The Process is the Punishment

Harvard in the "Break Room" in Noem's High-Stakes Procedural Game

In Severance, employees who violate company protocols are sent to the “Break Room”—a sterile chamber where they must repeatedly recite apologies until their contrition reaches the exact emotional tenor their overseer demands.

The name carries a cruel double meaning: it's where psychological resistance is broken through endless repetition, but also where the employee's former self breaks apart, severed from any continuity with who they were before.

The torture isn't in the words themselves but in the dual nature of the breaking—the simultaneous crushing of will and dissolution of identity. Release depends not on truth or justice but on performing submission so completely that both the person and their past cease to exist as unified wholes.

Harvard Enters the “Break Room”

The Trump administration has discovered its own Break Room for American universities: immigration enforcement as procedural warfare, where international students are treated as pawns, not people.

Harvard now faces a 72-hour deadline to maintain its ability to enroll international students—27% of its student body—with no specific violations cited, no clear path to compliance, only the demand to perform institutional contrition.

Legal merit becomes secondary when uncertainty itself is the weapon, inflicting damage regardless of the outcome. The goal is to prolong the conflict, even if it's unlikely the government will prevail in court.

To be clear: Harvard has real problems to solve, documented in a damning report on antisemitism and abysmal free speech rankings.

But weaponizing SEVP certification to force international students to transfer universities mid-program or those on OPT (who cannot transfer) to leave the US immediately doesn’t solve those problems.

Breaking apart world-class graduate research teams isn't reform—it's political theater dressed as policy, where international students become “acceptable collateral damage” in a proxy culture war.

Steven Pinker warns: “To cripple the institutions that acquire and transmit knowledge is a tragic blunder and a crime against future generations.” And Former Harvard President Larry Summers condemned the self-destruction of America’s research capacity as a “strategic gift to… enemies of freedom around the world.”

The Stakes are America’s Scientific Leadership, Not Next Year’s Tuition Revenue

International students comprise 27% of Harvard's total student population.

International undergraduates, anxious about the news, have been assured by immigration attorneys that they are legally allowed to attend next week’s commencement. The cruelty is the question—why should students who've worked hard for four years have to wonder if they'll be allowed to walk at their own graduation?

But too much analysis fixates on the $384.5 million in lost tuition revenue: Harvard doesn't need international students' money—it needs their minds–their contributions to the cultural and intellectual vibrancy of the campus that makes Harvard, Harvard.

International students don't just “fill seats”—they are the backbone of American scientific leadership.

Harvard’s graduate programs would be hit hardest if the SEVP de-certification goes into effect:

• Harvard Kennedy School: 59% international students

• Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health: 40% international students

• Harvard Business School: 35% international students

• Harvard Graduate School of Education: 42% international students

Forcing mid-program transfers to other universities doesn't just disrupt their education—it dismantles research teams that took years to assemble.

And don’t forget Harvard students on Optional Practical Training (OPT). They can’t transfer and will be forced to quit their jobs and immediately return home.

Here’s what should keep policymakers up at night:

If talent redirects to Singapore or Switzerland, if research teams reconvene in Paris or Zurich, they won’t come back when the political winds shift. America's scientific leadership wasn't inevitable—it was engineered through deliberate policy choices, now being reversed, sending America’s best scientists elsewhere.

The revocation of Harvard’s SEVP certification also threatens Harvard’s ability to maintain a high proportion of international students and faculty. Harvard sits atop the Times Higher Education (#3) rankings and QS World University Rankings (#4). Both assign significant weight to internationalization, and a drop in international enrollment or faculty will negatively affect their position.

The Power of the “Break Room” is in “Demonstration Effects”

By attacking Harvard—the king, not the pawns—the administration executes a strategy that reflects classic game theory.

Harvard's capitulation would cascade through higher education—if Harvard can't resist, who can? Meanwhile, Harvard's resistance generates exactly the media circus that makes for good political theatre, incentivizing other universities to keep their heads down rather than risk becoming the next target.

An effective response requires precisely the kind of coordinated response the “demonstration effect” is designed to prevent. Each university watches the others, calculating when their turn in the administrative Break Room might come, wondering if compliance will mean survival or merely a different form of breaking.

Secretary Noem explicitly acknowledges the demonstration strategy: "Consequences must follow to send a clear signal to Harvard and all universities that want to enjoy the privilege of enrolling foreign students."

The result is asymmetrical:

Harvard faces catastrophic losses—27% of students, hundreds of millions in revenue, disrupted research—while the government's cost is minimal.

This transforms what could have been a coordination game—where Harvard and the government negotiate toward mutual benefit—into a battle of attrition, where each side simply tries to outlast the other, the government with the upper hand.

But “demonstration effects” cut both ways.

As Former Harvard President Larry Summers told POLITICO: “Courage and capitulation are both contagious. I am glad Harvard chose courage, because if Harvard, with all its good fortune, can’t resist authoritarian steps, who can?”

Harvard's defense creates positive externalities across higher education by establishing legal precedents and proving that institutional autonomy and academic freedom remain protected.

Harvard immediately filed a complaint citing "irreparable harm", "devastating effect", and a "cascade of negative consequences" the SEVP decertification poses to its academic enterprise. On Friday, a federal judge granted Harvard a temporary restraining order to stop the decertification from taking immediate effect.

The “Game” is Attrition, Where The Process is the Punishment

The 72-hour compliance deadline in Noem’s letter does not follow the standard 30-day Notice of Intent to Withdraw certification (NOIW), creating its own temporal Break Room—where time itself becomes a tool of pressure, where the only escape is perfect performance of administrative contrition — raising many legal questions:

• How will courts evaluate the administration’s claim that Harvard’s responses to information requests were “insufficient,” given the lack of specificity in DHS’s revocation notice?

• Does the revocation constitute unlawful retaliation for Harvard’s refusal to disclose protest-related student records or alter its policies on free speech?

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes the letter contains "no evidence of Harvard's violations." He notes: "Nothing alleges ANY specific violation. He cites no law violated, no regulation broken, no policy ignored.”

Will Creeley, legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), called the government's actions "retaliatory and unlawful," particularly criticizing demands that Harvard provide "footage of international students protesting on campus." He characterized this as "a sweeping fishing expedition [that] reaches protected expression and must be flatly rejected." And Greg Lukianoff, FIRE’s CEO, called it “one of the more chilling things I've seen in my career.“

So, why did Noem send a letter with such a thin legal basis?

The administration has recognized a strategic reality of regulatory enforcement:

The process is the punishment.

Extended legal battles create prolonged uncertainty that achieves the administration’s policy goals even if their legal strategies prove unsuccessful.

The asymmetry of attrition favors the government:

Harvard bleeds talent and reputation by the day, while the government pays only in billable hours. The asymmetry is designed to be unbearable. The legal outcome matters less than the length the ordeal can be prolonged.

If Harvard wins, it becomes a pyrrhic victory, arriving after months (or years) of hemorrhaging talent and reputation. And, if Harvard loses, the university that emerges from procedural compliance is functionally severed from its former self—technically operational but missing the vital connections that once made it whole.

The “Logic” is Political Theatre, Not Smart Science and Innovation Policy

Analysts and parents trying to make rational sense of this unprecedented action—confused why America would self-inflict such economic and scientific damage on it’s universities—undervalue how much this is base politics dressed as principle.

This exemplifies what Michael Beckley calls America's transformation into a "rogue superpower"—neither internationalist nor isolationist but aggressively self-interested. This new politics is part political theatre, part game theory, and part derangement syndrome—where the Trump administration risks America’s academic reputation in a political environment where taking on elite institutions scores domestic political points.

By attacking Harvard's ability to enroll international students, the Trump administration scores a political trifecta: claiming to fight antisemitism, punishing coastal elites, and protecting "real Americans" from foreigners who "take their seats"—all while generating headlines that energize every segment of their base.

Steven Pinker, no apologist for Harvard, diagnoses the current assault as 'Harvard Derangement Syndrome'—a condition where critics engage in 'black-and-white splitting' that prevents them from seeing the institution as anything but pure evil.

This strategy forces rational analysts into an impossible position: acknowledging real problems risks validating the extreme rhetoric of Harvard as a “Maoist indoctrination camp”, while defending the institution appears indifferent to legitimate concerns about antisemitism. There's no winning move in this game.

But, as Fanta Aw warns, “We turn global talent away at our own expense.”

The Solution is Coordination Against the Isolating “Break Room” Strategy

Secretary Noem’s letter to Harvard is not the only issue on the horizon. President Trump’s immigration nominee vowed to end Optional Practical Training (OPT), which would upend the lives of almost a quarter-million international students.

The administration is constructing Break Rooms—spaces that carry Severance's double meaning: institutional autonomy broken through procedural torture, as international students are “acceptable collateral damage”, their lives broken apart.

This is precisely why isolated resistance plays into the administration's hands. When Harvard fights alone, its prolonged struggle becomes a warning to every other institution: this could be you. Social media calls for Harvard to "resist" miss game theory—success requires coordination. The sector needs more than Harvard's solitary resistance; it needs collective refusal to enter the Break Room one by one.

The Trump administration's unprecedented assault demands equally unprecedented coordination from America's highly decentralized higher education system: joint legal strategies, unified messaging, and most critically, a willingness to commit resources and accept short-term costs for long-term survival.

There are clear signs that coordination is happening:

• The AAC&U's Call to Constructive Engagement, signed by hundreds of university presidents, marks a beginning.

• Harvard has joined with MIT and other leading universities in filing joint amicus briefs and legal challenges in federal court, demonstrating a willingness to coordinate legal strategy.

• The Association of American Universities (AAU) and the American Council on Education (ACE) have coordinated closely with university leaders in response to major federal policy changes.

• Harvard has collaborated with peer institutions to issue joint op-eds and coordinated social media messaging, amplifying the sector’s voice and signaling a collective front.

These leaders understand the stakes: not next year's enrollment numbers, but the foundational principle that American higher education stands for intellectual freedom. The reputation that took centuries to build—making America the world's scientific leader—cannot be desecrated through proxy culture wars.

Harvard's vigorous defense demonstrates it recognizes the existential threat to itself and American higher education.

Universities cannot simply go through the motions of research and education once severed from their essential purpose. That severance strikes at their very identity—intellectual freedom isn't just what universities do, it's what they are.

Once broken, this core identity doesn't heal. American higher education would become just another national myth that couldn't survive contact with the new political reality.