Germany on Friday blasted the US government’s “fatal” decision to revoke Harvard University’s right to enrol foreign students and urged President Donald Trump’s administration to reconsider.

Germany’s Research Minister Dorothee Baer told the Bayern 2 radio station she hoped “the US government will reverse this decision,” adding: “It’s not a positive signal, neither for the young generation nor the free world.”

German government spokesman Sebastian Hille also weighed in on the move, telling reporters that “restrictions on academic freedom are restrictions on democracy itself”.

On Thursday, US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote to Harvard informing the prestigious university its certification under the main system allowing foreign students into the United States had been revoked.

Trump is furious at Harvard — which has produced 162 Nobel prize winners — for rejecting his demand that it submit to oversight on admissions and hiring over his claims that it is a hotbed of anti-Semitism and “woke” liberal ideology.

Harvard filed a lawsuit Friday to challenge the administration’s move.

According to the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), around 550 German students are currently enrolled at Harvard out of a total of approximately 6,800 international students there.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Christian Wagner said that “we will quickly be raising the issue with our partners in the US to find out what effects this will have on German students”.

“We will of course express in those conversations our expectation that the interests of German students be given the necessary consideration,” Wagner added.

Baer, arriving in Brussels for a meeting of her EU colleagues, also said: “We are already noticing a shift not only from American students who want to come to us but also from other countries, including China and India, who choose Europe because they simply see their freedom guaranteed differently here.”

“I never thought… that it would come to this, that the hotspot of academic freedom would someday be questioned,” Baer went on.

“Yet I do not give up hope that… the ‘land of the free’ will someday again live up to its name.”