Latitudes

“The need is not going to end with Ukraine”

When Russian forces invaded Ukraine, Iryna Zenyuk watched as the war unfolded in her childhood home.

“I woke up with the news and went to bed with the news,” Zenyuk, an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of California at Irvine, said. “I’m as far away from Ukraine as I can be.”

Soon, though, Zenyuk, who came to the United States at 15 and still has family and professional colleagues in Ukraine, decided she had to do more. She began to lay groundwork to bring Ukrainian scientists and other scholars displaced by the fighting to Irvine.

Zenyuk was able to turn to a colleague for guidance — Jane O. Newman, a professor of comparative literature, started a campus chapter of Scholars at Risk, an international network of individuals and institutions that supports displaced scholars and promotes academic freedom, five years ago. Recently, she worked to sponsor four Afghan professors, including a human-rights lawyer and an advocate for women’s education, at Irvine.

Newman gave Zenyuk a roadmap to move ahead. She has begun a crowdfunding campaign with a goal of raising $100,000 to support the scholars’ needs and made fund-raising trips to New York and Los Angeles, which have large Ukrainian diaspora communities. Irvine’s vice provost for research committed $25,000 in funding. Now, Zenyuk is working to identify potential academic positions for displaced researchers.

Irvine isn’t alone in opening its doors to professors fleeing the war in Ukraine. Other colleges, such as Purdue and Brown Universities, have committed to hosting displaced scholars. Robert Quinn, executive director of the Scholars at Risk Network, said there are already efforts underway to welcome Ukrainian academics into European universities, where many have robust networks. Along with Scholars at Risk, the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund helps identify and vet scholars and provides some fellowship funds.

Yet there can be challenges to supporting scholars displaced by war and other threats to their safety and academic freedom. It can be more difficult to rally campus and community support for displaced scholars without a high-profile crisis to galvanize attention. And such programs are often reliant on the efforts of faculty and staff volunteers who are juggling other responsibilities.

The work required to sponsor a displaced professor or researcher is substantial: In addition to temporary positions, they typically need housing, clothing and furniture, health care, and travel and visa assistance. They may have families in need of English lessons, help securing cell phones and driver’s licenses, and assistance in getting their children into local schools.

“I’m a scholar of 16th- and 17th-century European history,” Newman said. “I never thought I’d know so much about the visa process.”

Newman and Zenyuk said Irvine administrators have supported their work, and all 10 University of California campuses now have Scholars at Risk chapters. Still, both professors said they would like the university system to have a formal displaced-scholars program, with dedicated funding and staff members.

Some of the barriers to aiding threatened scholars are beyond higher ed’s control — many Afghan academics, for example, are still waiting to secure visas to come to the United States. But having infrastructure on campuses can make efforts to support scholars more sustainable, especially when threats against academics don’t make the headlines, as they have in Ukraine and Afghanistan.

“It’s not enough to respond to the crisis of the moment,” said Newman, who also currently sponsors a professor who fled Cameroon’s civil war. Assisting such scholars isn’t just altruistic — visiting academics are often outstanding scholars and their presence enriches American campuses, she said. It also fits with colleges’ global missions.

For Zenyuk, “What is happening in Ukraine is personal to me,” she said. “But the need is not going to end with Ukraine.”

Have ideas for The Chronicle’s international coverage? Send me an email at karin.fischer@chronicle.com.

Many international STEM grads are here to stay

Despite challenges in navigating the American immigration system, international students who earn doctorates in science and technology fields stay in the United States after graduation at high rates, according to a new analysis of data collected by the National Science Foundation.

Seventy-seven percent of the 178,000 international STEM Ph.D. graduates from American colleges between 2000 and 2015 were still living in the country as of 2017, according to an issue brief by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University.

Since 2000, at least 65 percent of each year’s graduating class has stayed in the United States, and since 2004, no graduating class has had a stay rate below 73 percent. By contrast, about 55 percent of non-STEM graduates from overseas remained in the United States over the same period.

Stay rates are even higher for the two countries that account for the most international students on American campuses: Ninety percent of Chinese and 87 percent of Indian doctoral graduates in STEM have stayed on after graduation.

And they put down roots — as of 2017, 70 percent of those who had graduated at least a decade earlier had become permanent residents or naturalized U.S. citizens. (Although the NSF has more-recent data, from 2019, the researchers analyzed the 2017 figures because of possible issues with response rates.)

Retaining foreign graduates has become key to American science and innovation. Student-visa holders earn 40 percent of all doctorates and well over half of those in certain STEM fields.

But making a permanent home in the United States has become more difficult in recent years for some international graduates, the Georgetown authors point out. Because there is a cap on the number of employment-based green cards that can go to individuals from any single country, there now are sizable backlogs for countries with large numbers of applicants like China and, especially, India. For Indian applicants, the projected green-card wait time was more than 80 years.

The U.S. House passed legislation earlier this year to exempt graduate-degree holders in certain in-demand STEM fields from green-card caps, but the Senate has yet to agree to the measure.

Professor convicted of hiding China ties wants a new trial

A Harvard University professor found guilty of lying to U.S. government officials about his ties to China is asking a federal judge to throw out his conviction.

Lawyers for Charles M. Lieber, the only academic to be found guilty under the U.S. Department of Justice’s China Initiative, have filed a motion for him to be acquitted or granted a new trial. The government’s decision to end the controversial probe of academic and economic espionage just two months after Lieber’s conviction should be taken into account when considering his appeal, his lawyers argued in a Boston courthouse last week.

They also said that prosecutors did not accurately represent statements to investigators by Lieber, a former chemistry department chairman, and that the government did not prove that he concealed the truth.

Prosecutors disputed these assertions. Jurors at Lieber’s December trial were shown a recording of him telling FBI agents that he had been “dishonest” and not “completely transparent” about his ties and financial affiliations with a Chinese university and Chinese-government foreign-talent recruitment program.

Around the globe

Recent international graduates moving to Optional Practical Training and student-visa holders will be able to pay for faster service from the federal government in in the current fiscal year, among the first to be able to use expedited processing.

The state of New Jersey urged a federal judge to reinstate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which gives legal protections to children brought to the United States as children.

Chinese universities have organized indoctrination courses to give students a “correct understanding” of the war in Ukraine, one that minimizes Russian aggression.

NPR reports that security officials in China blocked some scholars there from remotely delivering papers at an international conference and questioned one at his home for hours, as the Chinese government tightens restrictions on academics’ international work.

Brandeis University has disassociated from the Middle East Studies Association after the group’s members voted for a resolution endorsing an academic boycott of Israel.

Sudan’s military leader, who seized power in a 2021 coup, has replaced 30 of the country’s university presidents.

Students at the American University of Afghanistan remain in hiding after efforts to evacuate them stalled.

China’s Foreign Ministry has lodged a complaint with the Australian government after Chinese students were allegedly deported for failing to disclose their military training.

American universities should not build campuses in countries with repressive regimes, argues Tom Zoellner in The Review.

The University of Southern California awarded posthumous degrees to Japanese American students who were forced into internment camps during World War II.

And finally...

One of the things I’ve missed the most in the two years since I last traveled overseas is sitting down for a meal. Maybe (no, definitely) I’m tired of my own cooking, but I also crave the excitement of tasting a new, unfamiliar, or unexpected flavor. Sampling the local cuisine gives you a sense of a place as well as a window into people: The Chinese mother who fussed over me like I was one of her children. (In fairness, my chopstick skills …) The shy Indian boy who brightened when he shared a bite of his mom’s mango pickle. The businessman who confided he sometimes felt nostalgic for the “fake” Chinese food he ate while studying in the United States. Even as I am writing, I am coming to realize that my hunger is not just for food but for connection, the kind you can’t get through a Zoom screen.

Still, food will do. Do you have a favorite recipe you picked up studying or working abroad? A cookbook that reminds you of your travels? A treasured international food memory? Send me an email — my mouth will be watering only a little.

And Ramadan Mubarak to all who observe.

Thanks for reading. I always welcome your feedback and ideas for future reporting, so drop me a line at karin.fischer@chronicle.com. You can also connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn. If you like this newsletter, please share it with colleagues and friends. They can sign up here.