A new school year starts at Harvard as students live with lingering White House threats

The nation’s oldest and wealthiest university – where red brick buildings went up before there even was a United States – buzzes with crisscrossing orientation groups. New students learn where to eat, where to study and why the toe of the John Harvard statue is so shiny, then line up on this sunny day to rub the bronze shoe for good luck.

Returning students, though, have their own story. As veterans of one of the most difficult semesters in Harvard University’s modern history, they have studied and lived at ground zero of the Trump administration’s high-stakes juggernaut against the purported ills of American academia.

And now, they’re back on campus.

“I do think there’s a big, big spike in how much people feel scared,” says Abdullah Shahid Sial, a junior who is co-president of the undergraduate student body.

The summer break was no vacation for Harvard’s attorneys, who have been working furiously to reverse two Trump administration moves this year that shocked the campus community, then the whole of US higher education: The White House cut off billions of Harvard’s federal dollars, then tried to block the school’s ability to enroll international students, who for the last four years have made up more than a fourth of the student body.

To justify these punishments of the country’s top-ranked university, the Trump administration cited antisemitism starting with pro-Palestinian protests on campus more than a year ago – a painful and unacceptableproblem Harvard says it is addressing – as well as alleged discrimination in diversity, equity and inclusion practices.

In similar, recent fights in the Ivy League and beyond, President Donald Trump has racked up prominent wins as schools have agreed to policy changes and lump-sum payments. And he’s willing to do the same for Harvard, he says, but at a higher price: “We want nothing less than $500 million from Harvard,” Trump told his education secretary last week, adding, “Don’t negotiate.”

On campus, Harvard’s refusal so far to pay up or make major concessions to its academic independence has stoked a palpable tension, especially among students from abroad and their American friends. It has shaken up parents, along with a college town reliant on university business, while upending the lives of scholars whose research money has vanished.

“There’s a level of self-censorship – and it’s frightening everyone – which I’ve never seen before,” Sial says. “It’s really sad that it’s happening at Harvard.”

Anxiety mixes with hope the threat will pass

On Harvard Yard, the move-in bustle gives way to picnics and Frisbee tosses. Curious parents armed with iPhones take in landmarks. Students make new friends and find old ones, catching up with smiles and laughter.

But the cheer often dissolves when the matter of the school’s precarious stance with the White House comes up.

“You’re not going to use my name, are you?” more than one international student replies when asked about the continuing row between Harvard and the Trump administration. Some contort their faces, concerned a wrong word attached to their name might jeopardize their hard-won chance at an elite American education.

Right now, the only thing allowing these students to study at Harvard is the order of US District Judge Allison Burroughs indefinitely blocking the Trump administration’s decision to revoke the university’s international student program.

With that decision now more than two months old, some are doing their best to drown out the noise.

“I’ve not been feeling a lot of anxiety,” a Japanese student says as she tosses an Aerobie disc to a friend.

But that friend, a first-year student from Canada, acknowledges the future of Harvard’s foreign scholars is not entirely out of their minds.

“It’s definitely still worrying to see that our enrollment is not fully guaranteed,” she says.

Some who hail from non-democratic countries seem especially adept at choosing their words. A Chinese student who declines to give his name pauses for several seconds when asked whether he feels welcome.

“I feel … comfortable,” he says, emphasizing the last word with a finality and a tight smile that make clear this is as much as he is willing to say on the subject.

His friends respond with knowing chuckles.

Some international students stay away, for now

Sial is a prominent exception to the heads-down strategy so many international students take. A native of Lahore, Pakistan, he entered student leadership just before the Trump administration’s attacks on Harvard began.

“That happened to perfectly align with what I wanted to stand for,” he says.

His position as class copresident gives Sial a soapbox – but not protection. So far, the junior has not seen any changes to the five-year visa approved at the beginning of his academic career in the US. But he knows that could change at any time, especially with the Trump administration talking about tightening time limits on visas.

“I don’t think I have anyone to talk with to assess what’s the right strategy here because it’s so new,” he says.

Talking about his predicament in a shaded wedge of grass near the center of Harvard Yard, Sial speaks with a mixture of passion, frustration and weariness, pushing back the shaggy hair that frequently falls over his eyes.

“I made my peace with (the possibility of) getting deported a while back when I started speaking out.”

Many of Harvard’s international students made plans to stay in the country over the summer to avoid the prospect of not being allowed back in the US if they’d left, Sial says. Others, including friends, are taking an unplanned “study abroad” year outside the US – not leaving Harvard entirely but anxious to see if things will be calmer in a year.

“They’re like, ‘Oh, I want to wait this out,’” Sial says. “It’s unfortunate that they feel it’s a necessity.”

It’s an option also available to Harvard freshmen from overseas.

“Incoming first year international students have been allowed to accept a spot at a non-US university in addition to their slot at Harvard and, if necessary, defer their enrollment for a year,” said James Chisholm, spokesperson for Harvard’s undergraduate admissions program.

Fear spills over to American students

Kaden Gillum is a sophomore majoring in government and economics. His first year at Harvard gave him unexpected lessons in both.

“When we first heard they were going to threaten to remove international students, we just sort of brushed it off,” he says, “like they were just bluffing.”

Gillum faced his own culture shock arriving in Cambridge from Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, a city with fewer residents than Harvard has paid employees.

“I knew nobody who had ever gone here,” Gillum says. While he had excellent grades at an accelerated high school, his application to Harvard was a long shot fired off before he applied to less prestigious universities.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he says of receiving his acceptance notification for Harvard’s class of 2028. “I was in shock.”

It didn’t take long for Gillum in his first semester to adjust to his new surroundings. He made friends, though many found their own concerns dramatically changed in the spring semester as their student visa status was thrown into limbo.

“I have a lot of international friends and some that I’m rooming with this year,” says Gillum. “It was really stressful for them.”

Gillum keeps close tabs on those friends, who deal with the pressure mostly by focusing on studies and avoiding controversy. They confine their worries to conversations behind dorm doors, where guidance from the university’s international program mixes with rumors of Harvard students being hassled as they reenter the country, he says.

“We still have to keep our heads,” Gillum says.

Harvard students bring life – and wealth – to Cambridge

Alongside its battle with Harvard, the Trump administration has put intense heat on Democratic-leaning communities across the United States. And while Harvard leaders may tiptoe publicly around the White House debate, the world just outside their gates doesn’t hide its politics.

Historic stone churches display rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter signs, and even the narrowest side streets find room for bike lanes. Signs touting Democratic candidates for local offices dot many yards in this so-called “People’s Republic of Cambridge,” the largest city in a county where only 7% of registered voters claim the GOP.

The energy from campus orientation spills out on this sunny day to Harvard Square, the famous mix of restaurants, music stores, tattoo shops and bohemian entertainment that relies on the thousands of students from the other side of the brick and iron fencing across the street.

“We do get a lot of international students,” says Jeff Ng of Le’s Vietnamese restaurant, a sit-down eatery a block away from Harvard Yard. “A lot of them are Asian students.”

But before Ng can finish his thought, 18 Harvard students walk through the door, launching a lunch rush that will keep him and the other employees at Le’s busy for the next two hours. Managing the carefully choreographed arrival of bowls of pho and plates of spring rolls, Ng has no time to consider what might happen if a quarter of Harvard’s students were forced to leave.

Whether Harvard’s international student enrollment has taken a hit in the White House barrage is still unclear. The school has not yet released a final number after extending the deadline for international students to accept a slot off of Harvard’s wait list, a university spokesperson told CNN.

Parents hope for a return to stability

Nearby side streets leading to Harvard dormitory houses strain with cars and luggage carriers as parents help their children move back onto campus, optimistic things are moving in a calmer direction for students.

“It’s been beautiful! The weather is great,” beams Joanne Barkauskas of Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, as she moves her daughter Emma into the Lowell House residence wearing a “Lowell Mom” shirt. Her husband, Rich – in matching “Lowell Dad” garb – says they didn’t feel worried for their daughter last spring.

“Actually, as a parent, I thought the year before was where most of the tumult was,” he adds, referring to the pro-Palestinian protests on Harvard Yard that disrupted campus activities and forced the school to close its famous iron gates for a time.

A university task force this April acknowledged mistakes in how the school handled those protests, at once vowing improvements while also giving grist to the White House’s continuing claims of antisemitism on campus.

Still, the federal grants and contracts frozen in April in part over that issue remain locked up, meaning the turmoil for Harvard scholars who rely on that money for their research – and their livelihoods – are still in chaos.

Grant-funded researchers wait for answers

The creaky wooden stairs that Henri Garrison-Desany ascends for work could easily be confused for the weathered stairwells in many buildings at Harvard, where he used to be a post-doctoral researcher. But these stairs are 2 miles from the T.H. Chan School of Public Health where the geneticist was a fellow last spring – and instead lead to a third-floor studio where he works as a yoga instructor.

What started as a pandemic side interest has become a financial lifeline for Garrison-Desany after his program at Harvard lost its federal funding. Although he is used to uncertainty as a researcher living on time-limited grants, it now seems like all the doors are closing.

“They’ve changed all the rules,” he says, “and it’s really hard.”

Not only did Garrison-Desany lose his position at Harvard, his attempts to find other research work have been fruitless so far this year, even as a coauthor of published studies.

“I think until the (grant) money hits the bank account, a lot of other universities are scared to proceed with a new hire when they have other people that they’re trying to keep employed as it is.”

Many of Garrison-Desany’s studies have included research on the LGBTQ community – the kind of research that increasingly gives higher education institutions pause as the Trump administration targets diversity, equity and inclusion efforts on college campuses.

On that point, even Harvard backtracked in the spring, changing the nameof its Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging to Community and Campus Life.

“As someone who is queer, as someone who is Black, too, I worry that honestly that’s seen as a liability, just who I am,” says Garrison-Desany. “Am I automatically (seen as) DEI if I get any job?”

He moved nearly an hour away to Worcester, Massachusetts, to be closer to his parents – and in light of his new financial reality.

“I was applying for a mortgage at the time, and then this all happened, and that’s just not happening, obviously.”

Could Harvard settle and keep its academic freedom?

With no clear end in sight to Harvard’s two federal suits against the Trump administration, some in the school community are tempted by the possibility of a settlement that could reset the school’s relationship with the White House.

Gillum did not like the recent deal between the government and Columbia University, a $221 million settlement that restored the New York school’s government funding but also established an “independent monitor” to report to the Trump administration whether Columbia is meeting its end of the deal. Critics say that could chill academic freedom.

“But if they’re able to get a deal that stops the federal government from breathing down their back without placing restrictions on what we can do, then I would be fine with that,” he says.

“I wouldn’t like it, but I would be fine with it.”

Sial also recognizes the benefits a settlement could achieve, especially as someone whose ability to stay at Harvard stands in the balance. But he’s not convinced there’s any way to work an agreement that would not ultimately harm higher education.

“At this point, I don’t really care what the deal is,” the undergraduate co-president says. “The idea of having a deal itself just hands over a ‘Oh Yeah, This is Fine’ card to President Trump.”

One thing students agree on: the relief they feel that the difficult decision on whether to make a deal falls to someone else. As Harvard leaders keep those discussions behind closed doors, most students manage their concerns over the school’s future as silently as the John Harvard statue with the shiny shoe presides over the Yard.

CNN’s Betsy Klein contributed to this report.