A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration's move to revoke Harvard University's ability to enroll international students, but the future remains uncertain. In recent days, we've been hearing from Harvard students and faculty. Today, Steven Levitsky joins me. Levitsky conducts research on authoritarian governments and leads the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard.
Steven, you wrote in 2018 the book "How Democracies Die," where you warned that the Trump administration was acting like an authoritarian government, and you say it's happening again. What's different, if anything, this time around?
STEVEN LEVITSKY: Oh, this time is much, much more authoritarian. Trump, when he won the first time around, didn't expect to win, didn't have a plan, didn't have a team in place and was compelled to govern with more or less mainstream Republicans and conservative technocrats. And they constrained him. Trump was always very authoritarian. His instincts were always very authoritarian, but he was surrounded by folks who largely constrained him. This time around, very, very different story - had a team, had a plan, put in place a government that did not - full of loyalists and people who have a very authoritarian agenda. And he's completely unconstrained in his authoritarianism, except for - by the courts. So this is an all-out authoritarian assault, the likes of which we haven't seen in this country probably ever.
MARTÍNEZ: Are there any historical precedents with governments elsewhere trying to control schools in an authoritarian way? And how do those moments compare to this one?
LEVITSKY: Frankly, this is - has been a more aggressive assault on universities than we've seen in other elected authoritarian governments in the 21st century. This is something that really all authoritarians do - left-wing, centrist, right-wing. Autocrats don't like universities because universities are, in most countries, culturally influential centers of dissent. Universities are very - are always voices of dissent. And so autocrats, whether it's right-wing autocrats in Hungary or left-wing autocrats in Nicaragua and Venezuela, almost invariably go after universities. This is straight out of the authoritarian playbook.
MARTÍNEZ: Now, the U.S. has a track record for attracting the best and brightest. Immigrants have won 40% of Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans between the year 2000 and 2023. And that's according to analysis from the nonpartisan and nonprofit National Foundation for American Policy. Why go after, Steven, universities, the institutions that actually attract these best and brightest minds?
LEVITSKY: Well, this is a government that is ethnonationalist. It is turning inward. It's not interested in the kinds of international exchanges, trade, travel in and out of the country that governments in the United States consistently, since World War II, have engaged in. This is an inward-oriented government that is much more interested in consolidating power than in building capacity or building wealth for the future. I mean, trade policy is very similar. This is consistent with other policies. This is a government that is rapidly breaking what has made this country great since World War II.
MARTÍNEZ: How does a ban on international students impact Harvard and beyond? I know financially, it would be a big hit. But, I mean, what are the impacts that we're talking about here?
LEVITSKY: Financial is the least of it, quite frankly. We are an international university. We have 7,000 foreign students and a huge number of foreign visitors and professors. We absolutely feed on international exchange - on the ability of our own members to travel abroad, to do research abroad and to bring in the best and the brightest, again, scholars, students from every part of the world. That is what makes, in part, this country great, and it's what makes higher education in the United States great. We are - we could not be Harvard, as we've known it since World War II, without international exchange. We would...
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah.
LEVITSKY: ...Cease to be a great university almost overnight.
MARTÍNEZ: You teach international students at Harvard. What are they telling you about this moment?
LEVITSKY: They're terrified. About 80% of my students - of my graduate students are international, most of them from Latin America. And they are, as you can imagine, suffering total uncertainty about their future. These are folks who have spent years of their lives preparing for this, working to get into Harvard, to get a degree from Harvard and don't know where they're going to be, whether they're going to be here in the fall. Their futures are completely up in the air. Many of them have challenging financial circumstances and are - never, never imagined they'd be faced with this challenge.
MARTÍNEZ: Steven Levitsky is a professor of government and director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. Steven, thanks.
LEVITSKY: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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