On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends First,” Harvard Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics Kit Parker said that it’s best if the Trump administration and Harvard’s administration meet and try to resolve the conflict between the two and the Trump administration’s request for a list of foreign students is “perfectly reasonable, it’s fair, and I think it’s prudent.”
Co-host Carley Shimkus asked, “[D]o you foresee a situation where Harvard’s president will meet with or try and work with the Trump administration surrounding all of this?”
Parker answered, “I certainly hope so. And I’ve been encouraging that on our campus for months now. If President Trump will meet with Putin or he’ll meet with Kim, he’ll certainly meet with President Garber. You should always be talking to your enemies so you can avoid a conflict that’s going to hurt both sides. Certainly, this conflict is going to hurt both sides. The only people winning right now [are] the Chinese Communist Party, who [have] got to be laughing at the way our institutions of higher learning are disassembling themselves over the last several years and this current battle with the government.”
Later, Shimkus asked, “[O]ne of President Trump’s demands, Kit, is for Harvard to provide a list of its foreign students so that they can be vetted. I think we know about President Trump’s personality to know that it will likely bother him to no end to see foreign protesters protesting at Harvard and learn that 27% of its enrollees come from other countries. So, do you think that that is a demand that Harvard will work with the President on and provide that list? I think it might go a long way in going back to normalcy here.”
Parker responded, “I think it’s a reasonable request on the part of the President. I think it’s a reasonable request on the part of the State Department to follow up on these students who have been given visas to come here to the U.S. For the most part, they’re studying hard, they’ve come to these beacons of democracy called American universities, they’re working very hard for us, and many of them want to stay here. It’s a privilege to come here to the United States to study. And our institutions of higher education are soft power projection platforms, and in a knowledge economy, they’re very important to the nation’s interest. They’re certainly important to President Trump’s vision of a golden age, where, post-COVID-19 pandemic — after the Plague, there was a Renaissance period, great advances in science and culture — I think we’re posed to see the same thing now. And these universities are going to be the hubs of this Renaissance period…it’s important that the universities are secured, the same way the Italian port cities were and that we’re all aligned going forward. So, I think it’s — the President’s request, the administration’s request is perfectly reasonable, it’s fair, and I think it’s prudent.”
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