Kevin O’Leary on Trump’s trade war and battle with Harvard

Kevin O’Leary:

I’m also critical of the stance that Harvard’s taken. And I have to be careful. I’m an executive fellow. I support — let me just disclose my association with Harvard. I’m an executive fellow there. I have been for years. I support the entrepreneurship program. I teach international students and domestic students in the executive programs, the MBA, and the undergrads as well.

And also to disclose, my son, who’s an engineer, was accepted at Harvard, and MIT, by the way, this year, and chose Harvard to go to school there. I think what has to happen is the president of Harvard, who, by the way, is Jewish, and he doesn’t have a single antisemitic bone in his body — and so — and many of the professionals I work with there are Jewish as well.

So I don’t think it’s an antisemitism issue at Harvard. Harvard cannot win the battle by suing the president of the United States. The president of Harvard has to get together with the president of the United States and work out whatever they’re going to work out.

Now, regarding the students — and you need to understand something here that I think I’m very passionate about. Harvard, the oldest educational institution in America, curates a remarkable cohort every year. They’re agnostic to religion, to race, to geography. They find the very best of the very best of the very best worldwide, and they put them into an educational institution to advance, learn, to advance science, to advance research.

And they are the very best at it worldwide, until recently. In terms of spending dollars right now, number one in the world is in Beijing. Number two is Harvard. And so America should understand we’re in a race on research because this is where the science comes from.

If we curate these people, and they come to America and they check out, their background checks have checked out, why don’t we offer them the ability to stay here and advance here, to grow their businesses here? Why would we train 37 percent of the smartest people on Earth at Harvard and then kick them out of the country 24 months later? How stupid is that?

Why don’t we fix this now in this negotiation? Create a program and offer it to every single educational institution in America and say, look, if you’re willing to make the pass, if you get actually invited, if you make the cut and you’re invited to Harvard or to MIT or to Temple or to Notre Dame, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter which one.

And you’re willing to go through the scrutiny of background check, and we approve you, we will give you the golden ticket to stay here, because I teach these students. They don’t hate America. They want to stay here. They’re the smartest of the smartest people on Earth I have ever worked with. They’re young. They’re incredible individuals.

Why in the world would you want to kick them out of here to go back to even a competing economy that decades later they build businesses to compete with us? How stupid is that? Let’s fix this now.