Tag: told

  • US study visa applicants told to make social media accounts ‘public’ amid vetting crackdown

    US study visa applicants told to make social media accounts ‘public’ amid vetting crackdown

    • New social media privacy requirements come just as US government lifts four week-long study visa interview freeze, leading to fears of a backlog.
    • Concerns of added complications where consular officers responsible for social media vetting do not speak the applicant’s language.
    • Policy extends even to those who have been issued US visas in the past.

    In an update sent to consulates last week, the US government has advised that all those applying for F, M or J nonimmigrant visas are “requested” to make their social media accounts available to view by anybody so that their identity can be verified and they can be thoroughly vetted before entering the country.

    Immigration experts have criticised the move because of the huge additional workload it will place on immigration officers, meaning that visa issuance is likely to slow down considerably.

    US immigration lawyer James Hollis said he “almost [felt] bad” for consular officers.

    “It’s going to grind processing to a halt and will likely result in increased wait times for all nonimmigrant visas, let alone the student and exchange visitor applicants,” the business immigration specialist at the McEntee Law Group warned – noting that there are added complications where applicants were posting on social media in their own local language if officers do not understand what they have written.

    It appears that the new policy will be mandatory from June 25 onwards, and all applicants will be vetted in this way even if they have been issued a US visa in the past.

    It’s going to grind processing to a halt and will likely result in increased wait times for all nonimmigrant visas, let alone the student and exchange visitor applicants
    James Hollis, McEntee Law Group

    Consulates are advised that they should consider whether active social media privacy settings “reflect evasiveness or otherwise call into question the applicant’s credibility”.

    Officers have been told to reject a visa application in cases where the applicant has:

    • expressed “hostile attitudes” toward the US in terms of its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles;
    • advocated for or supported “designated foreign terrorists and other threats to US national security”;
    • shown or supported anti-semitism;
    • even if they have otherwise proven they are not an immigration risk;
    • and are not already ineligible for a visa (ie does not post a risk to US national security).

    In these cases, the US can deny entry on national security or foreign policy grounds.

    The US has asked visa applicants to provide social media information on their application forms for the past five years – including all social media names or handles of every platform they have used over the past five years. Failing to include this information could lead to an applicant’s visa being denied and being ineligible for future visas.

    It comes after a tumultuous few weeks for prospective international students eyeing a place at US institutions. After stretching a study visa interview freeze into its fourth week – despite assurances that the pause would be quick – officials last week resumed interviews with additional social media vetting for applicants.

    US stakeholders have repeatedly expressed concerns that the Trump administration’s extreme social media crackdown could inflict untold damage upon the country’s international education sector.

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  • After Michigan State trustees told students to call professor a racist, his lawsuit is moving ahead

    After Michigan State trustees told students to call professor a racist, his lawsuit is moving ahead

    Professor Jack Lipton scored a victory for free speech last week after a federal court allowed his lawsuit to move forward against two Michigan State University trustees who he claims not only urged students to call him racist, but told them how to phrase it.

    In his lawsuit, Lipton alleged that two trustees, Rema Vassar and Dennis Denno, met with MSU students, encouraged them to file complaints against Lipton with MSU’s internal civil rights office, and asked students to condemn Lipton as racist in public statements, op-eds, and on social media. MSU hired the law firm Miller & Chevalier to conduct an independent investigation, producing a report you can read online. According to Lipton, it found that Vassar and Denno planned the attacks and even provided others with specific language to paint Lipton as racist, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Muslim.

    For example, in one recorded conversation, Denno told students, “The other thing you can do to help us is attack Jack Lipton, the Chair of the Faculty Senate . . . call him out, call him a racist.”

    What was Lipton’s “racist” crime?

    In October 2023, at a public Board of Trustees meeting that followed an open letter accusing then-BOT Chair Vassar of ethics violations, Lipton read a resolution on behalf of faculty calling for Vassar’s resignation. The meeting erupted in chaos, marked by jeers from Vassar’s supporters.

    The Constitution doesn’t cease to exist just because someone’s feelings got hurt at a trustee meeting.

    The next day, while making clear he was speaking in his personal capacity and not as a faculty representative, Lipton told a reporter that Vassar could have stopped the chaos of the meeting with “a single statement … yet she elected to let the mob rule the room.”

    That single word — mob — triggered what Lipton describes as a coordinated retaliation campaign by Vassar and Denno.

    Lipton apologized for using the word “mob,” as well as for any unintended racial undertones, but did not stop calling for accountability over Vassar’s alleged ethics violations — and he says Vassar and Denno’s harassment of him continued.

    In November 2023, the NAACP Michigan State Conference Youth & College Division released a statement accusing Lipton of “racial terrorism.” Also that month, the organization Diverse: Issues In Higher Education published an op-ed arguing that Lipton had used the word “mob” because he wanted to traumatize black and Palestinian students. At a BOT meeting that December, Denno read a statement accusing Lipton of “criminalizing students” and described his use of the word “mob” as “racism and violent language.”

    What’s more, even though the board eventually voted to censure both Vassar and Denno, as advised by investigators for a range of misconduct including their attacks on Lipton, Vassar didn’t stop there. At a meeting in September 2024, she mocked Lipton and questioned his right to speak on matters of civil discourse, which he cites as yet another effort to chill his speech.

    In language as dry as it was devastating, the court summarized the allegations that these trustees abused their power to carry out what amounts to a smear campaign. Lipton claims that Vassar and Denno “used their positions as BOT members to attack Lipton for the comment he made as a private citizen” and “used their BOT pulpit to funnel adverse action towards Lipton via proxies, leveraging their BOT membership to speak through students, supporters, and members of the public.”

    The court also noted that Lipton’s original “mob” comment was “speech regarding matters of public concern,” as it critiqued the behavior of a public official at a public meeting, and Lipton made the remark as a private citizen. The First Amendment protects faculty when they speak as private citizens on matters of public concern, such as raising state university ethics violations to the media, as Lipton did.

    UPDATE: Another federal appeals court backs academic free speech for public employees

    After FIRE secured a lawyer for a law professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, the school reached a resolution but later reneged on the deal. That’s when the professor sued.


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    While the court dismissed MSU and its Board of Trustees as defendants, Lipton is now free to pursue his claims against Vassar and Denno themselves — and they have not exactly covered themselves in glory. The university investigation that recommended their censure found that Vassar had taken courtside tickets and free flights while Denno had pressured consultants reviewing MSU’s response to the 2023 mass shooting on campus to tone down any criticism of the trustees. In fact, just this week, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer declined the MSU board’s official request to remove Vassar and Denno, though the governor’s counsel said this “by no means indicates a condoning of the conduct alleged in the referral.” Vassar and Denno may have retained their seats on the board, but they are hardly out of the woods. 

    Now, Lipton’s case moves to discovery, where we’ll get a closer look at how MSU’s top brass reacted when a faculty member stepped out of line by doing his civic duty, and potentially to trial. While this week’s court decision is far from a final ruling, it shows the court believes Lipton’s allegations deserve to be heard, and it’s a reminder that the Constitution doesn’t cease to exist just because someone’s feelings got hurt at a trustee meeting.

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  • UKRI has too many people telling it what to do without the resources to do what it’s told

    UKRI has too many people telling it what to do without the resources to do what it’s told

    UKRI has a massive job.

    As the National Audit Office’s (NAO) new report sets out in 2023–24 UKRI assessed close to 29,000 grant funding applications and spent £6bn on innovation grants. It featured in 105 policy papers across 13 ministerial departments in the last three years alone, and it has been seven years since the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) formally set out UKRI’s role and objectives.

    Scale

    The scale of UKRI’s work is so massive that according to its own estimates

    […] were it to receive a 2% budget increase each year for the following three financial years, its existing legal, statutory and political commitments would take up around 98% of its budget in 2025-26, 84% in 2026–27, and 74% in 2027–28. When also including investments that it considers critical, such as continuing to fund similar numbers of new doctoral students and similar levels of new curiosity-driven research, this would then take up around 103%, 101%, and 99% of its future budget, respectively, in those years

    The obvious question here is if UKRI has so much to do, if it is then compelled to do even more, how can it possibly change as government introduces new priorities. Whether it is moonshots, levelling up, supporting the industrial strategy, fuelling government missions, working with devolved authorities, or whatever comes next, UKRI’s funding is so committed it has little bandwidth to put its massive resources behind emerging government strategies.

    However, this assumes that UKRI has a clear idea of what it’s supposed to do in the first place.

    Roughly, UKRI has a corporate strategy which then informs its funding calls which institutions then bid for and through post award work UKRI then assures that the thing it set out to do is being done in some way. The NAO found that how government communicates its priorities to UKRI is a bewildering mix of things:

    ad hoc and routine meetings; board meetings; formal letters; key UK government strategies and mission statements; and spending review budgets. These are not consolidated or ranked, meaning that the government does not currently have an overall picture of what it is asking UKRI to do.

    It is therefore not surprising that in UKRI’s own strategy none of its formal objectives are “specific, measurable or time-bound, making it difficult to understand what outcome UKRI is seeking to achieve.”

    Priorities

    To the outside observer it would seem odd that UKRI doesn’t have a single ministerial letter with a single set of priorities which it can then pursue at the expense of everything else. Instead, in reading the NAO report it seems that UKRI has become the everything box where the entire hopes of a government are pinned, whether UKRI has the resources to achieve them or not.

    It’s easy to see how the research funding ecosystem becomes so complex. UKRI is an important part but it sits alongside the likes of ARIA, charitable organisations, national institutes, venture capital, businesses, and others. The bluntest assessment is that if the government is unable to specify a single set of aims for UKRI, UKRI then cannot measure outcomes as clearly as it would like – and even if it could there is little spare budget to pivot its work. The report makes clear that there is ongoing “prioritisation” to address this confusion – but this work will not conclude until after the spending review, by which point key decisions will already have been made.

    It’s not that UKRI is failing – by any reasonable assessment it is powering a world-leading research ecosystem, even with some deep cultural challenges – it’s that as NAO point out it is given a lot to do without all the tools to do it, and even when it can measure its work government priorities are liable to change anyway. The one thing that good research and innovation policy needs is time. The one thing every government has is little time to get anything done.

    It is even harder to assess whether its measurable things are good value on their own terms. NAO is interested in ensuring the public gets value for money in the things it funds. One of the challenges in assessing whether what UKRI does is good value for money is that outcomes from research and innovation funding are diffuse, happen on a long-time scale, and may even fail but in doing so moves the research ecosystem toward something that works in some hard to measure and adjacent way.

    Value

    Although not directly captured within the NAO report, assessing value for money within research and innovation also depends on which level it is assessed. For example, there may be investments in breakthrough science which return little direct economic benefits but expand the knowledge of a field in a way they one day might. There may be investments that achieve immediate economic benefits but have few long term economic benefits as new technologies become available.

    It is clear that UKRI would benefit from fewer directions and fewer priorities which would allow it to use its resources more efficiently and in turn measure its impact more easily. The problem is that government policy overtakes bureaucratic needs which in turn encourages policy churn.

    In lieu of being able to change the nature of politics part of the solution must lie in changing how UKRI works. The organisation is aware of this, and realises it needs a capacity which goes beyond adjusting the direction of its existing activities – rather, one that “incentivises applicants to put forward ideas that align with government objectives which can be quicker and more efficient than setting up new programmes.”

    The fundamental problem for policy makers is that they have collectively turned to UKRI with an enormous list of asks without the resources to achieve them. UKRI either needs clearer direction or more resources, or both, what it does not need is more asks without clear priorities.

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