Global

First Thought

Weekly insights from Karin Fischer’s. Subscribe here to Karin’s global-education newsletter, latitude(s).

A new Trump administration policy, released with no notice on Monday, would block international students from coming to or remaining in the United States if their courses are taught entirely online. Many in higher education viewed it as a backdoor effort to force colleges to reopen for face-to-face instruction, and Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sued almost immediately to stop it. In the meantime, the policy has thrown colleges and the lives of a million international students into tumult.

For students, especially those with health conditions, the regulation forces tough choices: travel to their home countries in the midst of a global pandemic or return to campus. For colleges, as one vice president for international affairs put it, “it’s an all-hands-on-deck exercise.”

Indiana University at Bloomington, which is planning to operate in a hybrid mode, must issue new student-visa documents to more than 5,000 international students. Michigan State University, which also plans on a hybrid fall, is working to ensure that every student can take a face-to-face course that fits with their academic program and schedule. Across the country, campus officials are being inundated with calls from concerned students.

Read Karin’s full analysis of the policy and its implications for higher ed: As MIT and Harvard Sue, Colleges Scramble to Respond to New Federal Policy on International Students

The Reading List

• A report by the ombudsman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services identifies a number of risks to the optional practical training program.
• Academics in Hong Kong are anxious that a new security law imposed by the Chinese government could chill academic freedom and make it more difficult to hire and retain faculty.
• Moody’s warned that the executive order suspending H1-B and other work visas is “credit negative” for U.S. universities because it could “aggravate the decline” of international students and weaken colleges’ ability to recruit academics and researchers.

Featured This Week

“I’ve come to think of learning about being anti-racist the same way I think about learning a language. I’m never going to be perfect at it, I’m going to continue to be corrected, and I’m going to keep trying.”

—May Lopez, a graduate student at Michigan State University who is from Ecuador. Lopez joined a panel with Karin Fischer for a latitude(s) coffee hour on how colleges can do a better job talking with international students about race and racial identity. One of her suggestions: Colleges should provide safe spaces for international students to talk about race so that they can ask questions they might be embarrassed to pose.

Read more about the discussion, and Karin’s key takeaways, in this week’s latitude(s) newsletter.