Harvard University, one of the nation’s wealthiest schools, on Monday joined the list of universities across the country imposing hiring freezes, citing the uncertainty created by President Trump’s threats to slash funding for higher education. The move was announced in an email to the school community by Dr. Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s president. The announcement comes three days after the Trump administration pulled $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia University over accusations that the school had failed to protect Jewish students and faculty from antisemitism. A number of other universities have announced hiring freezes or “chills” in the past month in response to potential policy changes of the Trump administration. But the step by Harvard, which has an endowment of more than $50 billion, illustrates the gravity of the situation facing higher education as the Trump administration continues its crusade against colleges and universities. Harvard, like Columbia, is one of 10 schools the Trump administration identified last month as subject to review over accusations that it had not done enough to curb antisemitic behavior on campus during protests over the war in Gaza. In a similar move Monday, the University of Pennsylvania — which is not among the 10 schools the Trump administration identified last month — announced a freeze on staff hiring. It also announced a review of faculty hiring, citing changes to federal research funding, including “stop-work” orders that Penn already received. “The direction is clear, and we are already experiencing reduced funding,” said the announcement, in an email to Penn staff by two university administrators. In addition to issuing a freeze on staff hiring, with some exceptions, the university said it was freezing some raises and reducing other expenses by 5 percent. Those freezes come after funding cuts prompted some departments at Penn to retract verbal admission offers to incoming Ph.D. students. Campuses have been embroiled in debates over whether the protests against Israel constitute antisemitism. While many such demonstrations have been peaceful, some episodes with pro-Palestinian demonstrators and counterprotesters supporting Israel have deteriorated into violence. Many of the protesters themselves are Jewish, and activists, political leaders and university officials have debated what, precisely, constitutes antisemitism. Issuing claims of antisemitism, which could violate federal law, is just one of the methods the Trump administration is trying in an effort to hobble funding of higher education. Other methods include threatening to increase taxes on large university endowments, cutting overhead reimbursements for federal grants and promising to target schools that allow diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Dr. Garber’s email, which was posted to the university’s website, did not mention Mr. Trump by name, but said that universities through the nation “face substantial financial uncertainties driven by rapidly shifting federal policies.” “Effective immediately, Harvard will implement a temporary pause on staff and faculty hiring across the University,” the email said. It was also signed by other top members of Harvard’s administration. The email emphasized that the hiring pause was temporary, but also asked the leadership of Harvard units to “scrutinize discretionary and nonsalary spending.”

The Trump administration invoked an obscure legal statute over the weekend in an attempt to deport a recent Columbia University graduate — and lawful permanent resident of the United States — who helped lead campus protests against Israel last year, people with knowledge of the action said on Monday. Mahmoud Khalil, 30, who graduated in December from Columbia with a master’s degree from its School of International and Public Affairs, was arrested by immigration officers in New York on Saturday and sent to a detention center in Louisiana. Mr. Khalil, who has Palestinian heritage, holds a green card and is married to an American citizen who is eight months pregnant. On Monday, a federal judge in Manhattan ordered the government not to remove Mr. Khalil from the United States while the judge reviewed a petition challenging the legality of his detention. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers also filed a motion on Monday asking the judge to compel the federal government to transfer him back to New York. President Trump said Mr. Khalil’s case was “the first arrest of many to come.” “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” Mr. Trump said on social media on Monday. “If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply,” he added. The arrest and attempted expulsion of Mr. Khalil by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has provoked alarm over free-speech rights and the Trump administration’s escalating crackdown on immigration and on universities that Mr. Trump and his aides argue are too liberal. The administration did not publicly lay out the legal authority for the arrest. But two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio relied on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that gives him sweeping power to expel foreigners.The provision says any “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.” Mr. Rubio also reposted a Homeland Security Department statement that accused Mr. Khalil of having “led activities aligned to Hamas.” But officials have not accused him of having any contact with the terrorist group, taking direction from it or providing material support to it.Rather, the rationale is that the anti-Israel protests Mr. Khalil helped lead were antisemitic and fostered a hostile environment for Jewish students at Columbia, the people with knowledge of the matter said. Mr. Rubio’s argument is that the United States has a foreign policy of combating antisemitism around the world and that it would undermine this policy objective to tolerate Mr. Khalil’s continued presence in the United States, they said. “We haven’t seen anything like this as far as I’ve been a practicing attorney,” said Robyn Barnard, an immigration lawyer at Human Rights First. “It’s just really deeply concerning to see the U.S. government deciding to use their limited resources in terms of enforcement of immigration laws to target someone whose speech they just disagree with, but otherwise doesn’t seem to violate our First Amendment.”Mr. Trump has taken measures to try to suppress protests and other activities on campuses that officials in his administration consider anti-Israel or antisemitic, often conflating the two. On Friday, the Trump administration announced it was canceling $400 million of grants and contracts with Columbia, citing “the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” While a student at Columbia, Mr. Khalil, who was a negotiator and spokesman for the protesters, played a major role in campus protests that broke out after Hamas launched an assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and kidnapping about 250 others. The Israeli military carried out strikes in Gaza that have killed nearly 50,000 Palestinians, according to health officials there. Pro-Palestinian protests and a student encampment at Columbia — as well as the university administration’s response, which included asking the police to clear out protesters — became a lightning rod in national debates over public criticism of Israel. Some protesters adopted slogans like “globalize the intifada” and called for freeing Palestine “from the river to the sea,” a phrase that has radically different interpretations by Israelis and Palestinians and that led to accusations of antisemitism. The State Department declined to comment on Monday. The Homeland Security Department referred questions to the State Department. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump previewed that he intended to expel foreign students who had participated in anti-Israel protests as part of his broader plans for a sweeping crackdown on immigration. He generally framed that plan in terms of canceling student visas, however — not expelling lawful permanent residents.Mr. Khalil, who was born and raised in Syria, became a lawful permanent resident in 2024 after having entered the United States on a student visa around December 2022 to pursue a master’s at Columbia, his lawyers said. His lawyers said Mr. Khalil was detained on Saturday night by four people dressed in plain clothes who entered the lobby of his New York apartment building, which is owned by Columbia, and identified themselves as D.H.S. officers looking to arrest him. Mr. Khalil’s wife and his lawyers, whom Mr. Khalil got on the phone, told the officers that Mr. Khalil had a green card, but the agents arrested him anyway, his lawyers said. A lawful permanent resident, or green-card holder, is protected by the Constitution, which includes First Amendment free-speech rights and Fifth Amendment due-process rights. The Trump administration’s attempt to expel Mr. Khalil under that statutory provision is likely to face a constitutional challenge, several legal experts said. Amy Belsher, the director of immigrants’ rights litigation at the New York Civil Liberties Union, said she could not recall any previous instances in which a secretary of state had invoked that provision since Congress enacted the Immigration and Nationality Act, or I.N.A., in 1952. “It’s an escalation,” she said. “This provision has not been historically invoked and is incredibly vague and would raise real concerns about the weaponization of the I.N.A. to remove people who the administration just disagrees with.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Because any prior use of the provision appears to have been rare at most, legal specialists were still sorting through what it would mean procedurally — including whether an immigration judge would need to formally revoke Mr. Khalil’s green card and issue a final removal order. It was also not clear whether administrative removal proceedings, should they be a necessary first step, would delay the ability of Mr. Khalil’s lawyers to pursue a constitutional challenge in federal court. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Monday. Nor was it clear whether any legal challenge to his detention and deportation proceedings would play out in New York, where he was arrested, or in Louisiana. The appeals court that oversees federal judicial proceedings in Louisiana is particularly conservative. At a rally in Iowa on Oct. 16, 2023, Mr. Trump declared that, “in the wake of the attacks on Israel, Americans have been disgusted to see the open support for terrorists among the legions of foreign nationals on college campuses. They’re teaching your children hate.” He added: “Under the Trump administration, we will revoke the student visas of radical, anti-American and anti-Semitic foreigners at our colleges and universities, and we will send them straight back home.”At a speech in Las Vegas on Oct. 28, Mr. Trump said that “we’ll terminate the visas of all of those Hamas sympathizers, and we’ll get them off our college campuses, out of our cities and get them the hell out of our country.” And at a Nov. 8 campaign stop in Florida, he said he would “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism.” On Monday, Mr. Rubio met in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in part to discuss efforts to end the war in Gaza. As a Republican senator representing Florida, Mr. Rubio was a vocal supporter of Israel in the war, telling one protester confronting him in the Capitol that the “vicious animals” of Hamas were to blame for all the devastation and civilian deaths from Israeli military strikes in Gaza.

The Trump administration warned 60 universities on Monday that they could face penalties from pending investigations into antisemitism on college campuses, a threat sharpened in recent days by its cancellation of funding to Columbia University and the arrest of a protest leader there. The list of five dozen schools included colleges from both Republican- and Democratic-voting states, elite Ivy League schools such as Brown and Yale, state schools including Arizona State University and the University of Tennessee, and smaller institutions, like Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., which has about 2,000 students. President Trump seized on accusations of antisemitism as a cudgel against Democrats during his presidential campaign and has continued to prioritize the issue from the White House. Mr. Trump’s push comes as college campuses are embroiled in debates over what, precisely, constitutes antisemitism and whether that definition should include protests against Israel — even as many of the protesters themselves are Jewish. Last week, Mr. Trump threatened to strip funding from schools that allow “illegal protests,” but did not elaborate on what he meant by that phrase. His administration has also canceled $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University for what it said was “inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” The Trump administration has not said whether that decision was based on a particular finding from any of the three investigations into religious discrimination that were opened during the last 14 months of the Biden administration. Instead, Mr. Trump’s new antisemitism task force notified Columbia on March 3 about a “comprehensive review” of the school’s federal contracts and grants. The administration announced that it was pulling $400 million from the school four days later. The administration also invoked an obscure legal statute to arrest and try to deport a recent Columbia graduate who led protests there, though a federal judge in Manhattan ordered him not to be removed from the United States for now. During a confirmation hearing last month for Linda McMahon, Mr. Trump’s education secretary, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, the Republican chairman of the Senate Education Committee, pressed Ms. McMahon about how she would direct the department to address its “backlog” of antisemitism investigations. At the time, Ms. McMahon told Mr. Cassidy that she needed to learn more about the issue. On Friday, four days after her confirmation, the department announced that it would prioritize the resolution of antisemitism investigations. According to department records, there were active investigations into religious discrimination at 40 of the 60 college campuses when Mr. Trump assumed office. At the time, nearly all of those cases were less than 14 months old. An online database of existing federal investigations into colleges and universities has not been updated since Mr. Trump took office in January, and an Education Department spokesman said he was unable to provide information beyond the agency’s news release. Ms. McMahon said in a statement on Monday that federal funding was a privilege for colleges and contingent on “scrupulous adherence” to anti-discrimination laws. “The department is deeply disappointed that Jewish students studying on elite U.S. campuses continue to fear for their safety amid the relentless antisemitic eruptions that have severely disrupted campus life for more than a year,” Ms. McMahon said.

The Trump administration is moving to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent legal resident of the United States who recently graduated from Columbia University and had helped lead high-profile campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Speaking to reporters in Ireland on Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused Mr. Khalil of participating in protests that he described as antisemitic and supportive of the terrorist group Hamas. Foreigners who come to the United States and do such things, he said, will have their visas or green cards revoked and be kicked out. “This is not about free speech,” Mr. Rubio said. “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card, by the way.” Mr. Khalil’s arrest ignited protests in New York and set up a fight over free speech. Here’s what to know about the administration’s attempt to deport him. Who is Mahmoud Khalil? Mr. Khalil, 30, earned a master’s degree from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December. He has Palestinian heritage and is married to an American citizen who is eight months pregnant. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers say he was arrested by immigration officers on Saturday in his apartment in Manhattan even though he told the agents that he had a green card. He was then sent to a detention center in Louisiana. At Columbia last spring, Mr. Khalil assumed a major role in student-led protests on campus against Israel’s war efforts in Gaza. He described his position as a negotiator and spokesman for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a pro-Palestinian group. What’s the legal basis for his arrest and possible deportation? Mr. Khalil has not faced any criminal charges, and deportation proceedings are a civil, not criminal, matter. In arresting Mr. Khalil and working to remove him from the United States, Mr. Rubio is relying on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that gives him sweeping power to expel foreigners. The provision says that any “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the secretary of state has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.” The administration’s rationale for why Mr. Rubio can invoke that provision to expel Mr. Khalil, according to people with knowledge of the matter, is that the United States has a foreign policy of combating antisemitism around the world. Mr. Khalil’s presence in the United States, the people said, would undermine that objective because the protests he helped lead were antisemitic and fostered a hostile environment for Jewish students. President Trump’s border czar, Thomas Homan, echoed some of that reasoning while speaking to reporters in Albany on Wednesday. He described Mr. Khalil as a “national security threat.” “When you hand out leaflets inciting violence on a college campus, that’s illegal,” Mr. Homan said. “Being in this country with a visa or a resident card is a privilege, and you got to follow certain rules.” At a news briefing on Tuesday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, accused Mr. Khalil of “siding with terrorists.” She asserted that “pro-Hamas propaganda fliers” with the organization’s logo were distributed at the protests Mr. Khalil led at Columbia. She declined to share the purported fliers with reporters, saying that doing so would corrupt the dignity of the White House briefing room, and presented no evidence that Mr. Khalil had produced or distributed any fliers. Nor have officials accused Mr. Khalil of having any contact with Hamas, taking direction from it or providing material support to it. Because lawful permanent residents are protected by the Constitution — including First Amendment free-speech rights and Fifth Amendment due-process rights — the case appears likely to set up a major test of whether that statute, at least as applied to this situation, is constitutional. Immigration law specialists have struggled to find much guiding precedent for previous uses of the provision of the Immigration and National Act the administration is invoking. The Clinton administration invoked the provision in 1995 in an attempt to deport a former Mexican government official, but the constitutional issues were never resolved. The ex-official, who was in the United States on a visa, filed a lawsuit, and in 1996, a federal judge in New Jersey — Maryanne Trump Barry, the sister of the president — struck the provision down as unconstitutional, noting that it had not been interpreted in any reported judicial opinion. But an appeals court overturned her ruling, saying the former official had to go through the administrative immigration process before federal courts could address his case. In 1999, the Board of Immigration Appeals said the administration could use the provision to deport him, but two months later it changed course and instead indicted him. The former official died a month later, so the case ended. What happens next? A federal judge in Manhattan has ordered the government not to remove Mr. Khalil from the United States while his case is pending. But it is not yet clear whether that judge has jurisdiction over him now that he has been moved to Louisiana. The judge did not make any immediate decisions about the detention of Mr. Khalil at a hearing on Wednesday, but he did allow Mr. Khalil’s lawyer two phone calls, their first privileged contact since his arrest. A lawyer for the government said that Mr. Khalil, a legal permanent resident, has been placed in removal proceedings in Louisiana, where he is being held. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers also filed a motion on Monday asking the judge to compel the federal government to transfer him back to New York to reunite him with his wife, who is expected to give birth next month. His immigration status will be decided in a separate process, presided over by an immigration judge who could determine whether to revoke Mr. Khalil’s green card. There is little precedent for deporting a legal permanent resident based on the 1952 law giving the secretary of state the power to do so on foreign policy grounds. Could this happen to other visa or green card holders? Mr. Trump said Mr. Khalil’s case was “the first arrest of many to come.” Ms. Leavitt echoed that warning and said that Columbia had the names of others who had “engaged in pro-Hamas activity” and that the school was “refusing to help” the Homeland Security Department identify them. One of Mr. Khalil’s lawyers, Amy Greer, said that homeland security agents told her they had a warrant to revoke his student visa. When she informed them that Mr. Khalil did not have one, given that he was a permanent resident, she was told that the department had revoked his green card. What has Mr. Trump said about pro-Palestinian protesters? Since 2023, Mr. Trump has repeatedly vowed to revoke visas of international students who participate in pro-Palestinian protests and criticize Israel’s war efforts. “Americans have been disgusted to see the open support for terrorists among the legions of foreign nationals on college campuses,” Mr. Trump declared at a rally in Iowa on Oct. 16, 2023. “They’re teaching your children hate.” He added: “Under the Trump administration, we will revoke the student visas of radical, anti-American and antisemitic foreigners at our colleges and universities, and we will send them straight back home.” At a speech in Las Vegas on Oct. 28 of that year, Mr. Trump said that “we’ll terminate the visas of all of those Hamas sympathizers, and we’ll get them off our college campuses, out of our cities and get them the hell out of our country.”

While the country holds its breath for the Supreme Court’s responses to the Trump administration’s serial depredations, it’s hard to focus on anything else. Nonetheless, a case set for argument next month before the court merits more attention than the little it has received, given its destabilizing potential for public education. The central question is whether a state that allows charter schools as alternatives to traditional public schools, as nearly all states do, must agree to fund those that are explicitly religious. To emphasize: The court is not being asked to decide whether a state may, if it chooses, include a taxpayer-funded parochial school among its charter school offerings. That question alone would challenge the long-held understanding of the separation of church and state in the context of public education. This case goes further. It concerns what would be the first fully taxpayer-supported religious school in modern American history. The internet-based “virtual” Catholic school that the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa seek to operate, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, would promote the “evangelizing mission of the Church.” The question is whether the Constitution requires Oklahoma to permit the school to open its virtual doors as a public charter school. This is far from the first collision between the two religion clauses of the First Amendment, the protection for the “free exercise” of religion and the prohibition against religion’s official “establishment.” But this case reaches the court at a time of rapid change in the justices’ treatment of the relationship between the two clauses. Not so long ago, the Supreme Court was willing and able to manage the inherent tension between the two clauses by giving weight to each. For example, the question in a 2004 case was the constitutionality of a state’s explicit exclusion of ministerial studies from eligibility for an otherwise widely available state scholarship program. A student who wanted to use the scholarship to study for the ministry argued that his inability to do so violated the Free Exercise Clause. The court rejected that argument, holding that while the Establishment Clause would have permitted the state to subsidize ministerial training if it chose, the Free Exercise Clause did not impose such a requirement. In rejecting the argument that the state had imposed a burden on the free exercise of religion, the court said the state was not penalizing or criminalizing a religious service or rite, prohibiting ministers from participating in a community’s affairs or requiring students to choose between their religious beliefs and receiving a government benefit. Instead, the court said, “the state has merely chosen not to fund a distinct category of instruction,” which it said was a legitimate interest of the state in preventing an establishment of religion.The court’s goal was to maintain “play in the joints” between the two clauses that frequently were in tension with each other, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in the majority opinion in Locke v. Davey. But “play in the joints” has fallen out of favor in the current court. In a 2022 case, Carson v. Makin, the question was whether a state could exclude religious schools from a program that permitted people who lived far from a public secondary school to send their children elsewhere at state expense. The court held that the exclusion of religious schools from eligibility violated the free exercise rights of parents who would have chosen a religious school. The 2004 decision turned out, after all, not to stand for the broad principle of maintaining a balance between the two religion clauses. Chief Justice Rehnquist’s successor, John Roberts, wrote in the Carson decision that Locke v. Davey should be interpreted to apply only to its precise facts and “cannot be read beyond its narrow focus on vocational religious degrees to generally authorize the state to exclude religious persons from the enjoyment of public benefits on the basis of their anticipated religious use of the benefits.” In a series of cases beginning in the early 2000s and culminating with that one, the court has substituted for what would have been Establishment Clause concerns a seemingly limitless nondiscrimination principle: Whatever the government does for anyone, it has to do for religion, too. Further, the court’s invocation of the Free Exercise Clause in these cases has depended on the notion that when parents choose a generally available financial subsidy like a voucher or tax credit for religious use, that is a private choice in which the government plays no role. The challenge in the case involving the virtual Catholic school, Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, is whether the court can sustain the fiction of private choice when it’s no longer a matter of individuals directing a state tuition subsidy to a private school that happens to be religious. St. Isidore would be, like the other charter schools that some 50,000 Oklahoma students currently attend, a taxpayer-financed public school. Or so the Oklahoma Supreme Court held last June when it declared that the state’s Charter School Board’s approval of St. Isidore violated the federal Establishment Clause as well as the Oklahoma Constitution and the state law governing charter schools. “Under the Act,” the state court wrote, referring to the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act, “a charter school is a public school.” The court noted that while charter schools are free from some state regulations, they have to adhere to numerous other rules that apply to ordinary public schools. Their teachers are eligible for the same state retirement benefits as other public school teachers, the court observed. “St. Isidore will be acting as a surrogate of the state in providing free public education as any other state-sponsored charter school,” the court said. “What St. Isidore requests from this court is beyond the fair treatment of a private religious institution in receiving a generally available benefit, implicating the Free Exercise Clause. It is about the state’s creation and funding of a new religious institution violating the Establishment Clause.” As the state court emphasized, the characterization of St. Isidore as a public school matters because only in that case is it a “state actor” to which the federal Constitution applies. The Charter School Board and St. Isidore itself, both of which are appealing the Oklahoma court’s decision, are arguing vigorously to the justices that the school is, in fact, private and that the nondiscrimination principle should resolve its case. “St. Isidore is not an arm of the Oklahoma government,” the school said in its petition seeking Supreme Court review, “and Oklahoma has plainly violated its Free Exercise rights by cutting it off from the benefits created by the Charter Schools Act” solely because it is religious. The school is represented in its Supreme Court appeal by lawyers including Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Clinic. That is probably the reason that Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who spent 15 years as a law professor at Notre Dame and has taught classes there while on the bench, has recused herself from the case. The Charter School Board is represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, the prominent Christian litigating group that has scored a series of recent victories at the Supreme Court. The case is deeply entangled in Oklahoma politics. It was the state’s attorney general, Gentner Drummond, who sued the Charter School Board to keep the school from opening. The state’s governor, J. Kevin Stitt, strongly supports the school and filed his own brief, which opposes the brief that Attorney General Drummond filed. Both officials are Republicans. Before the board approved St. Isidore’s charter, Mr. Drummond had warned against creating a “slippery slope” that would compel approval of charter school applications by any and all religious groups, “even those most Oklahomans would consider reprehensible and unworthy of public funding.” The warning was valid as far as it went, but it should have gone further. Yes, an occasional Muslim madrasa seeking to incorporate as a charter school would be likely to cause controversy, but the problem is much broader. It is easy to imagine a scramble for public resources among mainstream faith groups, each with a curriculum in mind. As of 2021, some 3.7 million students were enrolled in public charter schools across the country. How many millions more might be drawn to a safely siloed religious education if it is available at taxpayer expense? And who will be left in the secular public schools? A quarter-century ago, Justice David Souter, a devout Episcopalian and a strict separationist, dissented from a decision that expanded the eligibility of religious schools for various types of equipment and other public resources. “The establishment prohibition of government religious funding serves more than one end,” the now-retired justice wrote in his dissenting opinion in Mitchell v. Helms. “It is meant to guarantee the right of individual conscience against compulsion, to protect the integrity of religion against the corrosion of secular support, and to preserve the unity of political society against the implied exclusion of the less favored and the antagonism of controversy over public support for religious causes.” At a time of surging Christian nationalism in response to the country’s evolving demography, that warning is even more timely now than it was then. This case puts the Supreme Court to a choice. If St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School is a public school, the court can uphold it only by further erasure of the Establishment Clause. If the justices deem it sufficiently private to evade the Constitution’s reach, they will have invited further fragmentation of public education, one of the few experiences that most Americans share. At this fraught moment for the court and the country, it may not be too much to suggest that the future of an increasingly fragile civil society is at stake as well.

A group of Native American tribes and students is suing the Trump administration to reverse its recent firing of federal workers at Native schools that they said has severely lowered their quality of education. The firings, part of the series of layoffs led by the Department of Government Efficiency that have cut thousands of federal jobs since January, included nearly one quarter of the staff members at the only two federally run colleges for Native people in the country: Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan., and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque. Instructors, a basketball coach, and security and maintenance workers were among those who were fired or forced to resign in February. Although the total number of layoffs was not clear on Sunday, the reductions also included employees at the central and regional offices of the Bureau of Indian Education, a federal agency. Some staff members, but not all, have been rehired, according to a statement from the Native American Rights Fund, which filed the suit on Friday in federal court in Washington. About 45,000 children are enrolled in bureau-funded schools in 23 states. As a result of the cuts, dozens of courses at the two colleges lost instructors, according to the lawsuit. And because of the loss of support staff and maintenance workers, school dorms were quickly overrun with garbage, students reported undrinkable brown water, dining halls failed to adequately feed students, and widespread power outages hampered students’ ability to study. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “Unfortunately, these firings were done without preparation and without regard to the health and safety of the students, and that is a continuation of a history of neglect and disrespect,” Jacqueline De León, a lawyer for the tribes and students, said. “We are here to fight to make sure that it doesn’t continue.” Lawyers with the Native American Rights Fund filed the suit against the heads of the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Office of Indian Education Programs. Plaintiffs included the tribal nations of the Pueblo of Isleta; the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation; and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes. Five students from the two colleges are also among the plaintiffs.

Shortly before noon on Friday, Dr. Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health, stood on the steps below the Lincoln Memorial tuning his acoustic guitar — a “very sweet” Huss & Dalton, he said, with a double-helix of DNA winding down the neck in pearl inlay. The nation’s anxious scientists could use a song. Dr. Collins, a biomedical researcher renowned for leading the Human Genome Project in the 1990s, had steered the N.I.H. through three presidencies, into 2021, and continued working at the agency until his abrupt retirement a week ago. Now he was a headline speaker for Stand Up for Science, a rally to protest the Trump administration’s drastic cuts to the federal work force and to federally funded science. The organizers weren’t sure how many people would show up — they later estimated that the crowd had peaked at 5,000 — nor quite what to expect. In 2017, tens of thousands gathered on the Washington Mall for the March for Science. The collective mood then was as much perplexity as defiance at Mr. Trump’s suggestions that America could be made greater by greatly reducing the Environmental Protection Agency and perhaps never mentioning climate change ever again. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT This year’s crowd was met by Lincoln, over-large and stone-faced in his chair. The organizers had chosen the site for its postcard view of Capitol Hill, perhaps less aware that the 16th president was a champion of science. He established the National Academy of Sciences in 1863 and, an avid astronomer, often visited the Naval Observatory. Early in his career, Lincoln often carried a volume of Euclid under his arm; he studied the mathematician’s argumentative logic to hone his own as a lawyer.Friday’s protesters made their feelings known with a diversity of placards, some pointed (“Fund Science, Defund DOGE”); some catchy (“Make America Think Again,” “No Brains, No Gains”); some clever (“In Evidence We Trust”); some resigned (“I Can’t Believe I’m Marching for Facts”), some too explicit to repeat here. Several read, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun-ding for Science.” Meghan Bullard, a fourth-year doctoral student in neuroimmunology at Georgetown University, sat on the steps below the speakers’ area, sharing Lincoln’s gaze down the length of the pool to the distant Capitol Building. Her sign read, “Literally Just Trying to Cure Multiple Sclerosis.” Her dissertation involved a novel cure for M.S., she said: “We’re currently funded on an N.I.H. research grant. They’re telling us that we need to prepare in case it’s not funded next year.” Dr. Collins, now at the microphone in the sunshine, enjoined the crowd “to celebrate the achievements of science over decades in bettering the human condition, and to advocate for strong public support at a time when serious threats of harm are occurring.” He invoked the Gettysburg Address — “of the people, by the people, for the people” — and noted that it applied to taxpayer-funded science, too. “We need to sing about this,” he said finally, and offered a reworked folk song, which involved everyone singing the chorus: “We're joined together by this noble dream.” Several dozen Stand Up for Science rallies were held on Friday in cities around the country and the world. A thousand people attended in Berkeley, Calif. In Chicago, protesters in winter coats, some holding umbrellas against the sideways-falling snow, gathered at Federal Plaza to hear Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and other speakers. Signs not shielded in clear plastic were soon reduced to soggy cardboard and blurs of marker ink.At Montana State University, one of five rallies happening across the state, organizers struggled to confirm speakers. “There are no speakers except me at the moment,” said Roland Hatzenpichler, a biologist at Montana State University, on Thursday evening. Several invitees declined for fear of repercussion from the state or federal government or their tenure committees, Dr. Hatzenpichler said. Many international students, he added, were afraid to attend after recent social media posts by Mr. Trump about cutting funding for universities allowing “illegal protests.” In Washington, many protesters declined to share their names publicly, for similar reasons. One woman, who wore a surgical mask and a long, white lab coat with the words “Mad Scientist” on the back in red lettering, described herself only as a federally funded researcher “who’s trying to keep things moving forward in these challenging times.” Her field was planetary science, hence her sign: “Good luck getting to Mars without science.” Elsewhere, three young women, all students, stood together with a sign that read “Science is Apolitical.” One said, “I didn’t tell my parents I’m here,” and they all laughed. She added, “I should be at home doing my research. But I can’t, because we might get defunded. It shouldn’t be political, but because they’re making it that way, we don’t have a choice.” The speechifying continued through the afternoon. Bill Nye, the Science Guy. Fred Upton, a former Republican representative from Michigan. Representative Bill Foster, Democrat of Illinois and the only Ph.D. physicist in Congress. (“It’s not just science that’s under attack, it’s facts,” he said offstage.) Dr. Allison Agwu, infectious-disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University. Denali Kincaid, a doctoral student in geochemistry and a TikTok communicator. They reminded the audience (unnecessarily, they conceded) of the value of scientific expertise: to make vaccines, accurate weather forecasts, agricultural breakthroughs; to monitor the 150-plus active volcanic systems in the United States alone. From the sidelines, Mary Doyle, a retired public-health researcher, lamented the depth and seemingly indiscriminate nature of the job and funding cuts. Entire university departments “are going to be gone, because they’re so heavily dependent on federal funding,” she said. Her husband, Scott Nainis, an engineer, said: “We saw a sign that said, ‘Science is best done with scalpels and microscopes, not chainsaws.’” Both had attended the 2017 march; this one felt different. “It’s a darker mood,” Ms. Doyle said.“This is a lot sadder,” their friend Jackie Agnew said. “The other rally felt like a rally, you know? It actually felt like you could have impact. There's sort of a defeated feeling here.” Late in the afternoon, Colette Delawalla, a graduate student in psychology at Emory University and one of the organizers, was feeling elated, if tired. “My expectations were pretty low,” she said. “I’d have been pretty excited if 500 people came out.” One thing her team had learned from the March for Science “was that one protest isn’t enough,” she said. The previous day they had been on Capitol Hill to meet with congressmen, lay out some legislative goals and “ring the bell.” “I did this because, at the end of the day, I just want to do my research,” Ms. Delawalla said. “I never thought of myself as an activist — that’s never been part of my identity. And I’m reckoning with that.” The crowd had dwindled to hundreds when the last speaker, Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, took the microphone around 4:15 p.m. He too invoked Lincoln, as a “champion of liberty and union,” and gave a fiery short course on the Constitution and on science as a First Amendment endeavor. (“‘Diversity’ is not an illegal word.”) He noted that it was the president’s sole task to “take care that the laws are faithfully executed: Do your job, Donald Trump!” Briefly, the crowd chanted, “Do your job!” The 16th president did not speak, or maybe he did. In 1860, while passing through Norwich, Conn., Lincoln was a approached by the Reverend J.P. Gulliver, who was writing for The New York Independent. The two men bonded over their mutual admiration for Euclid. “Euclid, well studied, would free the world of half its calamities, by banishing half the nonsense which now deludes and curses it,” Gulliver said. Lincoln laughed and replied, “I vote for Euclid.”

The Trump Administration’s abrupt withdrawal of $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University cast a pall over at least nine other campuses worried they could be next. The schools, a mix that includes both public universities and Ivy League institutions, have been placed on an official administration list of schools the Department of Justice said may have failed to protect Jewish students and faculty. Faculty leaders at many of the schools have pushed back strongly against claims that their campuses are hotbeds of antisemitism, noting that while some Jewish students complained that they felt unsafe, the vast majority of protesters were peaceful and many of the protest participants were themselves Jewish. The Trump administration has made targeting higher education a priority. This week, the president threatened in a social media post to punish any school that permits “illegal” protests. On Jan. 30, his 10th day in office, he signed an executive order on combating antisemitism, focusing on what he called anti-Jewish racism at “leftists” universities. Then, on Feb. 3, he announced the creation of a multiagency task force to carry out the mandate. The task force appeared to move into action quickly after a pro-Palestinian sit-in and protest at Barnard College, a partner school to Columbia, on Feb. 26. Two days later, the administration released its list of 10 schools under scrutiny, including Columbia, the site of large pro-Palestinian encampments last year. It said it would be paying the schools a visit, part of a review process to consider “whether remedial action is warranted.” Then on Friday, it announced it would be canceling millions in grants and contracts with Columbia. Harvard University, whose former president Claudine Gay resigned last year following a bruising appearance before a House committee, is also on the list. So are George Washington University; Johns Hopkins University; New York University; Northwestern University; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Minnesota; and the University of Southern California. The Trump administration’s moves to hobble university funding and target schools over claims that they tolerated antisemitism had already caused internal recalibration at schools across the country. Some have stepped up lobbying efforts, including hiring lobbyists with connections to Mr. Trump. Many campuses had already cracked down on students over protest activity. More are dialing back or renaming efforts related to diversity, an effort to avoid the ire of Trump officials who have vowed to end such programs And a number have paused hiring and reduced the number of doctoral students admitted in response to the financial uncertainty. Some school officials have said they face an “existential threat.” Still, many presidents have been silent or muted in their public statements about Mr. Trump’s moves against the sector, appearing to retreat in fear of the new administration. In a statement Saturday, Harvard said it was “committed to ensuring our Jewish community is embraced, respected, and can thrive at Harvard, and to our efforts to confront antisemitism and all forms of hate.” Several days after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the president, Dr. Alan M. Garber, posted a message to the university cowritten with other administration leaders. “In these challenging times,” they wrote, “our efforts will be guided by our values and commitments: supporting academic excellence and the pursuit of knowledge; championing open inquiry, constructive dialogue, and academic freedom.” The selection criteria for being on the list for visits is nebulous, but a number of the schools had been included in a report last October by the House Committee on Education and the Work Force, which claimed they had allowed antisemitic behavior by students and faculty. The report criticized Harvard leaders, citing their initial failure to condemn the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023. Northwestern and its president, Michael Schill, also had been under attack by the House committee, then led by Representative Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina. The committee report criticized the university for placing “radical anti-Israel faculty” in charge of negotiations with protesters. The University of California, Berkeley, was identified in the House report for not disciplining students who took part in an encampment or disrupted a talk by an Israeli speaker.Berkeley issued a statement on Saturday saying, “We are confident we have the right processes in place now to respond to any antisemitic incidents.” The statement cited an advisory committee the chancellor formed on Jewish student life and campus antisemitism. While several of the schools have been focal points for campus protests, others are more of a surprise. Richard Painter, a professor of law at Minnesota, was among those who filed a complaint about antisemitism at the university. He had chafed at incidents on campus, including anti-Israeli statements posted by faculty on official department websites. Even so, Mr. Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, wondered if the school was targeted partly because it sits in the congressional district of Representative Ilhan Omar, a vocal critic of both Israel and Mr. Trump, and in the home state of Gov. Tim Walz, who ran on the ticket with former Vice President Kamala Harris. “Part of it is political,” he said in an interview Saturday. Officials at the University of Minnesota could not be reached for comment, but efforts are already underway to address the complaints. The Board of Regents is expected to vote next Friday on a resolution prohibiting individual departments from making political statements on issues of the day. There was evidence suggesting that the administration’s action against Columbia was accelerated by last month’s sit-in at Barnard, which led to additional protests last week. The protests were sparked by Barnard’s decision to expel two students who interrupted a class on Israel. On March 3, six days after the initial Barnard disturbance, the government sent a notice to Columbia that it would review $51 million in federal contracts, citing harassment of Jewish students. The next day, Mr. Trump released a statement on Truth Social saying, in part: “All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests.” In a news release Friday announcing the cancellation of $400 million in grants and contracts, the task force also accused Columbia of failing to respond to the earlier notice while antisemitic harassment continued on or near campus. On Friday, Columbia said it was reviewing the administration’s announcement and that it pledged to work with the government. Also on Friday, Linda McMahon, the newly installed secretary of education, met with Columbia’s interim president, Dr. Katrina Armstrong. Ms. McMahon issued a statement saying that schools “must comply with all federal anti-discrimination laws” to receive federal funding. The task force’s list was released in late February amid a flurry of executive orders from the White House. Members of the task force include Leo Terrell, a senior Justice Department lawyer. Efforts to reach Mr. Terrell were not successful on Saturday. It was also unclear if any of the campus visits had been scheduled.

The chemistry professor’s nightmare seemed to finally be over. Five years had passed since Feng Tao, also known as Franklin, was led by F.B.I. agents out of his home in Lawrence, Kansas. The first professor to be arrested under a Trump-era program aimed at fighting Chinese economic espionage, Dr. Tao was accused of hiding his ties to a Chinese university while conducting federally funded research at the University of Kansas, where he was tenured. In July, he won his legal fight. A federal appeals court overturned the final conviction in his case. His wife, Hong Peng, recalled in an interview that she thought her husband could finally return to his lab, and their family could perhaps recover some semblance of a normal life. But the University of Kansas has not reinstated him. Dr. Tao, a Chinese citizen and permanent U.S. resident, is now suing his former employer for wrongful termination. He has accused the university of unlawfully surveilling him on behalf of federal investigators and of violating its own faculty disciplinary policies by terminating him before his criminal proceeding concluded. “The university allowed itself to join in fearmongering and racist witch hunting,” read a complaint filed by Dr. Tao’s lawyers in January in a federal court in Kansas. The University of Kansas did not respond to requests for comment.Dr. Tao’s experience underscores how, more than three years after the Justice Department officially ended the Trump-era program, known as the China Initiative, its impact is still reverberating among professors and researchers of Chinese descent. The F.B.I. brought at least a dozen prosecutions at universities or research institutions over the three years the initiative was in effect, mostly against scholars of Chinese descent. None involved charges of economic espionage or theft of trade secrets or intellectual property. Critics argued that the program had singled out scientists based on their ethnicity and overreached by blurring the line between violations of disclosure policies and more serious crimes like espionage. Many of the prosecutions against academics of Chinese descent eventually collapsed. Yet there are growing concerns that the China Initiative could be revived under a second Trump administration. Congress is currently considering an appropriations bill that would allocate funding for a Justice Department program focused on rooting out Chinese espionage, including in academia. And about a week ago, Republican lawmakers reintroduced legislation to protect against Chinese espionage by establishing a “CCP Initiative” — referring to the Chinese Communist Party — under the Justice Department. “President Joe Biden recklessly ended the China Initiative that President Trump established during his first term,” Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the bill’s co-sponsor, said in a statement. “Now, President Trump is back in action to hold Communist China fully accountable for its exploitation of the United States.” There is broad agreement that the Chinese government has tried to steal American technology, including through the recruitment of overseas scientists. Chinese partnerships with U.S.-funded researchers and universities have also helped propel Beijing’s advancements in fields like hypersonics and nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and semiconductors, according to a report put out last fall by a House committee focused on threats from China. American universities disputed parts of that report, but they have also begun shuttering collaborations with Chinese institutions. In January, the University of Michigan ended its joint partnership with a Chinese university. Lawmakers have also raised concerns about the large number of Chinese students studying science and engineering on American campuses — sometimes using rhetoric that has been criticized as fearmongering.“The difference is, Chinese students here in the U.S. are not studying ancient Greek history — they’re here studying STEM and national security issues,” Senator James Risch, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in January. “And each one of them, whether they like it or not, is an agent of the Chinese Communist Party.” Critics say resources could be better directed at rooting out actual Chinese espionage threats. Such programs could also backfire on U.S. national security by helping accelerate an outflow of talent that is key to maintaining a scientific and technological edge against China.“There are real, genuine threats that need to be addressed, but we should not be using a sledgehammer on the issue — we should be using a scalpel,” said Gisela Perez Kusakawa, executive director of the Asian American Scholar Forum, an advocacy group based in New York. A 2022 survey of scholars of Chinese descent found that 45 percent of respondents who had previously obtained federal grants said they would avoid doing so in the future. In interviews, many cited concerns that it could subject themselves to unnecessary racial profiling. The number of academic collaborations between researchers in the United States and China has also declined since 2017. And there are concerns that blanket restrictions on future research collaborations, such as the ones House Republicans recommended in their fall report, could cut American scientists off from areas where China is already ahead, such as materials science, hypersonics and nanotechnology. Caroline Wagner, a professor of public policy at the Ohio State University who advises the government on research security, said that given the open nature of scientific research, efforts to blunt China from getting certain technologies could ultimately prove “shortsighted.” Federal funding agencies and universities have recently taken steps to clarify which ties academics need to disclose, which Dr. Wagner said was a step in the right direction. “I’m not sure there would be a need for the China Initiative now given all of the infrastructure that’s being put in place,” she said. Critics say that Dr. Tao is a case study of how issues of integrity in academic research have been leveraged to support accusations of espionage. Raised in a village in southwest China, Dr. Tao moved to the United States in 2002 to pursue a Ph.D. in chemistry at Princeton University. After working at several different universities, he was recruited by the University of Kansas in 2014 to a tenured faculty position. Known among colleagues for his intense work ethic, Dr. Tao continued to work after the allegations came out even while suspended without pay, publishing dozens of papers. But he has also accumulated millions of dollars in legal bills. According to his lawsuit against the university, the F.B.I. began its investigation after a disgruntled visiting scholar falsely accused Dr. Tao of being a spy. During the investigation, authorities discovered a job offer from Fuzhou University in southern China that Dr. Tao had failed to disclose to the university. Dr. Tao did travel to China while telling University of Kansas officials that he was in Germany. While prosecutors argued that he went to set up a laboratory and recruit staff for the Chinese University, Mrs. Tao denied this and testified that her husband went to China to visit his ailing mother. In court, Dr. Tao argued that he had no disclosure obligations because he never received money or signed an employment contract with Fuzhou University. Still, prosecutors said that Dr. Tao had committed fraud by hiding the offer and his work with the Chinese institution from his university and two funding agencies, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. A jury found him guilty on three counts of wire fraud and one count of making a false statement. But in 2022, a federal judge threw out the fraud convictions, citing insufficient evidence that Dr. Tao had received any money for his work in China. “This is not an espionage case,” said U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson. “If it was, they presented absolutely no evidence that was going on.” And in 2024, a federal appeals court voided the last count of making a false statement, arguing that Dr. Tao’s failure to disclose had not influenced an actual funding decision. In his lawsuit to get his job back, Dr. Tao accused the university of discrimination based on race, saying that other professors who were not of Chinese descent did not face termination even though they had similar undisclosed interactions with foreign universities. The university, the lawsuit said, violated its own policies by failing to hold a hearing on his employment status. In addition to reinstatement, Dr. Tao is seeking payment for lost wages, lawyers’ fees and damages for emotional distress and injury to his reputation. “We can’t choose the country where we were born, where we came from,” said Dr. Tao’s wife, an American citizen. “What we have experienced, this is completely racial profiling.”

President Trump signed an executive order instructing administration officials to alter a student loan forgiveness program for public servants to exclude nonprofit organizations that engage in activities that have what he called a “substantial illegal purpose.” His order to restrict the program appears to target groups supporting undocumented immigrants, diversity initiatives or gender-affirming care for children, among others, as the Trump administration has sought to eliminate federal support for efforts that have drawn right-wing ire. The order, made public on Friday, is the latest of many attempts to overhaul the loan forgiveness program, which has often whipsawed borrowers with rule changes and bureaucratic obstacles. The program, known as Public Service Loan Forgiveness, was created by Congress in 2007 and cannot be eliminated without congressional action, but the Education Department has some leeway to determine how it operates. Mr. Trump’s executive order directed the secretaries of education and the Treasury to amend the program to exclude workers for organizations supporting illegal actions, listing several categories of examples, including “aiding or abetting” violations of federal immigration law. The Trump administration has taken a broad view of what it considers to be support of illegal activities. The order cited as examples organizations that support “illegal discrimination,” which the administration has previously said includes diversity and inclusion initiatives. The order appeared to target groups supporting gender-affirming care. It said it would exclude from the loan forgiveness program any organization supporting “child abuse, including the chemical and surgical castration or mutilation of children.” Mr. Trump’s order also singles out organizations that engage in a “pattern” of breaking state laws against “trespassing, disorderly conduct, public nuisance, vandalism and obstruction of highways,” language that could be used against groups that have supported political protests. Another provision targets those supporting “terrorism,” a label that Trump officials have used to describe anti-Israel protests. Such changes must typically go through a formal rule-making process, which often takes months or years to complete and includes a period for public comment. But the Trump administration has frequently acted in defiance of apparent legal limits — which is likely to set off waves of anxiety for those relying on the complex program. President George W. Bush’s administration enacted the loan program, which aims to encourage people to work in government and at qualifying nonprofits by easing their college debt burden. After making 120 monthly loan payments — which requires at least 10 years of service in qualifying jobs — borrowers become eligible to have their remaining federal student loan debt wiped out. The program became a notorious quagmire, with bureaucratic tripwires and loan-servicing issues leading to a rejection rate as high as 99 percent for those who sought forgiveness. President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s administration used waivers and exceptions to eliminate barriers, allowing more than one million people to use the program to eliminate debts totaling $79 billion. An estimated two million people have made payments that count toward their obligation to be eligible for relief through the program. Those borrowers often anxiously count down the months until they reach the required 120 payments. The program is open to borrowers who work in government jobs — at the federal, state or local level — and those who work at nonprofits that are tax-exempt under the Internal Revenue Service’s 501(c)(3) statute. Some other nonprofits are also eligible, but many are exempt, including labor unions and partisan political organizations. At various points in the history of the loan program, there has been confusion over what constituted “public service.” In 2019, three lawyers won favorable rulings after having been deemed ineligible. Mr. Trump’s order seems to take aim at disfavored organizations in a way that echoes a bill passed last year in the House that would allow the government revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofit groups it accused of supporting terrorist entities. Democrats feared the bill could be exploited by Mr. Trump to target his political enemies. The bill stalled in the Senate.