Education secretary says foreign students are fomenting 'unrest'

Education Secretary Linda McMahon said Wednesday that President Trump has “great concerns” about some of the foreign students who are coming to the U.S., saying that they are creating “unrest” on campuses.

Her comments came a day after it was reported that the State Department has paused processing of foreign students’ visas and is looking to set up new vetting of their social media presence before granting approvals.

Ms. McMahon said she didn’t know what criteria would be used.

“But I think the president certainly had great concerns that there are foreign students, not everyone, but there are foreign students who come to this country, I do believe, who help create this unrest,” she said on CNBC. “There are activists who come in.”

She also said she believes there are professors “that are hired and brought in who are teaching ideology more than they are the subject matter” that parents expect their child to learn at an American university.

“And so I think you start taking a hard look across a broad area and then you can start to see where [sic] you really need to focus,” she said.

Homeland Security last week moved to oust Harvard University from the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, which certifies schools to host foreign students.

If the administration is successful in that endeavor, it would erase about a quarter of Harvard’s student body, forcing the students to transfer schools or obtain another legal status here.

Harvard has sued over the move, and a judge issued a restraining order halting the administration from carrying out the policy, for now.

President Trump said Wednesday the school “has got to behave” for the standoff to end.

“Harvard has to understand. The last thing I want to do is hurt them,” he said. “They’re hurting themselves. They’re fighting.”

He also said Harvard “has to show us their lists.”

“They have foreign students. About 31% of their students are foreign-based. … We want to know where those students come [from]. Are they troublemakers?” he said in the Oval Office. 

He said he hoped the foreign students were “100% fine,” but he expected many won’t be.

“You’re going to see some very radical people,” the president said.

The administration has also frozen billions of federal dollars in grants that go to Harvard and threatened the school’s tax-exempt status.

“Many parts of the country might look at and go, wait a second, they have a $53 billion endowment, and yet my tax dollars are going for about $9 billion right now,” Ms. McMahon said. “I understand a lot of that is for research, good research, by the way, and universities should continue to be able to do research as long as they’re abiding by the laws and are in sync with the administration and what the administration is trying to accomplish, but primarily abiding by the laws,” she said.

The administration cites concerns about the university allowing anti-semitism to run rampant on campus.

“And when we looked at different aspects of what Harvard was doing relative to antisemitism on its campuses, they were not enforcing Title VI the way it should be,” Ms. McMahon said.

Harvard President Alan Garber admitted Tuesday that the university has some problems to address, but found the way the administration is handling it “perplexing.”

“Why cut off research funding?” Mr. Garber said on NPR’s “Morning Edition.” “Sure, it hurts Harvard, but it hurts the country because, after all, the research funding is not a gift.”

“The research funding is given to the university and other research institutions to carry out research work that the federal government designates as high-priority work,” he said. “It is work that they want done … Shutting off that work does not help the country — even as it punishes Harvard — and it is hard to see the link between that and say antisemitism.”

Ms. McMahon said the administration tried to work with Mr. Garber, but “Harvard’s answer was a lawsuit.”

In fact, the school has filed two lawsuits, the most recent one over its foreign student program and an earlier one over government demands that Harvard adjust its hiring and admissions processes and take more steps to combat antisemitism.

Both lawsuits accuse the administration of retaliating against the university for its views.

Ms. McMahon said the administration would “like to continue to talk to Harvard.”

Mr. Trump said there should be a cap on the number of foreign students at Harvard.

“I want to make sure that the foreign students are people that can love our country,” he said. “We don’t want to see shopping centers exploding. We don’t want to see the kind of riots that you had.”