“Harvard University sued the Trump administration for a second time on Friday, less than 24 hours after the Department of Homeland Security said it would block international students from attending the nation’s oldest university and one of its most prestigious,” the New York Times reports.

“The lawsuit, and a letter issued by Dr. Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, signified a dramatic escalation of the battle between the administration and Harvard. And the university’s forceful and almost immediate response served as evidence that stopping the flow of international students to Harvard, which draws some of the world’s top scholars, would destabilize Harvard’s very existence.”

CNBC: Harvard sues Trump administration over ban on international student enrollment.

“The Trump administration’s sudden move to bar foreign students at Harvard University is seen as dealing a blow to the US’s standing in business — and handing an advantage to elite rival colleges across the English-speaking world,” Bloomberg reports.

Bloomberg: “The assault on a beacon of US education ostensibly in the name of tackling anti-semitism is the latest move that erodes the nation’s soft power globally. The administration has cut funding or dissolved institutions including USAID, Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.”

“Other universities in the US and internationally are likely to capitalize on Harvard’s plight, snatching the smartest minds — dozens of Nobel laureates attended or taught at the school. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has already offered to unconditionally accept Harvard students.”

The Guardian: China pledges support for overseas students after Trump’s latest attack on Harvard.

“The Trump administration on Thursday halted Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, a major escalation in the administration’s efforts to pressure the college to fall in line with the president’s agenda,” the New York Times reports.

A federal judge in Boston has blocked President Trump’s executive order to shut down the Department of Education, the Washington Post reports.

The order says the Trump administration must “restore the Department to the status quo such that it is able to carry out its statutory functions.”

“The Trump administration is investigating whether Harvard’s admissions policies comply with a Supreme Court ruling that ended affirmative action, opening a new front in its widening effort to bring the institution to heel,” the New York Times reports.

“The investigation adds to the mounting pressure on the nation’s oldest, wealthiest university to overhaul its admissions, curriculum and hiring practices to align with President Trump’s political agenda.”

“The Trump administration has sharply expanded its campaign against experts who track misinformation and other harmful content online, abruptly canceling scores of scientific research grants at universities across the country,” the New York Times reports.

“The Trump administration announced Tuesday that it is cutting an additional $450 million in grants to Harvard University through eight federal agencies, on top of the $2.2 billion already frozen last week,” CNBC reports.

A new AP-NORC poll finds just 27% of Americans support withholding federal funding from universities for noncompliance with the president’s goals or removing their tax-exempt status.

“Sixty-four percent of adults think that colleges and universities make positive contributions to medical and scientific research and 63% feel they encourage new ideas and innovative technology.”

Rose Horowitz: “The latest letter to Harvard makes clear that the administration’s goal is to punish liberal institutions for the crime of being liberal.”

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg roasted Education Secretary Linda McMahon for confusing artificial intelligence development as “A1” as he torched President Donald Trump’s cabinet as incompetent, Mediaite reports.

McMahon repeatedly referred to AI as “A1” multiple times while speaking at an education summit in San Diego.

Said Buttigieg: “Like I love A1 Steak Sauce, but A1 steak sauce is not one of the most important things confronting humanity right now. Artificial intelligence is. And somebody who doesn’t understand that probably should not be leading an important federal agency.”

“Voters in suburban Texas came out handily over the weekend to vote out school board trustees touting book removals across districts and elect first-time candidates in opposition of such removals — a clear protest against titles flying off school library and classroom shelves,” the Houston Chronicle reports.

“Emmanuel Macron has warned that Donald Trump’s crackdown on U.S. scientific research threatens America’s economy and democracy, as the French leader and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen made a pitch to researchers to come to Europe instead,” the Financial Times reports.

Said Macron: “No one could have thought that the world’s biggest democracy, whose economic model relies so heavily on science, on innovation and on its ability…  to have disseminated this innovation more widely than its European peers, would make such a mistake. But here we are.”

“The federal government on Monday will resume collecting defaulted student loan payments from millions of people for the first time since the start of the pandemic,” NBC News reports.

“The Trump administration said it would collect the debt through a Treasury Department program that withholds payments through tax refunds, wages and government benefits.”

New York Times: “Mr. Trump’s attacks on this elite group — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania — have endeared him to his political base. He is withholding, or threatening to withhold, billions of dollars in federal funding from six of the eight schools because, he says, they are citadels of antisemitism and liberal indoctrination…”

“The Trump administration has targeted many other colleges and universities for potential antisemitism, some 60 in all. And yet the eight Ivies are cultural touchstones for Mr. Trump. Beyond the politics is a complex brew of resentment and reverence that the president, an Ivy League graduate himself, has long harbored for a club that has never really accepted him.”

Harvard University President Alan Garber fought back against President Trump’s renewed threat to revoke the school’s tax-exempt status, telling the Wall Street Journal that the move would be “highly illegal” and “destructive to Harvard.”

“Beginning in the 2025-26 school year, thousands of high school students in Oklahoma will be required to learn about President Trump’s debunked claims that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud,” Popular Information reports.

“The lesson will not be part of a course on conspiracy theories, but an official component of the new social studies curriculum created by Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters (R).

The new curriculum includes the following: “Identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends.”