “seen by Reuters,” the State Department ordered all its consular missions to enforce additional vetting of visa applicants looking to travel to Harvard for any reason.

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The President’s two-page order explained that Harvard had “demonstrated a history of concerning foreign ties and radicalism” and had “extensive entanglements with foreign adversaries,” including the Chinese Communist Party. You might expect Reuters to at least challenge that assertion, but no, it was the usual inglorious journalistic failure. The article didn’t dispute the core facts at all— which suggests something about how radioactive Harvard’s reputation has become.

Harvard, frantically trying to climb out of the PR crater in which it now finds itself, bravely called the ruling “yet another illegal retaliatory step taken by the Administration in violation of Harvard’s First Amendment rights.”

The suspension is only for six months —one admitting cycle— but can be extended for another six months. So. Your move, Harvard.

Trump’s latest chess move echoed the 1950s crackdown on institutions accused of harboring communist sympathies. Now, 75 years later, Harvard —once a Cold War stalwart— finds itself on the receiving end— accused of seditious foreign entanglements, not Soviet this time, but Sino-Communist. This is McCarthyism in reverse: not blacklisting professors, but putting elite institutions themselves on the no-fly list.

During World War II, FDR restricted the entry of German nationals amidst concerns about subversion and sabotage. Harvard, with its “radical foreign entanglements,” is now being treated as a national security vulnerability on par with enemy nations. In other words, Harvard is a non-state actor with state-sized influence, finally recognized as such.

Rogue judges will do what they do, but Harvard will almost certainly lose this cage match. Immigration and visa policy fall squarely under the executive branch’s Article II powers, especially when framed as a national security measure. Plus, this time, the Trump Administration holds the 2018 Supreme Court decision like a battlefield map.

Harvard can cry all it wants about the First Amendment and retaliation, but foreign nationals have no constitutional right to enter the U.S., and institutions like Harvard have no constitutional right to demand visas be granted to their applicants. Courts have explicitly ruled this. Not only that, but Harvard is deep underwater right now in the public’s jaded eye: antisemitism scandals, imploding diversity deans, corpse controversies, plagiarism problems, lying ethics professors, remedial math classes, Chinese cash pipelines, and widespread mockery over grade inflation and ideological monoculture.

But wait, there was more.

? Accreditation dies in darkness. Yesterday, the Washington Post ran an encouraging story headlined, “Education Department says Columbia doesn’t meet accreditation standards.” In other words, Trump is turning progressive torture tools back against the very institutions that manufactured them.

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Yesterday, the Department of Education formally notified Columbia University’s accrediting agency that the university may be out of compliance with federal antidiscrimination law —specifically, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act— due to its mishandling of antisemitic harassment on campus. The escalation followed a joint investigation by the Department of Education and HHS, which found Columbia had acted with “deliberate indifference” to antisemitic incidents, thereby denying Jewish students equal access to education.

In one example of many, a Jewish student group invited a Holocaust survivor to speak on campus. Protesters showed up, shouted her down, and accused her of genocide. University security did nothing, despite repeated desperate requests. The next day, Columbia’s administrators issued a statement expressing concern about the protestors’ “right to be heard.”

In another example, a Jewish student found a sign taped to her door saying “Free Palestine. No Zionists allowed here.” When she reported it to Columbia’s “bias response team,” mistakenly thinking that was what the “bias response team” was for, she was told not to “escalate tensions” by making any public comments about the incident, and was referred to campus counseling.

If Columbia loses its accreditation, it will no longer be eligible for federal student aid, including loans and Pell Grants. This piles on previous punishments for the Ivy League school, such as a $400 million cut in federal funding in March.

Unlike Harvard, Columbia isn’t escalating. After getting the stinky DOE letter, Columbia agreed to cooperate. “Columbia is deeply committed to combating antisemitism on our campus,” the school’s spokesperson said. “We take this issue seriously and are continuing to work with the federal government to address it.”

For decades, the Left used civil rights law, accreditation leverage, and bureaucratic choke points to punish dissenters, deplatform opposition, and reshape institutions. Now, for the first time, that machinery is being reversed— not dismantled, but weaponized in the opposite direction.