00:00Since taking office, U.S. President Donald Trump has launched a series of actions targeting student activism,
00:07including threats to revoke student visas at Harvard and to strip Columbia University of its academic accreditation.
00:13Ui Zihau, chief executive of non-profit think tank Haya Inc.,
00:17discusses whether this could set a dangerous precedent for other American universities.
00:23The first one I was targeted was actually Columbia University,
00:26which has been a highlight in terms of the administration has called campus violence on those Gaza protests and things.
00:37But again, it is a similar playbook.
00:40The administration actually gives all these universities a list that you will actually need to surrender all those foreign universities data,
00:48all those disciplinary records, all the research scope done by the researcher of the universities.
00:55And the whole picture behind this requirement is not so-called a review,
01:03but it's more like to stop fear into the universities,
01:07so that they are forcing universities to run into the ideological tracks that the Trump administration want the universities to adopt.
01:15While Columbia's administration issued a public apology for its handling of protests on campus,
01:23Zihau said it was Harvard's response that marked a turning point,
01:26sparking a broader battle over university autonomy in the U.S.
01:30So Harvard is on the spotlight because Harvard is the first university in the U.S.
01:38that do not bow to the Trump administrations.
01:42So Harvard has kind of lead the opposition to these overreaching administrative actions towards the Trump administrations.
01:52So definitely this will change the whole ecosystem of the U.S. higher educations.
01:59If you could see in some of the state universities,
02:02that has already happened recently in the University of Florida and also the Universities of Indiana States.
02:09They have already clamped down on the universities and they want the universities to comply to the state administrative.
02:15That is easy because the University of Florida, the University of Louisiana states,
02:22those are universities kind of publicly owned by the state governments.
02:28So you can see it is a ripple that spread across all the whole U.S. higher education system.
02:36And I'm afraid this will not stop until there is a landmark decision from the United States Supreme Court
02:46on what is the right and what is the border of the government administrations that can interfere to the universities.
