BERLIN: Germany on Friday blasted the US government’s “fatal” decision to revoke Harvard University’s right to enrol foreign students and urged the Trump administration to reconsider.
Germany’s Research Minister Dorothee Baer told the Bayern 2 radio station that she hoped “the US government will reverse this decision,“ adding: “It’s not a positive signal, neither for the young generation nor the free world.”
On Thursday US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote to Harvard informing it that its certification under the main system allowing foreign students into the United States had been revoked.
US President Donald Trump is furious at Harvard -- which has produced 162 Nobel prize winners -- for rejecting his demand that it submit to oversight on admissions and hiring over his claims that it is a hotbed of anti-Semitism and “woke” liberal ideology.
Harvard has called the administration’s move “unlawful”.
Arriving in Brussels for a meeting of her EU colleagues, Baer said: “We are already noticing a shift not only from American students who want to come to us but also from other countries, including China and India, who choose Europe because they simply see their freedom guaranteed differently here.”
“I never thought... that it would come to this, that the hotspot of academic freedom would someday be questioned,“ Baer went on.
“Yet I do not give up hope that ... the ‘land of the free’ will someday again live up to its name.”
