Last spring, Michele Heryford, director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, worried that she was going to have to put the center’s Chinese-language teachers on a plane back to China after the U.S. Department of State said they, and several hundred other schoolteachers affiliated with university-sponsored institutes across the country, were violating American visa rules.
But as the fall semester begins, there are some 20 instructors connected to Pittsburgh’s Confucius Institute teaching in local schools. That’s because Ms. Heryford and her counterparts at the roughly 80 U.S.-based language-and-culture centers, which are supported by the Chinese government, spent the summer scrambling to find a solution that would not run afoul of visa regulations.
There’s no single fix. Some institutes have transferred the responsibility for sponsoring teacher visas from the university to nearby school districts or state departments of education. Others have turned to third-party groups that have approval to bring in teachers from abroad. In Pittsburgh’s case, the language instructors are now coming to the United States under a different visa category altogether, one for those seeking specialized training they can’t get in their home country.
All in all, it’s a happy ending for what could have turned into an ugly diplomatic row.
The issue dates back to May, when the State Department unexpectedly put out policy guidance, stating that universities could not sponsor schoolteachers on J-1, or exchange, visas. Noting that foreign professors, academics, and students at the university level are prohibited from teaching in elementary and secondary schools, the policy directive said that some 600 instructors attached to Confucius Institutes would have to leave the United States within weeks and reapply for the correct visa to return to this country.
Although some of those teachers had been slated to depart at the end of the school year, the policy also affected those who were to begin their duties in the late summer and early fall.
Providing language instruction to American schoolchildren is a major mission for many of the Confucius Institutes. And the institutes themselves are a key part of the Chinese government’s cultural diplomacy efforts. Within days, there was a public outcry in China over the State Department’s action, and an official with the Chinese Language Council International, or Hanban, which oversees Confucius Institutes, warned the move could “harm” Sino-American exchanges. The State Department’s chief spokeswoman was forced to repeatedly answer reporters’ questions on the topic during news conferences.
After little more than a week, federal officials—who also had initially said Confucius Institutes would have to be associated with university foreign-language departments or earn separate accreditation—backed off their insistence that the teachers leave the country. In recent months, they have worked with institute directors and university administrators to hammer out ways to permit the teachers to remain.
A senior State Department official characterized the process as “moving smoothly, moving amicably.” She said the Confucius Institutes had until the end of the 2012 academic year to work out any problems and come into full compliance with the revamped policy guidelines.
Help From a Variety of Sources
Different institutions have taken varying approaches. The Universities of Kentucky and Nebraska both turned over sponsorship for teacher visas to their state departments of education. The state of Kentucky has had an agreement with Hanban for seven years to bring in Chinese teachers separate from the Confucius Institute and so is already recognized by the federal officials as a visa sponsor, said Jacqueline Bott Van Houten, who oversees visiting foreign teachers for the Kentucky Department of Education.
In New York, the University at Buffalo turned to the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit group that works on overseas academic exchanges. Buffalo plans to transfer sponsorship for all its Chinese-language schoolteachers to the third-party organization by the end of the fall semester, said Oscar Budde, the university’s immigration lawyer. There is a fee, of several hundred dollars per visa application, but the university is negotiating with the local schools to cover those charges, Mr. Budde said.
Ms. Heryford is working with another not-for-profit group focused on international education, the Cordell Hull Foundation, to bring in the Pittsburgh Confucius Institute’s teachers. Rather than use exchange visas, which are overseen by the State Department, Pittsburgh sought approval from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to admit the teachers under the H-3 category. To get that visa designation, the institute had to demonstrate that it was bringing its teachers, most of whom are graduate students at Wuhan University, to the United States for specialized training in teaching Chinese to foreigners, experience that would be difficult to obtain in China.
Fortunately, Pittsburgh already provided a great deal of training to its visiting schoolteachers, but the Confucius Institute had to rush to “quantify and qualify what we do, to put it in formalized language, with specific outcomes,” Ms. Heryford said. “It was an enormous amount of paperwork.”
Indeed, Marianne Mason, Cordell Hull’s executive director, said completing the H-3 application, which ran to about 200 pages, wouldn’t make sense for institutes with smaller numbers of teachers or without a well-thought-out training component already in place. “It’s not unlike a doctoral dissertation,” said Ms. Mason, who also worked with Portland State University’s Confucius Institute to gain H-3 approval.
There have, however, been wrinkles. Some universities have balked at paying third parties to administer the visas because they don’t have the extra funds or are loath to ask local schools to foot the bill. In addition, State Department regulations mandate that schoolteachers on J-1 visas have three years’ full-time teaching experience, something that many of the young language instructors recruited by Confucius Institutes lack.
Some states have even more rigorous requirements teachers must meet. In Kentucky, not only must foreign teachers have three years’ experience but that experience must be in elementary- or secondary-school classrooms (teaching at the university level does not count). Teachers without the necessary classroom time must be supervised by state-certified teachers, a requirement that Huajing Maske, the director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Kentucky, worries will dampen participation. “School budgets are already cut to the bone,” she said. “Where are principals going to find another teacher to sit in the classroom? I’m concerned that this could pour some cold water on their enthusiasm.”
And at least one institution, Webster University in St. Louis, has so far been unable to find an outside sponsor for its instructors. The city school district turned the Confucius Institute down, and Deborah Trott Pierce, the director there, is still trying to convince the Missouri department of education to take on the task. In the interim, the institute is relying on a half-dozen local Chinese-speaking volunteers this fall. “We are doing all we can to make sure there is no interruption in the Chinese courses we had promised we would deliver to the area schools,” Ms. Pierce said.
