POLITICIANS have always had a love-hate relationship with American college students. They love using us as interns, yet they also distrust colleges as hotbeds of dissension, and many conservatives see them as responsible for moral breakdown. But they used to at least like those hard-working foreign students. Not anymore.
Because some of the Sept. 11 hijackers were in the United States on student visas, President George Bush now wants to bar foreign students from taking certain "sensitive" courses to avoid terrorists getting useful information. This is an ineffective way to stop terrorism that ultimately will backfire.
Several of the Sept. 11 hijackers had entered the United States on student visas. But concern over terrorists using the American university system is not new.
Concern over the spread of "weapons of mass destruction," which includes not only nuclear but also chemical and biological weapons, has been present in the government for several years. The idea came up that terrorist groups might try to learn how to make nuclear bombs in America.
As a result, the Bush administration came up with a plan a year ago for the Immigration and Naturalization Service to keep tighter controls on who comes into the country on student visas and to watch them more carefully while they're here. According to University Foreign Student Advisor Richard Tanson, student visa holders were to be put into a database compiling where they were going and their major. The colleges would be required to keep in touch with the INS about any changes to this information. Yet the program won't begin until next year.
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Despite this slowdown, the administration is getting more ambitious. A presidential directive, entitled "Combating Terrorism Through Immigration Policies," called not only for tightening restrictions on who gets student visas, which is reasonable, but also prohibiting students of some countries from taking "sensitive" courses. These courses are ambiguously defined as having direct applications to "the development and use of weapons of mass destruction" ("Plans on foreign students worry college officials," New York Times, April 18).
Beyond the issue of defining these courses and restricting access, colleges also are concerned because of the high prevalence of foreign students in advanced science programs. Foreign students make up about half of graduate engineering students, for example, and are instrumental in carrying out research.
The Bush administration obviously hasn't thought at all about how the University and the INS can work together to implement these restrictions. To really keep international students out of certain classes, this university would have two possible options. The first is to somehow reprogram ISIS so that it checks whether students are American citizens before enrolling them. Considering how little money ITC already has, this is ridiculous - unless the federal government plans to fund this type of enforcement nationwide, which is highly unlikely. Or, even better, make professors check passports the first day of class.
More likely, the INS would enforce this policy of limiting foreign students' class enrollment based on information provided by universities. But considering the INS's recent debacle over student visas being sent to hijackers six months after Sept. 11, it is doubtful the agency can be trusted with this either.
Even if this policy were enforceable, it's just plain wrong. It's no student's fault that he wasn't born here. Universities are supposed to open minds, not close them. But designating international students as a group to be watched and restricted will reinforce or create prejudices in American-born university students. The last thing we need is a wave of xenophobia.
What's more, these restrictions will change the roles American universities have played: both to educate bright young people from countries with underdeveloped higher education systems, and also to send back first-hand accounts of life in America to other countries.
While the first of these is fulfilling a duty, the second objective serves this country as well. The best public relations this country has is educating foreign students who return to their homelands with an understanding of the United States. This is most important for countries with whom we have strained relations, and sending foreign students back to tell their countrymen about how the United States suppressed their intellectual freedom is, frankly, idiotic.
Even keeping out radical foreigners can't stop the proliferation of weapons. Osama bin Laden doesn't need to finance graduate students in nuclear engineering. All he has to do is hire some unemployed Russian scientists who made nukes during the Cold War - American universities don't have a monopoly on this information.
The new policy to restrict what international students study won't work and is downright stupid. It is perfectly reasonable to restrict who gets in this country. But if it's OK to let them in, they should be able to learn whatever they want.
(Elizabeth Managan's column appeared Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at emanagan@cavalierdaily.com.)
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