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| Flowers and signs adorn a tree close to where federal agents apprehended Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk on Tuesday. (Scott Eisen/Getty Images) |
| The video is a grim watch. Plainclothes officers, some masked, confront a student in a Boston suburb, handcuff her and force her toward an unmarked car. From what we know now, the student — Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old Turkish national on a student visa working on her PhD at Tufts University — was taken by homeland security officials to a facility in faraway Louisiana. The video of her arrest Tuesday proliferated on social media. By Thursday, U.S. officials confirmed that Ozturk’s student visa had been revoked and that she was in deportation proceedings — one of a growing number of foreign nationals here legally who have had their visas revoked by the Trump administration for allegedly participating in pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses. Secretary of State Marco Rubio criticized foreign students he said were “creating a ruckus” in universities and said his agency had already revoked about 300 student visas. “We do it every day,” Rubio told reporters Thursday. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.”
He did not explain what Ozturk did to justify the revocation of her visa, and neither did other U.S. officials. “DHS and ICE investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” the Department of Homeland Security said in an emailed statement to my colleagues, without sharing evidence of the claim or responding to questions about the video. It added that “supporting terrorists” is grounds for visa termination. There is no clear evidence of Ozturk “supporting terrorists” — unless you believe voicing any form of solidarity with Palestinians or criticism of Israel is tantamount to supporting Hamas. In March last year, she co-authored an op-ed in the school newspaper urging the university’s administration to heed a student council resolution denouncing the war in Gaza, recognize the “genocide” unfolding in the enclave and divest from companies linked to Israel. These are calls that reverberated across U.S. university campuses over the past 17 months of the war. Campus protests — which, in some instances, saw tent encampments spring up or disruptive student occupations of university buildings — proved polarizing, roiling the American conversation and shadowing the U.S. election campaign. In the wake of President Donald Trump’s victory, foreign nationals such as Ozturk and detained Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident, are among those caught up in a backlash against pro-Palestinian activism.
But it’s also part of a deeper assault by the Trump administration on U.S. universities, long the target of right-wing grievance. Much to the ire of many of its faculty and students, Columbia University, the site of some of the most heated protests last year, recently caved to Trump administration threats to pull federal funding if it didn’t make certain changes, including more restrictions on campus protests and new oversight over curriculum and hirings at the university’s Middle Eastern studies department. Onlookers doubt the pressure campaign stops there. These moves — along with the new uncertainties regarding what foreign students can say or do on campus — are already having a chilling effect on universities, with scholars fearing for their academic freedoms and students engaging in self-censorship. In a sign of the times, Jason Stanley, a prominent Yale University philosopher and author of the 2018 book “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them,” announced that he would soon leave the Ivy League institution for a job at the University of Toronto. The main reason, he said, was that he wanted to raise his children “in a country that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship.” “Columbia was just such a warning,” Stanley told the Guardian in a recent interview. “I just became very worried because I didn’t see a strong enough reaction in other universities to side with Columbia. I see Yale trying not to be a target. And … that’s a losing strategy.” Stifling free speech among foreign students was just a first step, he argued: “If you can’t speak out loudly if you’re not an American citizen, when will they come for the American citizens? It’s inevitable.” | ||||||||
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| University students protest in Istanbul on Thursday after Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, a key political rival to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was arrested and sent to prison. (Francisco Seco/AP) |
| Trump’s animus toward U.S. universities reflects a wider global trend. In a number of electoral autocracies, illiberal nationalist leaders have targeted elite universities as enemies of the state and hotbeds of radicalism. Hungary’s long-ruling prime minister, Viktor Orban, has spent years waging a culture war against top Hungarian universities and rejiggered the system to exert greater influence over them. That included a conspicuous campaign to oust Central European University (CEU), which was founded by the Jewish American financier George Soros — a favorite Orban punching bag. “In Budapest, the CEU was a small, research-oriented social-science and humanities graduate school — hardly a thorn in the side of the Orban regime, you might think,” wrote Michael Ignatieff, the university’s former president, in 2023. “But that would be to misunderstand how Orban saw us. To him, our university made a valuable symbolic target in his effort to fashion himself as a conservative culture warrior, fighting back the supposedly tentacular influence of liberal cosmopolitanism. Once universities are framed in this way, they become irresistibly attractive to self-promoting demagogues.” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have similarly interfered with their nation’s universities. Universities in major cities such as New Delhi and Istanbul are long-standing sites of dissent and protest, but both leaders have sought to neuter that spirit, exerting greater control over hiring practices and the management of these institutions. Erdogan’s undue influence over the academy was arguably on show when Istanbul University revoked the diploma of his main political rival, Ekrem Imamoglu, earlier this month. Imamoglu was arrested and detained on corruption charges that his allies say have been conjured to remove him as a political threat. Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan, a professor of economics at Brown University, bemoaned in an op-ed the “muted” U.S. reaction to Erdogan’s power play and warned that Trump’s recent moves echoed strategies adopted by Erdogan for more than a decade. “The Trump administration has repeatedly targeted knowledge institutions, especially universities,” she wrote. “Because college-educated voters often lean toward the opposition (Democrats), academia has become a scapegoat. Attacks on academic freedom, rejection of science, and promotion of conspiracy theories are all part of the institutional rot that Turkey has witnessed since 2013.” |