'Harvard Is Starting To Behave': Donald Trump Amid Student Visa Ban Row

Last Updated:June 08, 2025, 22:28 IST

US Education Secretary Linda McMahon defended Trump's actions on elite universities like Harvard and Columbia and said that she is seeing “progress” from the institutions.

Harvard University. (Reuters/File Image)

US President Donald Trump has said that “Harvard University has actually starting to behave" days after he signed a new order banning visas of foreign students who are set to begin attending the institution.

The President in a recently held meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz had said that, “We want to have foreign students come. We’re very honoured by it, but we want to see their list."

“Harvard didn’t want to give us the list. They’re going to be giving us the list now. I think they’re starting to behave, actually, if you want to know the truth," he added.

Additionally, US Education Secretary Linda McMahon defended Trump’s actions on elite universities like Harvard and Columbia and said that she is seeing “progress" from the institutions on the administration’s demands.

“I have seen progress. And you know why I think we’re seeing progress? Because we are putting these measures in place, and we’re saying we’re putting teeth behind what we’re looking at," McMahon said in an interview with NBC News.

She added that there still is a long way to go to remove antisemitism on campus and vet international students. “It’s very important that we are making sure that the students who are coming in and being on these campuses aren’t activists, that they’re not causing these activities," McMahon said.

She said that students who come on campus should not be afraid to be there and should not feel unsafe.

The secretary acknowledged that the universities have taken positive steps to combat what she said was growing antisemitism on campus, but credited Trump for pushing them to do so.

“I’m really happy to see what Harvard did, but I wonder if maybe they didn’t get a little spur from our action, because they talk a lot about it, but I think we really started to see a lot of their actions once we were taking action," McMahon said.

Amid accusations on Harvard and Columbia of fomenting antisemitism, Trump had cancelled $2 billion in grants to Harvard and $400 million in grants to Columbia.

Her remarks came after the US President signed a proclamation aiming to ban foreign students from studying at Harvard earlier this week.

In the executive order, Trump had declared that it would jeopardise national security to allow Harvard to continue hosting foreign students on its campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Later, a federal judge temporarily halted the Trump’s order after Harvard filed a new lawsuit against the rule. In May, a federal court in Boston had blocked the Department of Homeland Security from barring international students at Harvard.

The dispute has been building for months after the Trump administration demanded a series of policy and governance changes at Harvard, calling it a hotbed of liberalism and accusing it of tolerating anti-Jewish harassment.

Harvard defied the demands, saying they encroached on the University’s autonomy and represented a threat to the freedom of all US universities.

Harvard enrolled nearly 6,800 international students in the 2024-2025 school year, amounting to 27 per cent of its total enrollment, according to university statistics.

In 2022, Chinese nationals were the biggest group of foreign students at 1,016, university figures showed. After that were students from Canada, India, South Korea, Britain, Germany, Australia, Singapore and Japan.

Washington D.C., United States of America (USA)

News world 'Harvard Is Starting To Behave': Donald Trump Amid Student Visa Ban Row