UW-Madison Engineering Hall. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that international students with ties to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in “critical fields” could have their visas revoked. Rubio didn’t define what those critical fields would be and also provided little detail when he said that the State Department would “enhance scrutiny” on new student visa applications.

The administration has also said it plans to increase the vetting of visa applicants’ social media accounts. The announcement that the administration would be revoking the visas of Chinese students came the same day the State Department announced it had paused scheduling appointments for visa applicants. 

UW-Madison had 3,414 international students from China this spring semester. In recent years, the university has worked to expand its international student body, aiming to increase the international population from 4% to 8% by 2028. The acceptance of international students helps the university increase revenue as state aid has remained flat and inflation has increased costs because international students pay an average of four times the amount of tuition as in-state students. 

The university said Thursday it is monitoring the situation. 

“We are deeply concerned about the impact of such a policy on our Chinese student community,” the university said. 

In a message to its international students, the university advised them to attend visa appointments that are already scheduled and inform university staff if an appointment is canceled. The message also told the students to schedule appointments as quickly as possible once the pause on scheduling is lifted and to enroll in classes for the fall. 

These moves are the latest in the Trump administration’s efforts to attack international student visas. Earlier this spring, the administration deleted visa records for some students over minor traffic infractions and encounters with law enforcement. That effort temporarily canceled the visas of more than two dozen students and alumni at UW schools across the state. 

The Trump administration rolled back that decision and reinstated the visas after a federal judge ruled in favor of a number of students who sued to stop the revocation.

The lobby of the Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research, where researchers say pauses to federal grants have stifled science. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

Earlier this year, Dr. Avtar Roopra, a professor of neuroscience at UW-Madison, published research that shows a drug typically used to treat arthritis halts brain-damaging seizures in mice that have a condition similar to epilepsy. The treatment could be used to provide relief for a subset of people with epilepsy who don’t get relief from other current treatments.

But even as the culmination of a decade-long project was making headlines as a possible breakthrough for the 50 million people worldwide with epilepsy, Roopra’s research was put on hold because the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under President Donald Trump has stopped reviewing grant requests. 

Now, months after his funding was paused, Roopra says he is facing the choice between cutting corners in experiments to save costs or laying off research staff — which comes with its own loss of years of experience and institutional knowledge. 

“Experiments are being trimmed down,” Roopra says. “So the perfect experiment, which is what every experiment must be, we’re now trying to reanalyze and say, ‘Well, can we get by with less?’ If we do, we’re not going to have the perfect answer, and that’s always a danger.”

Roopra’s lab is currently working on an experiment comparing data from healthy mouse brains to diseased brains and, ideally, he’d have ten of each. But to save costs he now has to use three of each. The result is that the conclusions that can be made from the data are less certain, which only creates more expenses in the long term. 

“What that means is we’ll still get some data, but the confidence we have in our conclusions will be drastically reduced,” he says. “And so any experiments we then decide to do based on that will be on more shaky ground, and experiments further on that will be on even shakier ground. And so you have this propagating knock-on effect, but ultimately, the conclusions you get, they’re going to have to be interpreted cautiously, whereas, if we did the perfect experiment for which we were expecting funds, we would have robust data, robust conclusions. We could move forward, forthright into trials.”

Science is expensive, Roopra says, because results have to be replicated many times. Cutting grant funding, as the Trump administration has done, results in austerity measures at labs and universities. Those budget cuts mean experiments aren’t repeated as many times, which means data isn’t as complete and results in less work reaching the end goal — treatments that improve people’s lives. 

Roopra says that when a patient sees a doctor and is prescribed a drug, that is just the tip of an iceberg, underneath which are the thousands of hours of research and millions of dollars spent at pharmaceutical companies conducting clinical trials and university departments testing theories.

“So it’s actually going to cost everybody more money if we do it this way, because we have to go back,” he says. “And once this moves to clinical trials, which is our goal, if we don’t have the very best, the most solid foundation for doing so, if that trial goes ahead and it fails, it may never be done again. Because trials cost hundreds of millions of dollars, you’ve got to get it right the first time. So that’s what this new normal looks like.”

Roopra’s work is just one research focus in one department on one campus. Wisconsin institutions alone receive about $750 million annually from the NIH. The Medical College of Wisconsin has lost at least $5 million in research grants since Trump took office. 

The cuts affect “every lab, every department, and we’re very biomedical-research centric, but it’s also happening outside of biomedical research,” Dr. Betsy Quinlan, chair of UW-Madison’s neuroscience department, says. “It’s happening in physics and it’s happening in engineering. It’s happening to all research, environmental science.”

Researchers in Wisconsin have had at least $26.8 million in expected grant funding terminated, according to data compiled by Grant Watch, a project to track cuts to grant funding at the NIH and National Science Foundation (NSF). 

“I’ve heard a lot of panic in the community as if the support that the federal government has for science has ended and that science is no longer the priority,” NIH director Jay Bhattacharya said at an event at the Medical College of Wisconsin earlier this month. “One of the reasons I was delighted to be able to come here was to assure people that is not true.”

Nonetheless, among the terminated grants here in Wisconsin are projects to study science misinformation in Black communities, how to engage the public in water stewardship in urban areas such as Milwaukee, the effect of technology on children’s development, the cardiovascular side effects of hormone treatment on transgender men and ways to increase HIV prevention measures among gay men in rural areas. 

“It’s vital that we adopt reforms, real reforms in the research enterprise of this country, so that we depoliticize it, ground it in reality and build a culture of respect for dissent and free speech,” Bhattacharya said.

But discoveries can come from unexpected places, says Quinlan, who warns that the top-down approach to approving research grants that the administration appears to be moving toward will stifle scientific exploration. 

“If the agency says, ‘Here’s a very narrow range of things we will fund,’ it will squash all creativity and real discovery, because real discovery comes when you see something that is unexpected and you follow the unexpected lead,” she says. 

While the cuts to grants are having an immediate impact on research in Wisconsin, there are also concerns about morale among lab staff and a “brain drain” as researchers choose to leave the U.S.  or even abandon science entirely. 

“The biggest problem I think most researchers are facing is the uncertainty and decline in morale that these changes have wrought,” Jo Handelsman, director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, says. “These are extremely real and fairly devastating effects on the research community in terms of what’s already happened, almost every week there’s a wave of NIH termination. No one feels their grant is going to continue for sure. That’s a difficult way to do research.”

For decades, scientists have come from all over the world to work in the U.S. Now cuts to grants and the Trump administration’s harsh immigration policies are changing that. Last week, after decisions from a number of judges, the Trump administration walked back an effort to cancel the visas of 27 students at University of Wisconsin schools. Roopra says those fears hurt research. 

“Every minute that that researcher is worried is a minute they’re not thinking about the science,” says Roopra, whose work has also focused on breast cancer. “And so what it looks like is a continuous, chronic fear, which pushes us to think about maybe looking at other options, which we’d rather not do.”

Bascom Hall, University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Ron Cogswell | used by permission of the photographer)

Madison attorney Shabnam Lotfi says her client, Krish Lal Isserdasani, was exceptionally responsible in the way he handled the news that the Trump administration had suddenly taken away his student visa.

Isserdasani, a 21-year-old computer engineering senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from India, was about a month out from his graduation on May 10 when he became one of thousands of students across the U.S. that had their Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) records cancelled by the Trump administration. According to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, SEVIS is a “web-based system for maintaining information on nonimmigrant students and exchange visitors” in the U.S. Once SEVIS records were canceled, students faced the termination of their student visas and their ability to remain in the U.S.

UW-Madison notified students of the changes to their SEVIS status, warning them that status termination generally means an affected person should depart the United States immediately.

“I admire him for acting quickly,” Lotfi told the Wisconsin Examiner. “He saw that his SEVIS record was terminated, immediately contacted the university to see what it means, did not attend classes for a week to figure out what’s going on, [and] hired a lawyer immediately.” 

In April, U.S. District Judge William Conley issued a temporary restraining order blocking the government from terminating Isserdasani’s SEVIS and from taking any further related actions. That order noted Isserdasani and his family had spent about $240,000 on his education, stood to lose $17,500 on the current semester’s tuition and would be responsible for four months of rent on an apartment he would vacate if he was forced to leave the country. 

With the temporary restraining order in place and providing some protection, Lotfi said he was able to resume attending classes. 

“That doesn’t necessarily mean he feels entirely welcome and free and comfortable,” Lotfi said, “but he’s doing the best he can with the cards he has in the situation.” 

At the end of April, the Trump administration started reversing the cancellations. Administration attorneys said in court that they were working on developing a policy that would provide a framework for SEVIS record terminations. Lotfi said she is “aware of what they’re thinking about” and that if they’re trying to find a way to make the terminations lawful, that “will likely be challenged again.”

Lotfi said the Trump administration’s step back from the cancellations is a win. This is not the first time she has fought a Trump order involving immigrants, having brought a challenge in 2018 to the Muslim travel ban during Trump’s first term.

“It was a coalition of attorneys nationwide bringing so many [temporary restraining orders], so many lawsuits on behalf of so many students all at the same time — and the government not having any defense to any of it — that caused them to have to reevaluate,” Lotfi said.

As of April 28, the 27 cancellations for UW-Madison students and alumni were reversed as were the 13 for UW-Milwaukee. However, the reversals are not the end of Isserdasani’s case.

When it comes to his case, Lotfi said it appeared during a hearing last week that the government attorneys were not changing their plan to eject Isserdasani based on the administration’s perceived change in stance on international students’ visas. She said the government’s attorney indicated her client’s SEVIS record was only active because of the temporary restraining order and that “it was not related to any change in a government policy.”

“The government attorneys also indicated that they maintain their right to terminate his SEVIS record again in the future should that be necessary,” Lotfi said. “It certainly surprised me, and I think it surprised the court that they were taking that position.” 

Lotfi noted that the government attorneys in Isserdasani’s case have been arguing, based on a declaration by Andre Watson, a Trump Department of Homeland Security official, that the SEVIS record and a student’s visa status are not the same. She said no one is buying the argument. 

“The vast majority of judges nationwide are asking, then, why do you terminate the SEVIS record? What was the point of doing this? If you guys say that SEVIS and student status are not the same, does that mean that Mr. Isserdasani is in a lawful student status right now?” Lotfi said. “They won’t say that. They’ll just say that the two are not the same, but they will not confirm that he is in a lawful student status with the SEVIS terminated.”

The case challenges the cancellation of the record in several ways, including arguing that the government cannot just take away his status without due process — the ability for him to know why his SEVIS is being terminated and to challenge the termination — and arguing the cancellation was arbitrary and capricious.

“It’s not that Isserdasani failed to go to class. It’s not that he had a criminal activity [or] he was convicted of criminal activity. It’s just because his name [was] in a database,” Lotfi said. In determining cancellations, the Trump administration had run international students’ names through an FBI database called the National Crime Information Center. It appeared that an arrest for disorderly conduct in November 2024 was the reason for Isserdasani’s SEVIS cancellation, but charges were never pursued and he never had to appear in court.

Lotfi said she and her client are waiting for the court’s written decision on whether the temporary restraining order will be converted to a preliminary injunction, which would prevent actions by the government through the course of litigation. Then, she said, litigation will continue, which can take time.

“It is in the interest of justice, and in the interest of the American people, that a final decision on the merits of the case is issued,” Lotfi said.

Lotfi said people shouldn’t accept the Trump administration’s accusations against foreign students as true.

“These students are in a foreign country. Many have learned a second language… They are young and alone without family. They are following this country’s rules and regulations, and they didn’t do anything wrong,” Lotfi said. “They don’t deserve this.”

“If it’s a U.S. citizen, we say innocent until proven guilty… Why do we not have that same mindset when it comes to foreign nationals?” she added. “It just seems like any arrest for anything then that’s guilt, and that’s not the case. We would never allow that for any of our neighbors, so we should not accept the administration’s description of international students having violated their status when they didn’t.”

Bascom Hall, University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Ron Cogswell | used by permission of the photographer)

With the 100th day of President Donald Trump’s second term in office approaching, University of Wisconsin-Madison professors and staff met Thursday to take stock of the growing threats to higher education and U.S. democracy and to discuss collective action to push back. 

UW-Madison professor Mark Copelevitch said the threats to higher education are “unprecedented because it’s happening in America” yet compared the current moment to a movie that historians and experts have seen “over and over again.” 

Copelovitch described the current U.S. system of government as competitive authoritarianism. He said comparisons for what is happening today don’t have to go back to 1930s Germany — recent examples are  Viktor Orban in Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. 

“Universities are centers of independent ideas and dissent. Professors are attacked by populist and nationalist leaders as being the radical elite,” Copelovitch said.

University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty, including Copelovitch and other professors were gathered for panels organized by the Public Representation Organization of the Faculty Senate (PROFS) and the Academic Staff Professionals Representation Organization (ASPRO) to discuss shared challenges and the prospects for collective action to defend higher education.

UW-Madison is facing an array of challenges to its operations due to the federal government as over $12 million in research grants to UW-Madison have been cut and caps on indirect cost reimbursements for research grants at 15% represent another significant cut to research funds, and dozens of students across UW campuses and other schools had their visas cancelled. Copelovitch said it is part of a greater attempt to exert influence over the shape of universities across the country.

“What’s happening at Madison [is] terrible and horrible and has real world consequences specifically here,” Copelovitch said. “But again, it is part of a broader pattern that is affecting all the universities across the country. So far, most universities have treated the problems as institution-specific symptoms… That is the big challenge right now. How do you get dozens, if not hundreds of institutions, to start acting collectively to push back against this?”

The panelists said one of the big challenges that universities face is explaining to the public how their budgets work and the impacts of potential cuts.

UW-Madison Veterinary Medicine Research Administration Director Jenny Dahlberg said one lost grant will be “much more broad reaching” than some imagine. “This is an entire generation of scientists that no longer will have opportunities to conduct research. That is alarming,” she said. 

Dahlberg said faculty and staff need to find a way to protect their ability to speak freely about research and to train the next generation. 

Copelovitch said universities will have to communicate to the public about their budgets and recent attacks on academic freedom, and explain that if those things continue it “ultimately means that the universities that people think they’re going to send their kids to eventually are just not going to exist in that format.”

Don Moynihan, a University of Michigan professor and previously a UW-Madison faculty member, said conversations about whether universities are too reliant on federal funding miss the point. He said that investments into research at universities were part of a deal between universities and the government created at the end of World War II. 

“If you will help us with our goals of building out research infrastructure, we will ensure a steady flow of resources into that research infrastructure,” Moynihan said. “Now, we have one of those partners basically withdrawing from the partnership and not just withdrawing from the partnership, but also trying to dictate what the other party does, even though they’re bringing less resources to the table and that activity violated that contract.” 

Moynihan said there’s no way to manage the budget holes that could be created by cuts and that it’s not really feasible that the private sector could fill to gap.

“You’re going to accept or live with a much smaller campus that does much less research…  and that story will be true across lots of other research areas,” Moynihan said. 

Moynihan said the Trump’s administration’s letter to Harvard University, which demanded changes to its administration, student admissions process and called for audits into “DEI” across the campus, lays out a “full menu” of administration priorities. The administration said it would also be cutting over $2 billion in federal grants to the school. 

Moynihan said that it’s clear that individual universities making side deals won’t be a viable strategy. 

“Without collective action, there is not going to be any effective pushback against this administration,” Moynihan said.

Copelovitch said that he has been “heartened” to see the pushback in the last few weeks. UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin signed a letter together with hundreds of other higher education leaders to speak against the “unprecedented government overreach” and the “political interference now endangering American higher education.”  

Copelovitch said discussions about universities banding together, including a recent proposal that  Big Ten schools form a NATO-like agreement, will also be key. 

“No chancellor or provost is going to stick their neck out and lead the fray. Harvard is doing it a little bit, and Harvard can afford to do it, but leaders of any individual public institution are not going to do that, so there’s a need to speak collectively,” Copelovitch said. 

“Fragility” of U.S. democracy

The upheaval in U.S. institutions has gone beyond higher education, and at a separate event, titled “The Fragility and Performance of Democracy in the U.S.” hosted by the Elections Research Center on Thursday afternoon, focused on analyzing Trump’s attacks on the U.S. administrative state and the consolidation of executive power .

UW-Madison professor and director of the Elections Research Center Barry Burden said he didn’t think “any of us imagined we would see the kind of chaos that we’ve experienced these first 100 days,” but said the second Trump administration “has been so massively disruptive” and is “pushing the limits of what a democratic system can handle.” 

“It is doing things that previously seemed illegal, impossible, unimaginable or unconstitutional, and they’re happening daily and often with people who are not really part of the government or part of his party — people like Elon Musk and others — being brought in to do the hatchet work on federal agencies,” Burden said. 

Burden said that Trump is showing warning signs of a “personalized” president, which is often a warning sign for democracies. 

“We’ve seen in other countries where a fairly elected leader, and [Trump] is a fairly elected leader, can nonetheless abuse the government against their enemies and make it a kind of weapon — whether it’s using the IRS for political purposes, or threatening judges or intimidating universities or journalists,” Burden said. “All of those things are using his power as president to get parts of society to bow to him and serve his interests.” 

Burden said the protests being held across the country at state Capitols, in small cities and towns — including in Wisconsin — in recent weeks are a sign that civil society is starting to rise up in opposition. 

“We’ve seen the public come back out of its hiding,” Burden said. He added that unpopularity amongst the public and public resistance — along with accountability by the courts and the media — are what has been essential in resisting autocrats in eastern Europe and Latin America as well. “It’s all hands on deck, really, to stop a democratic government from sliding away.”

Burden said that people need to understand their place in upholding democracy.

“Democracy needs people to keep it flourishing,” Burden said. “It doesn’t operate on its own. We often think of it as a kind of system. You write a constitution, and it exists, and it’s in place, and it will just continue. That’s not how it works. It has to be sustained and tended to and protected. It takes a whole bunch of different actors. It takes the public being vigilant. It takes journalists, media outlets holding government accountable, and transmitting what’s happening. … and it takes political parties to govern themselves and keep bad elements out of government.”