The man who coined the term ‘soft power’ recently died. It’s ironic that Joseph Nye taught at Harvard University… … the institution that’s in the eye of the storm of the Trump administration’s crackdown on foreign students. A court’s now stopped the U-S government from banning foreign student enrollment at the country’s most elite university but more suspensions of federal funding are in the works… and now comes a broader move...
The U-S state department pausing visa applications for the country’s more than one million foreign students this quote “in preparation for an expansion of required social media screening and vetting.» In a land that prides itself on its first amendment of the constitution guaranteeing free speech, who decides when posting a picture of a Palestinian flag constitutes a national security threat?
A passing fancy or the true decline of US soft power? As Europeans try to lure students and researchers to migrate to these shores, as the UK moves towards rejoining the Erasmus foreign student exchange program that the pro-Brexit Conservatives quit – we’ll ask what the pushback against foreign students and the use of social media posts as evidence for the prosecution say about our times… and the free flow of ideas and information.
Produced by François Picard, Rebecca Gniganti, Juliette Laffont, Ilayda Habip, Alessandro Xenos.
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Bernard HARCOURT Professor of Law and Political Science, Columbia University
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Ellen KOUNTZ Finance Professor, INSEEC and author of "Portraits de Veep, l'incroyable histoire de Kamala Harris"
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Jay P. GREENE Senior Research Fellow, The Heritage Foundation
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Lola DEASCENTIIS Co-founder of "Harvard students for freedom"
English (US) · 