It is a harrowing scene, captured by a security camera. A young woman on a quiet street is accosted by a man in a hoodie. He grabs her wrist; she tries to pull away. A second man emerges from behind and flashes a badge. In a matter of seconds, she is handcuffed and hustled into a vehicle enroute to incarceration on the grounds of supporting terrorists. Her crime? Co-authoring an op-ed in a student newspaper criticizing her university’s response to the pro-Palestinian movement. Her punishment? Deportation.
This is America now. The young woman, Turkish national Rumeysa Ozturk, is a Fulbright Scholar working on a PhD in child study and human development at Tufts University in Somerville, Massachusetts. She held a valid student visa until it was abruptly revoked by the State Department on the grounds that she was “supportive of movements that run counter to the foreign policy of the United States.” In response to questions about Ozturk’s detention, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters, “every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.”
I am an American citizen teaching U.S. history and politics at Leiden University. For me, the crisis unfolding in my native country elicits a unique sense of horror. But Donald J. Trump’s attack on U.S. higher education also presents opportunities for the Netherlands, as well as clear lessons on how we must protect Dutch universities in order to avoid the same fate as our colleagues across the Atlantic.
Although unfortunate, the situation in the United States presents the Netherlands with a rare opportunity. With its world-class university system, high rate of English-language literacy, and reputation for tolerance, the Netherlands could be a goldilocks destination for American scholars in exile. And thanks to a long history of Dutch trans-Atlantic engagement, the Netherlands is recognized and respected by American academics.
The exodus of U.S. scholars seeking to escape Trump’s repression has already begun. Rumeysa Ozturk is one of a growing number of academics and students who have been targeted, including Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, who was arrested in early March. A legal permanent resident, Khalil is married to a U.S. citizen. He has not been charged with a crime, yet he is being held in Louisiana, where he faces imminent deportation.
abysmal
In light of these developments, the Dutch message needs to be clear and consistent: students and faculty leaving the United States for political reasons are welcome here. So far, however, Minister of Education, Culture and Science Eppo Bruins’ handling of this issue has been unsurprisingly abysmal. Bruins’ recent announcement of a fund to attract American scholars essentially seeks to capitalize on American brain drain. It offers nothing for those suffering—like Ozturk and Khalil—from Trump’s attack on American higher education. Moreover, in light of the Dutch government’s unprecedented efforts to slash funding for higher education, Bruins’ fund for American exiles is laughably hypocritical, putting the lie to the government’s neoliberal TINA (There Is No Alternative) approach to the budget.
Put simply, if Bruins can find the money to headhunt US scholars, then he should first prioritize the quality of Dutch higher education. Likewise, the government’s crackdown on English-language programs through Internationalization in Balance Act (Wet Internationalisering in Balans, WIB) makes no sense in the context of Bruins’ effort to lure high-profile American scholars to the Netherlands. WIB will provincialize Dutch higher education, driving away international academics and making the Netherlands less competitive abroad. In other words, WIB makes it more likely that exiled American scholars will only arrive at Schiphol for a layover, not as their final destination.
tip of the iceberg
The Trump administration’s arrests are just the tip of the iceberg. In March, Trump threatened to withhold $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University unless it agreed to restrict campus protests, empower security officers, and place the Middle Eastern Studies Department under academic receivership. The administration’s decision to comply was a shocking act of cowardice in the face of Trump’s blackmail threat. Harvard and Princeton were next, and more attacks on universities will follow.
Significantly, Trump justified his actions by claiming to be protecting students against anti-Semitism—a position belied by MAGA officials’ close ties to anti-Semitic activists on the American extreme Right.
Columbia’s capitulation offers a lesson for Dutch universities. Well before Trump weaponized the anti-Semitism debate against Columbia, the university cracked down on pro-Palestinian activists, opening the gate for Trump to demand concessions. Similarly, in the Netherlands, the discourse of preventing anti-Semitism has frequently been used to disrupt both activism and academic programming addressing the crimes against humanity committed by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank.
At Leiden University, for example, pro-Palestinian activists have faced unnecessary scrutiny. The university’s use of plain clothes security personnel has been widely criticized, while the implementation of security checks—continuous in some buildings and occasional in others—has elicited complaints of racial profiling and fostered a sense that the campus is under threat. Moreover, in a clear violation of academic freedom, the university has canceled academic events on Palestine, claiming that they were not “impartial.”
remove security checks
The lesson is clear: at Leiden and at universities across the Netherlands, students and faculty must present a united front and resist intrusions that could erode our academic freedom. Given the trend towards securitization, it is an uphill battle, but there are signs of hope; more than 800 students and faculty members at Leiden, for example, recently signed a petition calling on the university to remove security checks. At the same time, we must be vigilant against those who conflate pro-Palestinian activism with support for violence against Israel.
The Columbia fiasco illuminates a broader trend in the United States: the Trump administration is targeting higher education as part of a sweeping MAGA culture war that aims to stamp out so-called wokeism. At the institutional level, universities across the U.S. are facing the possibility of losing federal funding unless they jettison diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The amount of funding in question gives Trump significant leverage. A recent study of 100 universities found that 10% to 13% of universities’ revenue typically came from federal contracts or research funding; for more prestigious research-focused institutions, the amount was even higher.
At the same time, at the individual level, academic researchers with federal funding face pressure to self-censor in order to continue their work. References to DEI, as well more than 250 words and phrases have been removed from government websites and documents, including funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF). This list allegedly includes the words “women, disability, bias, status, trauma, Black, Hispanic communities, as well as socioeconomic, ethnicity and systemic.” Despite its absurdity, the ban is real; scientists whose research is deemed inconsistent with Trump’s directive are being ordered to stop working. Combined with the ongoing chaos created by the Trump administration’s mass firing of government workers, the impact of the anti-DEI initiative on higher education will be long-lasting. As Kimryn Rathmell, former director of the National Cancer Institute put it, “discoveries are going to be delayed, if they ever happen.”
attacks on core rights
Trump’s anti-wokeism has a parallel in the Netherlands. Dutch right-wing political leaders use opposition to wokeism to advance a restrictive, discriminatory agenda. This tactic provides cover for attacks on core rights and liberties—such as denying protesters’ freedom of speech by claiming to be opposed to woke cancel culture. Anti-wokeism is also used to assail minority groups such as the LGBTQ community, or target Dutch people who are weirdly referred to in the Netherlands as hailing “from a migration background.”
Significantly, as in the United States, the Dutch right sees the university as a bastion of wokeism. “For too long, the woke activist culture has dominated lecture halls and educational institutions,” PVV MP Reinder Blaauw asserted in June 2024. The government’s massive cuts to higher education funding, Blaauw continued, would force universities “to reconsider their priorities.”
The lesson for Dutch universities is clear: we must resist the exclusionary core of the anti-woke agenda. In the face of the government’s proposed cuts to higher education, we must remain committed to academic freedom. Likewise, as we enter a new era of strained finances, supporting all of our students, regardless of background, orientation, or political views will be an increasingly important challenge.
As I write this, the fate of Rumeysa Ozturk remains unclear. “Nobody should be disappeared from the streets of Somerville — or anywhere in America,” Jessie Rossman, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, recently told reporters. To talk of individuals being disappeared in the United States for their political views is terrifying. Let’s make sure it doesn’t happen here, too.
William Michael Schmidli is a U.S. foreign relations historian and assistant professor at Leiden University