On May 29, federal judge Allison D. Burrough decided to allow Harvard to continue enrollment of international students. However, this would did not end the battle. Trump and his administration can use all their power to attack Harvard. 

The Trump administration has frozen Harvard’s health research grant with the amount of US$2.5 billion. Trump still has a political weapon to attack Harvard again. If that happened, it would threaten the future of US academic freedom. 

As usual, Trump practiced egoism in achieving his political ambitions, conflicting with the truth and with intellectualism. No compromise or dialogue. This is the most serious of Trump’s attacks on Harvard, which are unprecedented in American history. At the same time, 6,793 international students, or around 26 percent of the total number of 24,974 students at Harvard, are in limbo about the future of their studies. 

As a former senior Indonesian research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the university remains memorable to me. 

From 2011 to 2012, I enjoyed living with fellow Indonesian and international researchers who were doing academic research at Harvard with support from the Rajawali Foundation. 

We loved academic activities such as participating in selected seminars, discussing research projects with professors and experts and reading materials at the resourceful Widener library. Indeed, academic freedom and research culture are quite strong at Harvard.