Sawt Falasteen - Harvard holds graduation in shadow of Trump threat

Hundreds of robed students and academics squeezed onto the steps of the campus's main library as Trump piles unprecedented pressure onto the university, one of the most prestigious in the world.

The president is seeking to ban Harvard from having foreign students, shredding its federal contracts, slashing its multibillion-dollar grants and challenging its tax-free status.

The Ivy League institution has continually drawn Trump's ire while publicly rejecting his administration's repeated demands to give up control of recruitment, curricula and research choices.

The government claims Harvard tolerates anti-Semitism and liberal bias.

"Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they're doing is getting in deeper and deeper," Trump said Wednesday.

Harvard president Alan Garber got a huge cheer Thursday when he mentioned international students attending the graduation with their families, saying it was "as it should be" -- but Garber did not mention the Trump fight directly.

Garber has acknowledged that Harvard does have issues with anti-Semitism and that it has struggled to ensure that a variety of views can be safely heard on campus.

Ahead of the ceremony, members of the Harvard band sporting distinctive crimson blazers and brandishing their instruments filed through the narrow streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts -- home to the elite school, America's oldest university.

In front of a huge stage, hundreds of chairs were laid out in a grassy precinct that was closed off to the public as the event got under way.

Students wearing black academic gowns toured through Cambridge with family members taking photographs.

Madeleine Riskin-Kutz, a Franco-American classics and linguistics student at Harvard, said some students were planning individual acts of protest against the Trump policies.

"The atmosphere (is) that just continuing on joyfully with the processions and the fanfare is in itself an act of resistance," the 22-year-old said.

- Court battles -

Garber has led the legal fightback in US academia after Trump targeted several prestigious universities -- including Columbia, which made sweeping concessions to the administration in an effort to restore $400 million of withdrawn federal grants.

A federal judge in Boston will on Thursday hear arguments over Trump's effort to exclude Harvard from the main system for sponsoring and hosting foreign students.

Judge Allison Burroughs has temporarily paused the policy which would have ended Harvard's ability to bring students from abroad who currently make up 27 percent of its student body.

Harvard has since been flooded with inquiries from foreign students seeking to transfer to other institutions, Maureen Martin, director of immigration services, said Wednesday.

"Many international students and scholars are reporting significant emotional distress that is affecting their mental health and making it difficult to focus on their studies," Martin wrote in a court filing.

Retired immigration judge Patricia Sheppard protested outside Harvard Yard on Wednesday, sporting a black judicial robe and brandishing a sign reading "for the rule of law."

Basketball star and human rights campaigner Kareem Abdul-Jabbar addressed the class of 2025 for Class Day on Wednesday.

"When a tyrannical administration tried to bully and threaten Harvard to give up their academic freedom and destroy free speech, Dr. Alan Garber rejected the illegal and immoral pressures," he said, comparing Garber to civil rights icon Rosa Parks.

H.Jarrar--SF-PST