Like virtually everyone else in the United States, Abdulla Al-Mosallam felt devastated on September 11, reeling from the news of the terrorist attacks. As he walked across the campus of Arizona State University that afternoon, however, he quickly realized that he was now a suspect himself.
One young man came up to him and yelled, “Why did you guys bomb New York and D.C.?” Two women stood four feet away, pointing at him and talking. That afternoon, he failed a psychology test. “I was so nervous in class,” he said, “I did not know how to concentrate.”
The next day, the senior from Qatar shaved his head, his mustache, and his goatee, hoping he would look Latino and not Arab. But it wasn’t enough. “Before, when I walked on campus, I used to get smiles,” he said, calling from Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, on his way back to Qatar. “But now, I just get weird looks.”
Mr. Mosallam is one of hundreds of Middle Eastern students who decided to return home from the United States in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Although exact numbers are hard to come by, calls to eight U.S. universities with many students from the Middle East confirmed that 25 to 60 students at each institution had withdrawn by this week. University-affiliated English-language programs, which enroll students for shorter periods of time, have also been hit hard.
Overseas, most American students are staying put, according to university officials in the United States and abroad. Those who have returned home either did so at their parents’ request or simply felt isolated. American students and scholars in the Middle East and South Asia are especially anxious.
In Islamabad, said Nadeem Akbar, a staff member at the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, “there’s a Fulbright House, but it’s empty.”
Some countries reported a drop in the number of students expressing interest in studying in the United States. Many observers, however, see that as a temporary phenomenon, with students saying they want to wait a few months rather than outright canceling plans to attend college in the United States.
Mr. Mosallam, one of 48 Arizona State students to withdraw in the last two weeks, decided to leave the United States once he felt that he was in physical danger. A friend at Portland State University was beaten up. Another friend in Dallas was attacked in an Arab-run coffee shop and had to escape out the back door. Most disturbing, he said, a female friend who wears a head scarf was shot at from a car in Tucson. “I’m not willing to take that chance,” he said. “I’m 21. I still have a long life ahead of me.”
His experience may be extreme. University officials say that the majority of students leaving the United States have not cited immediate threats to their safety. Instead, many were pressured by their parents to return home. Others have said they were simply too distracted to continue their studies for now. Virtually all of those who formally withdrew hope to return in January. Even Mr. Mosallam said he wanted to finish his studies in the United States.
At the University of Colorado at Denver, 41 of the 250 students from the Middle East and surrounding countries had withdrawn as of Tuesday. Boston University reported that at least 25 of its 320 Middle Eastern students were leaving. At Washington State University, 61 of the 130 Middle Eastern students there went home.
A disproportionate number of the departing students were from the United Arab Emirates. Many of them told classmates and professors that they had been ordered home by their embassy, but embassy officials denied that claim. They said they had called several hundred students in the days after the attacks, but only to check on them and to let them know that they could go home if they wanted to.
Students from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have also left in significant numbers. And the Middle East is not the only region affected: Students from other countries, such as Japan and Australia, have also decided to leave.
Universities have tried to ease students’ transition home. Many were given full tuition refunds.
“For me, if a student is so anxious and is only sitting at home, I think it’s better to be close to family,” said Fanta Aw, director of international-student services at American University, where 32 students have taken leaves of absence. She said it had not been an easy decision for many students, because they know they will fall behind in their studies. But many Middle Eastern students find it difficult to defy their parents’ wishes.
“The fact of the matter is that parents are the ones who not only pay the bills, but, as elders, have a lot of say and a lot of influence,” said Ms. Aw. “When parents call, culturally, you abide by what is said.”
Embassies are also helping worried students. The Embassy of Kuwait, which estimates that it has 3,200 students in the United States, all on government scholarships, is providing free airfare home. “We all discourage them” from returning home, said Abdul Azeez Boujarwah, head of the cultural division. “But they say, ‘My mom is calling and she is crying.’”
Saudi Arabia, which has about 5,100 students in the United States, is also flying some students home free. The United Arab Emirates provides open-ended round-trip tickets to the roughly 600 students in the United States on government scholarships, so they can leave whenever they wish. About 2,500 students from that country are studying in the United States.
The College of Engineering at the University of Missouri at Columbia has been particularly hard hit. Of the 45 students who had withdrawn from the university as of Wednesday because of the attacks, 33 were engineering students. Many were freshmen.
James Thompson, dean of the college, met with students on September 18, shortly after he heard that several wanted to return home. Of the 30 who showed up, none reported being threatened, he said, but all were apprehensive.
“I’m sympathetic,” Mr. Thompson said, noting that he would feel anxious if his children were in the Middle East now.
A volunteer at the Islamic center in Columbia, who asked not to be identified, said most of the students who had left did not feel safe. Several students told him they had been yelled at or bullied in the days after the attacks. The volunteer also said that a number of the students had been told by their sponsor, an oil company in Abu Dhabi, to return home.
The University of Arizona has also seen some fallout from the attacks. Of approximately 200 students from the Middle East and surrounding areas, 39 had withdrawn as of Tuesday. Some students were unnerved by reports that one of the terrorists had taken an eight-week English-language course at the university in 1991, and they feared getting caught up in the investigation, said Omar Shahin, director of the Islamic Center of Tucson. The university agreed to give the students who left full refunds this semester and helped get their records in order, in hopes they will return in January.
Efforts to reach departing students were largely unsuccessful. Many had already returned home. Others, contacted by college officials, declined to be interviewed. Even student leaders had a tough time tracking them down.
“They’re not speaking because they themselves are afraid of implicating themselves in anything,” said Altaf Husain, president of the Muslim Students’ Association of the United States and Canada. “The biggest difficulty here is to quantify it and get some sense even of how much this is happening and whether it’s a temporary phenomenon.”
Mohammed El Hadid, a Syrian student and president of the Muslim Student Association at California State University at Long Beach, said most of the 41 students who had left did not feel safe. One female student, he said, was beaten up for wearing a head scarf. Another was interrogated for five hours by a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent. A third student reported that a professor had said in class: “There are no good Arabs over there.”
Most problems, Mr. Hadid said, occurred off campus. Muslim students at other universities also said that their campuses were relatively safe.
Ali Al-Qahtani, a Saudi engineering student at Missouri, said he planned to stay: “I don’t really have any concerns about my safety. I get a lot of support from my professors and fellow students. Everybody seems to understand.” The students who left, he said, felt distracted and uncertain about the future.
Kaled Al-Buhairi, a junior at the University of Colorado at Denver, did not want to leave, but said that his mother had begged him to come home to Kuwait. He told her that he was fine and did not want to take a leave of absence. When she discovered that Kuwait University had extended its registration deadline, however, “I had no argument,” he said.
He arranged to withdraw from the university and plans to go back to Kuwait, he said, “till my mom calms down.” He hopes it will take no more than a semester.
Intensive English-language programs may be feeling the greatest effects of the withdrawals. At the Center for English Language and Orientation Programs at Boston University, only 40 percent of 80 admitted Middle Eastern students showed up when classes started, on Monday, said Margot Valdivia, the center’s director. Last fall, 70 percent of accepted students end up coming.
At the English Program for Internationals at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, the director, Alexandra Rowe, estimated that 16 of the 25 Middle Eastern students would return home.
“They’re more vulnerable because they don’t have the English yet to defend themselves if the situation should arise,” Ms. Rowe said.
In the Middle East, universities are preparing for an influx of students who have either returned home from the United States or decided not to go abroad. In the week after the attacks, the Lebanese American University said it had been flooded with inquiries from students from the Persian Gulf region who had been accepted at American universities but wanted to stay home instead. The Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, has instructed all Lebanese universities to accommodate the expected exodus of students from the United States.
In Egypt and Jordan, Amideast, the agency that administers standardized admissions tests to students who want to study in the United States, reported a significant decline in the number of people seeking advice. “It’s been particularly noticeable among medical, engineering, and M.B.A. students,” said Elizabeth Khalifa, Amideast’s Egypt director.
But for many, it’s business as usual.
The Cairo office of the Institute for International Education, for example, which sends thousands of Egyptians to the United States every year for graduate and technical training, said the vast majority of its students had chosen to remain in the United States.
At the American University in Cairo, only 13 American students out of 101 have returned home. As with their Middle Eastern counterparts in the United States, they were responding to their parents’ concerns for their safety, a university spokeswoman said.
In India, parents are also worried about their children who are studying in the United States, because a number of Indian people have been assaulted in the aftermath of the attacks.
“I did phone,” conceded Trita Sondhi, whose son is getting his M.B.A. at the University of Iowa. “I was very, very concerned. We were listening to all the news.” Her son, however, played down the risks. She said he was consumed with his studies and had no plans to go home or end his program early.
In Japan, a handful of American students have returned to the United States. Sophie McCormick, an exchange student from the University of Virginia at Temple University Japan, in Tokyo, was one of them.
“It is scary being in a country where you know only a small fraction of the language,” said Ms. McCormick. “I felt so disconnected from the U.S., my family, and my friends.”
A number of American colleges, especially in the New York City area, have pulled out of the 2001 U.S. Universities Fair, scheduled to be held in Kobe and Tokyo at the end of this month. Organizers estimated that at least 20 of the expected 120 participants would eventually drop out.
In Pakistan, academic organizations affiliated with the U.S. government are obliged to pay for people’s plane tickets home if they want to leave.
Mr. Akbar, of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, said that six academics scheduled to arrive in Pakistan this month had suspended their travel plans. Another six already in the country had left. Several American students had also returned home.
Academics say it’s too early to know how tensions abroad will affect American students who plan to go overseas next spring. Carl A. Herrin, director of government relations for the nonprofit American Councils for International Education, has been talking to colleagues around the country. None have reported an immediate drop in interest. He expects that the future will mirror the experience of the Persian Gulf war: an initial decline in the number of students studying abroad, then a resurgence from pent-up demand.
Burton Bollag, Alan Brender, Daniel del Castillo, Ma Cheng, and Martha Ann Overland contributed to this report.
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