The war on terror and its impact on U.S. education

Mark Sidel, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, Iowa City

Washington's war on terror may be quietly taking a toll on unsuspecting quarters -- its universities. To understand the effects of anti-terror policies on the U.S. academic sector, it helps to spend time on university campuses in Australia, Singapore, the United Kingdom, or other countries.

From Melbourne to Edinburgh, those institutions are now filled with foreign students, many of whom would have come to the U.S., had they not been deterred by restrictive visa policies.

The inconsistent and ham-fisted implementation of a valid goal -- preventing terrorists from entering the United States -- has hindered or severely delayed many innocents from realizing their dreams of education, research, or teaching in the United States.

Thousands who are not terrorists have been denied visas, and many more have been forced to wait -- often for months or years -- preventing them from continuing their legitimate academic work.

Even as policies have eased in the last year or two, the perception remains: U.S. universities are an unfriendly destination for the best foreign students and scholars.

In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, doors to U.S. education and research clearly closed -- at a time when Australia, Britain, France, Singapore, Japan, and others were aggressively campaigning to attract the best and the brightest from abroad.

Higher education is the fifth-largest U.S. export in the services sector, and it accrues at least US$12 billion to the United States each year in spending by foreign students and scholars.

U.S. academic institutions hosted over half a million international students and scholars in 2002.

One of the problems with U.S. anti-terrorism policy lies with the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), a database that has frustrated colleges and universities from its inception, though the situation has improved somewhat.

Its operations include extensive checks on thousands of visa applicants, including many who returned home only briefly. SEVIS and other programs, which impose longer waiting times and stringent investigations, have significantly affected laboratories, science departments, and even the occasional English department.

Anti-terrorism policy has also led to an increase in government secrecy. A reversal of declassification efforts underway since the 1960s has made it more difficult for the research community to obtain data and release research results. One such area is information that government departments may not, by law, classify as confidential or secret. To sidestep this technicality, the government created a new category, "sensitive but unclassified information," and refused to release data under that label. The second category, "sensitive homeland security information," also permits the government to restrict access to information on government programs and activities that cannot be classified.

Anti-terror policy has also led to direct interventions on campuses and the occasional silencing of debate. At Drake University in Iowa, federal authorities issued -- and were later forced to rescind -- a broad subpoena seeking information on student protesters against the war in Iraq. At the University of Texas in Austin, military intelligence agents walked the corridors of the law school, seeking information on "suspicious" attendees at a conference on Islam, law, and gender.

Most seriously, some academics have been caught up in the web of anti-terror policy. The most well-known such case is the prominent Texas Tech University infectious disease researcher Thomas Butler, sentenced to two years in prison after he voluntarily reported that two vials of plague were missing from his laboratory.

Post-Sept. 11 policies have also affected university funding and grant distribution -- a fact virtually unknown outside the quiet offices of university presidents and academic vice presidents.

As the U.S. government has sought to prevent charities from being used as conduits for terrorist financing -- an important goal -- it has pressured foundations and other American nonprofits to guarantee, under penalty of law, that no philanthropic money go to ill-defined lists of terrorists and organizations.

Forced onto the defensive, their grants scrutinized by the government, several important U.S. philanthropic institutions have quietly responded. Some major foundations, such as the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, have shifted part of this risk to their grantees, requiring them to sign tough new letters taking full responsibility for broad definitions of violence or terrorism conducted with grant dollars. A number of academic institutions have protested against this move.

In April 2004, the provosts of Chicago, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, and three other universities wrote to the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, calling the new grant language vague and warning that it might impinge on political speech.

At least two universities explicitly declined to sign the letters, jeopardizing an important source of research funds during tough budgetary times.

The key issues here are twofold. First, restrictive U.S. visa and security policies continue to discourage and prevent many exceptionally talented students and scholars from even attempting to pursue their studies and careers in the United States -- a situation compounded by the exceptional entrepreneurship of other nations and universities in seeking out, welcoming, and funding that brainpower.

The long-term effects on U.S. competitiveness cannot now be measured, of course, but in the decades before Sept. 11, these foreign students and scholars had long been key contributors to a creative, research-based, value-added economy in the United States.

Second, the silencing effects of post-Sept. 11 anti-terror policies continue to resonate on U.S. university campuses.

Even though some policies have begun to ease in recent years, the academic community still feels the heat of antiterrorism policy. Only with continued pressure by the academic and scientific community, federal legislators, civil liberties organizations, and others can these problems gradually be ameliorated. The damage will take years to overcome.

The writer is professor of law at the University of Iowa and earlier served with the Ford Foundation in Beijing, Hanoi, Bangkok and New Delhi. This article is adapted from his book, More Secure, Less Free? Antiterrorism Policy and Civil Liberties After September 11 (University of Michigan Press, 2004).

Reprinted with permission from YaleGlobal Online, (http://yaleglobal.yale.edu)