HRK President Walter Rosenthal criticises the US government’s decision to ban Harvard University from accepting international students and to force enrolled international students to transfer to other universities or lose their residence status as an unjustifiable attack on academic freedom itself.
“The political pressure currently being exerted on universities and academia in the USA is simply catastrophic. The measures taken by the Trump administration at federal level, but also in some individual states, are difficult to reconcile with the principles of the rule of law, they massively and lastingly jeopardise the performance of the US research system and contradict the values of a liberal society – ultimately everything that the USA has stood for as a role model worldwide for decades.
The most recent order, which is intended to prohibit Harvard University from accepting or continuing to teach international students and forces them to transfer to another US university or even threatens them with expulsion, hits hard. This is an unjustifiable attack on academic freedom itself. The move is deliberately aimed at the autonomy of Harvard University. Research and teaching must be free and committed solely to academic criteria and standards. This includes maintaining universities as meeting places for international students and leading researchers.
Universities are part of society and the fight against anti-semitism, for example, is important. However, anti-semitism is being used here by the Trump administration as an excuse to take action against liberal, independent researchers and teachers and their institutions. In concrete terms, this is also being done by systematically weakening the financial basis of the institution.
The exclusion of international students threatens to eliminate the income from tuition fees that is relevant to Harvard’s budget. Of course, all of this particularly affects the international students themselves, whose future is being made the plaything of ideological interests.
If science and humanities in the USA are now being shut down, patronised and restricted for political reasons, this will cause enormous damage to the global research system. German universities stand in solidarity with their US cooperation partners at universities and other academic institutions.”
