International Student Visa Rule Blocked
A new U.S. Department of Homeland Security rule governing international visas for students, visiting scholars, and journalists was temporarily stayed in September by a federal judge. The rule would have capped the length of a standard student visa at four years and limited students’ ability to leave and re-enter the country without reauthorization. The average doctoral degree in the United States requires more than seven years of study.
U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV, J.D. ’81, wrote that “the weakness of the connection between the rule and its purported rationales raises legitimate questions as to whether its real purpose is not to safeguard national security and protect our borders,” as the government contends, “but to achieve other, undisclosed, goals—such as, for example, asserting greater government control over academic institutions and the press.” He cited two earlier Trump administration actions: an attempt to revoke Harvard’s authorization to enroll international students, and a presidential proclamation that would have prevented foreign students intending to attend Harvard from entering the U.S. The government’s latest rule would affect colleges and universities across the country. The lawsuit, brought by a coalition of education and labor groups, is ongoing.
FAS Reprises $100 Million Ph.D. Fund Drive
An endowment drive to fund Ph.D. students in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), launched in February, reached its $100 million goal in just four months. The money will support fellowships for 50 doctoral students across all three segments of the FAS (science, social science, and arts and humanities), as well as in the Harvard Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The fundraising effort was seeded by $50 million in donations from a group of alumni amid deep financial and political disruption. In November 2025, the division had announced that it would cut the number of doctoral students admitted to its science programs by 50 percent in response to ongoing uncertainty about federal funding and persistent efforts by the Trump administration to block research grants and contracts to Harvard.
Now, FAS leaders have launched a second $100 million matching-gift challenge, sparked by contributions from another group of donors. Edgerley family dean of the FAS Hopi Hoekstra announced in September that she has asked divisional deans to restore Ph.D. admissions to 80 percent of their historical levels. She also established a committee to develop “a principled framework to guide decisions about the number of Ph.D. students we can responsibly support and mentor.”
Harvard Settles Body Parts Case
In August, Harvard agreed to pay $53 million to compensate the families of people whose remains were stolen from the Harvard Medical School (HMS) morgue and sold on the black market. Cedric Lodge, the morgue’s former manager, was indicted—and fired by Harvard—in 2023 after a federal investigation found that he was part of a criminal network that bought and sold human remains across the country. From 2018 through 2022, Lodge stole body parts from cadavers that had been donated for research and teaching through the Anatomical Gift Program at HMS. Lodge was one of seven people prosecuted and the only Harvard employee. In December 2025, he was sentenced to eight years in prison, after pleading guilty to one count of interstate transport of human remains. HMS has since made substantial improvements to its Anatomical Gift Program and, as part of the settlement, established an annual financial aid scholarship honoring anatomical donors, beginning in the 2027-2028 academic year.
Antisemitism Case Dismissed
A federal judge in Boston has dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit that accused Harvard of violating civil rights law by continuing to foster antisemitism on campus. In a four-page memorandum and order, U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns, J.D. ’76, noted that the government’s complaint, filed in March 2026, focused primarily on incidents that took place during the 2023-2024 academic year, following the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel. Three campus incidents were alleged to have occurred in subsequent years. “Without diminishing any concern arising from these occurrences,” the judge wrote, “the court finds them, singly and collectively, to be too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference that any institutionalized noncompliance with Title VI [of the Civil Rights Act of 1964] persists at Harvard to this day.” The government notified Harvard of its alleged violation on June 30, 2025, Stearns noted, yet failed to establish “that any events that might be construed as evidence of noncompliance” occurred after that date.
Stearns added that Congress’s intent with the civil rights law was not to punish, but instead to incentivize a recipient of federal funding to come into compliance with Title VI. In that sense, he noted, the government had already achieved a victory. The government filed an appeal the following day.
Union Threatens Walkouts
The Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers (HGSU-UAW) announced in September that it would open a strike authorization vote, threatening to renew a 40-day walkout that ended in June without a contract. The union, whose previous contract expired in June 2025, represents approximately 5,000 workers, including graduate research assistants and instructors, along with graduate and undergraduate teaching fellows and course assistants. If union members approve a walkout, they may be joined by the Harvard Academic Workers-United Auto Workers (HAW-UAW), whose members authorized a strike in July. Certified in 2024, HAW-UAW represents more than 3,000 non-tenure-track faculty and other academic employees.
Harvard also faces a potential action from its unionized dining hall workers, represented by UNITE HERE Local 26, whose contract ended in June. Union members rallied outside of the Smith Center earlier in September, asking for better wages, healthcare benefits, and employment stability.
Griffin Gifts $3 Billion to Carnegie Mellon
Kenneth C. Griffin ’89, the founder of hedge fund Citadel and the namesake of the Harvard Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, has donated $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University, the largest gift ever to an institution of higher education. Of the funds, $2 billion will be used to build a new campus in Miami focused on solving society’s greatest challenges, while the remaining $1 billion will go to the university’s Pittsburgh campus, to be divided equally among top priorities there, as well as to support the renamed Kenneth C. Griffin School of Computer Science.
MacArthur Names 2026 Fellows
Three alumni and a former Harvard postdoctoral fellow have been named 2026 MacArthur Fellows. Winners will each receive a one-time grant of $800,000. Ellora Derenoncourt ’09, Ph.D. ’19, won for her work on wealth inequality and economic mobility in the United States. She is an associate professor in the economics department at Princeton. Organic chemist Song Lin, Ph.D. ’13, was recognized for his work designing electrochemical methods to more efficiently and sustainably build complex organic molecules. He is a professor of chemistry at Stanford. Theoretical physicist Vincenzo Vitelli, Ph.D. ’06, was chosen for “building theoretical frameworks to describe the behavior of metamaterials, soft materials, active matter, and biological systems.” He is a professor of physics at the University of Chicago. Felipe De Brigard, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Lab and the Center for Brain Science from 2011 to 2013, integrates tools from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to study “how memory relates to other cognitive functions, such as causal and moral judgment, imagination, and forgiveness.” He is a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Duke.
