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At least three universities in Hong Kong are inviting international students at Harvard University to join their institutions, following the United States administration’s shock decision last week to ban the prestigious American institution from enrolling foreign students.
The University of Hong Kong (HKU) is offering international students at Harvard dedicated scholarships, accommodation assistance and guidance on transferring academic credit, according to a letter addressed to them, which was posted on X yesterday by Zhigang Suo, a materials engineer at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“We recognise that recent developments in the US may have created significant uncertainties for many international students. HKU stands ready to welcome affected students at Harvard who wish to explore options and pathways for continuing their studies with us,” a spokesperson for the university told Nature.
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has also invited current and prospective international undergraduates and postgraduates at Harvard and other US universities to transfer to HKUST, and at least one other Hong Kong-based university has offered similar support.
The US Department of Homeland Security, which terminated Harvard’s ability to enroll and host international students on 22 May, said in a press release that the university had “created an unsafe campus environment by permitting anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators to harass and physically assault individuals, including many Jewish students.”
On Friday, Harvard sued the government, and a judge in the district of Massachusetts temporarily halted the government’s policy.
Harvard hosts more than 7,000 international undergraduate and postgraduate students with visas. “Thousands of international students and scholars have done nothing wrong. It is extreme cruelty for the government to make innocent people collateral damage,” says Suo.
Grants cut
Harvard has become a target of the Trump administration in recent weeks. In April, the university declined to agree to the government’s demands for greater oversight of its admissions and hiring practices in order to continue receiving federal money. The government has since cut billions of dollars’ worth of federal funding in the form of close to 1,000 grants given to researchers at the university, according to an analysis by Nature.
