Tag: blow

  • Trump Targets Chinese Students, a Harsh Blow to Higher Ed

    Trump Targets Chinese Students, a Harsh Blow to Higher Ed

    Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Wednesday night that the Trump administration will “aggressively revoke” Chinese college students’ visas and heighten scrutiny of visa applicants from China. The new policy specifically targets “those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.”

    It’s the administration’s latest move in what has been a sudden resurgence in its attacks on international students, which it seemed to suspend in April after legal efforts led to the restoration of the legal status of thousands of students.

    The news sent shock waves through higher education and could lead to a major reduction in foreign students at American universities, especially public research institutions. China contributes the largest number of international students to the U.S., with nearly 280,000 enrolled in 2023–24, according to data from the Institute of International Education—about a quarter of the total international student population in the country. 

    That share, however, has been shrinking since the COVID-19 pandemic; last year, India overtook China as the No. 1 source country of international students. But Chinese students are far more likely to enroll in undergraduate programs and pay more in tuition. They also make up a significant slice of STEM researchers: 16 percent of all U.S. graduate students in STEM fields and 2 percent of undergraduates are Chinese nationals, according to a 2020 report from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University.

    It’s not clear whether the visa revocations would be accompanied by legal status terminations in the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System or prompt deportation proceedings, as they did for thousands of international students in March and April. Those steps would be the purview of the Department of Homeland Security.

    The targeting of students in “critical fields” in particular could devastate STEM programs and research labs at smaller universities across the country, where Chinese international students are heavily represented. Rubio did not clarify what fields could be considered critical, potentially setting the stage for a sweeping focus on areas where GOP lawmakers have raised concerns about sensitive national security research being shared with the Chinese government.

    A spokesperson for the State Department did not respond to a list of questions, including requests to clarify the scope of the new policy’s target and the timeline for visa revocations, in time for publication. At a press conference yesterday, department spokesperson Tammy Bruce declined to “get into the details” of how the new visa scrutiny would be applied or what “critical fields” the department was referring to, because it “might give up our hand and make certain things less effective.”

    “When we think of critical fields, we think of national security, the nature of how we keep America safe and secure and more prosperous,” she said. “It is important to keep a broad base, because that could mean many things.”

    The new policy’s focus on students with ties to the Chinese Communist Party has also raised concerns about academic freedom and free speech violations. Jonathan Friedman, managing director of U.S. free expression at PEN America, said the new policy targeting Chinese students would “hold student visas hostage to an ideological litmus test and disrupt the open exchange of ideas across cultures and borders.”

    “‘Aggressively revoking’ visas based on political ideology is a gross violation of basic free expression principles that anchor the academy,” he wrote to Inside Higher Ed.

    William Brustein, a retired longtime international student administrator, said the vague nature of Rubio’s directive could enable a sweeping dragnet that catches the majority of Chinese students—especially since association with the ruling Communist Party is difficult to avoid in China.

    “How will they know who’s a member? Maybe they’ll say if you were in a Chinese-sponsored youth group as a child, that could prevent you,” Brustein said. “Right now that policy is so vague that it could cover all Chinese students who want to study in the U.S.”

    Revocation Resurgence

    The administration briefly retreated from its persecution of international students late last month, after targeting pro-Palestine student protesters and expanding its scope to terminate the legal residency of thousands of students at institutions across the country. But a spate of successful court challenges halted the campaign in April, spurring the Trump administration restore more than 5,000 students’ SEVIS statuses.

    A lull followed the restoration as students, advisers and lawyers waited for the administration’s next move. It came two weeks ago, when the Department of Homeland Security released a new Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy granting the agency more leeway to revoke students’ SEVIS status with little justification.

    The Trump administration’s new strategy seems to target specific international student populations. So far, those have been recent graduates on Optional Practical Training visa extensions, students at Harvard University and potentially other institutions in their crosshairs, and now students from China, who Rubio claims are more likely to be national security threats.

    The State Department has also begun to tighten visa restrictions for applicants and incoming students. On Tuesday, Rubio announced a pause on all new student and exchange visa interviews while the administration implements an intensive new social media screening policy. The latest announcement on China also said the State Department would review application criteria to “enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications” from China and Hong Kong.

    Marjorie Hass, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, said there’s already a process for vetting international students, and that the administration’s new policy seems more aimed at scoring political points and justifying deportations than enhancing national security.

    “Institutions have their own admissions standards and the embassies do vet students who come into the country,” she said. “It’s not currently the Wild West.”

    Brustein said that if international students from China weren’t already moving away from American colleges en masse due to this spring’s targeting of foreign students, the latest move is sure to discourage future applicants.

    “We’re shooting ourselves in the foot,” he said. “Even if some of these decisions are reversed, we’re undoing the progress we’ve made over so many years in being this welcoming environment for the best and brightest in the world.”

    “That harm I don’t think can be undone.”

    A Blow for Research Universities

    Brustein has led international student offices at West Virginia University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Ohio State University, where he said there were “thousands” of Chinese students who often paid three times as much as their domestic peers.

    He said the colleges likely to be hit hardest by a major reduction in current and future Chinese students are public ones, especially regional institutions in areas with shifting demographics and declining college-going rates.

    “There are regional public universities and flagships across the Midwest, in the South, that have a large contingent of Chinese students who are coming particularly for STEM education,” Brustein said. “It’s those ones that survive on a thin revenue stream who are going to suffer the most.”

    He added that a sizable reduction in Chinese international students would likely hit scientific research hardest.

    “Many Chinese students get degrees in computer science, engineering, and go on to go to grad school or do an OPT,” he said. “They stay in the country, work in our labs, contribute significantly to innovation in this country, not China. To lose that is going to be a very big blow to our capacity for innovation.”

    Hass said that Chinese students have been both a financial lifeline and a source of cross-cultural exchange between the two countries for more than a decade. She said the benefits for higher education and for American diplomacy have been overwhelmingly positive, and a large-scale rollback of that relationship would be destructive for both.

    “This is a place where the balance of trade is very much in favor of the U.S.,” she said. “It’s mystifying why we would be undermining that.”

    She added that for many colleges, international students—and the volume of full-paying Chinese students in particular—help institutions improve access for local students.

    “Colleges will miss out on a lot of revenue,” she said. “That means the burden has to be borne by domestic students.”

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  • Federal judges deal major blow to Education Department’s anti-DEI guidance

    Federal judges deal major blow to Education Department’s anti-DEI guidance

    Two federal judges issued separate rulings Thursday that together dealt a major blow to the Trump administration’s recent guidance threatening to strip federal funding from colleges and K-12 schools that consider race in any of their policies, including scholarships and housing. 

    U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher ruled that the U.S. Department of Education did not follow proper procedures when issuing the Feb. 14 letter and postponed its effective date nationwide while the legal challenge against the guidance plays out. 

    The order came in response to a lawsuit from the American Federation of Teachers and other groups, which alleged that the guidance “radically upends” federal antidiscrimination law and is too vague for colleges and K-12 school officials to understand what conduct is prohibited. 

    The guidance interprets the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling against race-conscious college admissions to extend to every aspect of education, including financial aid, administrative support and graduation ceremonies. 

    According to AFT, the letter also implied that a wide variety of “core instruction, activities, and programs” used in teaching students — from diversity initiatives to instruction on systemic racism — could now be considered illegal discrimination. 

    The Feb. 14 letter asserted that colleges and K-12 schools had “toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’ and advanced discriminatory policies and practices.” 

    The Education Department appeared to walk back some of the strictest aspects of its guidance in a March Q&A document, but Gallagher wrote that the Q&A still lacked “sufficient clarity to override the express terms of the [Feb. 14] Letter.”

    Gallagher, a federal distict judge in Maryland, said the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in their arguments that the letter exceeds the Education Department’s authority by attempting to exercise control over curriculum. 

    “The government cannot proclaim entire categories of classroom content discriminatory to side-step the bounds of its statutory authority,” Gallagher wrote. 

    AFT Maryland President Kenya Campbell hailed the court’s order on Thursday. 

    “This preliminary injunction pauses the chaos caused by targeting and attacking vital communities and temporarily protects the critical funding schools, from our K-12 schools to our higher education institutions, rely on,” Campbell said. 

    The order came the same day as another federal judge made a similar ruling in a separate case brought against the Feb. 14 guidance. 

    The National Education Association, its New Hampshire affiliate and the Center for Black Educator Development sued the Education Department in early March, arguing the guidance undermines the free speech rights of educators. 

    Although the plaintiffs had sought a nationwide injunction, federal Judge Landya McCafferty, ruling for New Hampshire district court,  only blocked enforcement of the guidance for federally funded colleges and schools that employ or contract with the plaintiffs’ members. NEA alone has about 3 million members, including higher education workers.

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  • The OfS’s fine on Sussex is a blow against free speech, not for it

    The OfS’s fine on Sussex is a blow against free speech, not for it

    • Peter Scott is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Studies at UCL and was Vice-Chancellor of Kingston University between 1998 and 2010.

    Freedom of speech and academic freedom are difficult enough to define and police. The task has become more difficult because they have got caught up in the two most toxic issues of the moment – Palestinian rights and anti-Zionism (seen as shading into anti-semitism) on the one hand and support for the Israeli Government on the other; and women’s and trans rights and transphobia. Never has it been more true that hard cases make bad law.

    This seems to have been lost on the Office for Students with its recent decision on the Kathleen Stock case, whose gender-critical views had led to protests and demonstrations by trans activists, to fine the University of Sussex more than £500,000 (with the threat that fines could be even higher for universities which, in the eyes of the OfS, fail to protect free speech and academic freedom in a similar way). Unsurprisingly, that decision is being challenged by Sussex on a number of grounds, including the OfS’s refusal to meet the University’s representatives face-to-face before reaching it, a curious decision in the light of normal proceedings in legal and quasi-legal cases. Remember the lawyers’ old Latin tag audi alteram partem.

    The Stock case was one of three recent high-profile free speech cases. The two others were the case of David Miller, the University of Bristol professor who won an employment tribunal case after his dismissal by the University for his anti-Zionist views and that of Jo Phoenix, the Open University (OU) professor who won a similar case for constructive dismissal following the University’s failure to support her when attacked for her gender critical views.

    The same two toxic issues were in play in all three cases. It is difficult to see how, from the OfS’s perspective, Bristol and the OU were not as much in breach as Sussex of the OfS’s regulatory condition E1 for failing to uphold the relevant public interest governance principles (ensuring staff have the freedom ‘to question and test received wisdom’ and ‘to put forward new ideas and unpopular opinions’ without placing themselves in jeopardy). Two separate employment tribunals found that this is exactly what happened to Professors Miller and Phoenix, although in the first case through gritted teeth. Constructive dismissal and dismissal certainly count as being placed ‘in jeopardy’.

    The OfS opened its investigation into ‘free speech matters’ at Sussex under the general powers it had under its regulatory framework. The fine was assessed within the same framework. The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which has given the OfS extra powers to investigate individual complaints, had not yet been passed. In any case, the incoming Labour Government chose last year not to implement some key provisions in that Act. So, when it launched the Sussex enquiry, the OfS did not yet have the power to investigate individual cases. Officially, it did not do so in the case of Kathleen Stock, although it appears she was interviewed as part of the investigation.

    So it remains a mystery why the OfS decided not to investigate the Miller and Phoenix cases which, on the face of it, raised the same issues and, as a result, should have led to the same concern – and similar fines? Surely not because of the political and media firestorm that the Stock case set off. Instead, the OU was allowed to ‘mark its own homework’ by setting up the Dandridge review, which failed to placate Professor Phoenix. Bristol publicly expressed its ‘disappointment’ at the tribunal’s findings, so no regrets and no acknowledgement that free speech had been an issue. The involvement of employment tribunals was no bar to an OfS investigation. Any differences between the three cases cannot explain why Sussex was picked out, because the OfS did not carry out investigations into the other two cases and so could not be aware of any differences.

    The OfS report is a curious document. It is largely context-free, in the sense that Professor Stock’s case is so briefly sketched that anyone unfamiliar with the case would find it difficult to understand what had happened. The formal reason for this context-lite brevity is that the OfS was not investigating what had happened to Professor Stock. Officially there was no Stock case. But a more substantial reason surely is that this absence of context was necessary in the light of its claim, in the words of the Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom, Professor Arif Ahmed, that ‘The OfS will continue to focus on a protection and promotion of lawful speech – irrespective of the views expressed. We will continue to be impartial and viewpoint neutral in our regulation and decisions’.

    In truth, free speech and academic freedom, even within the law, can never be absolute. This is explicit in section 43 of the Education (No. 2) Act of 1986 which states that universities ‘must take such steps as are reasonably practical to ensure that freedom of speech within the law is secured’. ’As are reasonably practical’ is an essential phrase, to which I will return. There will always be views which it is lawful to express but nevertheless are highly objectionable in the eyes of many people, and especially of those who feel they are threatened.

    Nor can they really be ‘viewpoint neutral’. The two toxic issues under discussion demonstrate this clearly. The expression of anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist views, because it is sometimes in danger of shading into anti-Semitism, is treated as beyond the pale. Gender-critical views, in contrast, despite the fact that they may be perceived to be transphobic, are firmly within it. The former, therefore, deserve to be banned and universities that tolerate their expression stigmatised or punished; the latter to be protected and universities that do not do so punished – as Sussex has been with its hefty fine. To be clear, I am not expressing an opinion about these viewpoints, just highlighting how they are treated differently.

    Why? Both Jewish and trans people, rightly or wrongly, feel threatened by what for them are hostile views. That is not sufficient in itself to override freedom of speech or academic freedom which, remember, are expected to be ‘unpopular’. This difference in treatment can only be explained with reference to history and politics. But, if the definition, and protection, of free speech and academic freedom are essentially political, the ‘viewpoint neutrality’ espoused by the OfS is an illusion. Its own decision to investigate Sussex was clearly partisan. The 2023 Act, which gave the OfS the mandate to investigate individual complaints, arose in a particular political context. It reflected the belief that conservative viewpoints were unwelcome in universities and therefore needed to be protected. Protecting liberal views was never the game.

    If free speech and academic freedom are context-specific, two questions arise. The first is practical. If that context is to be assessed and common sense applied – or, in the phrase in the 1986 Act, steps ‘as are reasonably practical’ defined – who is best placed to do that? In short, who is competent to make these complex decisions in which competing, and passionate, differences must be balanced? The effective choice is between officials in a State agency who are likely to have limited experience at the sharp end of university management, and vice-chancellors, their senior colleagues and university communities at large who know the people and personalities and real-world contexts. Free speech cases will not always be straightforward. They may contain multiple strands – breakdowns in professional relationships, complaints by students (ostensibly sovereign ‘customers’), even underperformance.

    The second question is one of principle, and much more important. In a liberal democracy that aspires to be an open society, should the State, or State agencies, ever be allowed to decide these delicate issues, particularly with regard to academic freedom, in the process invading and inevitably reducing the autonomy of universities? Of course, authoritarian and totalitarian States routinely behave in this way. They have no interest in academic freedom. But in a democracy, a foundational principle of academic freedom is surely that it is not defined or policed by the political authorities.

    The only conceivable justification for State intervention in a free society is that, if universities do not protect freedom of speech, they must be made to do so, as the partially implemented 2023 Act prescribes. There are two answers to this.

    • First, during the modern era, the practice has always been to trust universities to protect academic freedom because they understand it best. When I was a member of the board of the former Higher Education Funding Council for England two decades ago, no one would have suggested that HEFCE should have the power to fine universities for failing to uphold free speech. What is truly chilling is the erosion of institutional autonomy, with remarkably little protest or pushback. It is interesting how the political right, while believing passionately in a small State in the context of public services, economic regulation and taxation, believes equally passionately in a very strong State in the context of ideological surveillance.
    • Second, is there really a problem here – or, more accurately, a new problem? There is little evidence that universities have become less trustworthy in terms of protecting academic freedom. Of course, there have always been issues with ‘viewpoint diversity’ (in the phrase used by the US Government to justify its assault on Harvard – I’m coming on to Trump next…). In Economics departments dominated by econometricians behavioural economists are not always welcome. Some education departments may have ‘coloniality’ on the brain. Even peer review or the Research Excellence Framework may have ‘chilling effects’ in certain circumstances. But overall universities have always known, better than politicians, that intellectual creativity and productivity depend on a variety and diversity of ideas and of people.  

    … which brings me finally to Trump and Harvard. In a crooked sense, we should be grateful to President Trump for his brutish honesty. No serious attempt to disguise partisanship beneath a cloak of dispassionately protecting all free speech and academic freedom, just the driving desire to punish America’s greatest universities for refusing to toe the MAGA line in an extraordinary spasm of national self-harm. Harvard has been asked, and bravely refused, to allow the US Government to carry out ‘audits’ of departments suspected of being ‘woke’, to influence admissions, to vet academic appointments, to have access to lists of students, especially international students, who have taken part in demonstrations against Israel’s actions in Gaza, and outlaw all policies designed to promote diversity, equity and inclusion.

    The US example is important for two reasons, however little the OfS may appreciate being bracketed with Trump. First, the political focus on free speech, in the current form of the ‘war on woke’, has all the marks of being ‘made in America’, ideology borrowing rather than truly home-grown. Now we have been shown the future, and it stinks. Do we really want to go there? Second, the same politically partisan focus has actually made it more difficult to have a measured debate about free speech and academic freedom which, very sadly, is badly needed in a world from which reason, trust and mutual respect appear to have fled – and online abuse, fake news and AI have arrived. The OfS report on Sussex, and its disproportionate fine, are – in effect – a blow against rather than a blow in favour of free speech in higher education.

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