In Virginia, at least 28 students and recent graduates at four universities have had their legal status changed by the State Department, according to reporting at Inside Higher Ed. This includes students at Virginia Tech, Virginia Commonwealth University, George Mason University, and the University of Virginia.
As of April 15, over 180 colleges and universities across the United States have identified nearly 1,200 international students and recent graduates who have been affected.
Radio IQ’s Roxy Todd spoke with Inside Higher Ed’s news editor, Katherine Knott, for more on how this trend is affecting universities across the country, and what other significant changes she thinks may affect schools in the coming year.
*editor's note, this interview has been lightly edited for clarity
Roxy Todd: Tell us what you all have uncovered, and what’s known at this point about what prompted the State Department to do this?
Katherine Knott: "The government’s really not saying why these students are getting picked up and why they're losing their visas. It seems like they're comparing whether students have any sort of traffic violation or citation or otherwise. And then there’s also a social media component to this, where the government is looking through students’ social media, to kind of flag students as well who could lose their visas."
"There’s been some reporting based on lawsuits where students have challenged losing their visas that seem to indicate students who are from Muslim majority countries are getting swept up more often in these revocations of visas."
"We're learning about these students losing their visas because college administrators are going into the student visa information system and finding out that way that students have had their visas revoked. Institutions are basically having to check that database daily, so that they can make sure that they are telling students, ‘your visa has been revoked and something's wrong with your status.’ It’s happening quietly across the country, with very little explanation."
Todd: What are your sources telling you about how these cases threaten freedom of speech at universities?
Knott: "Sources are just telling us that international students are afraid to speak up. They're afraid to post on social media, they're afraid to protest, but also just speak up in class. I think there's a definite chilling effect based on what we're hearing across college campuses, especially for international students, because it really does seem, based on what the government is saying about the violations that could get you kicked out of the country and where you lose your student visa, is any sort of protest action. So it almost makes it seem like international students don't have freedom of speech at this time."
Todd: This administration is affecting higher education in a number of other ways, from cuts to research funding to orders to eliminate Diversity Equity and Inclusion programs. With all this upheaval, what do you see changing the most at universities over the next year?
Knott: "Just to start out, it's hard to say because we are only three months in to the Trump administration, and as you said, there's been so much upheaval that is fundamentally affecting institutions. So it’s hard to say where this all goes. But I think the research funding cuts certainly pose the biggest threat to universities like Virginia Tech and other institutions that are heavy research institutions. The government's just unilaterally freezing millions of dollars in grants, which include grants that were already awarded. So research that's actively going on is having to stop now."
"And then you also have the broader cuts. Again, it's kind of a black box, and it’s hard to say exactly what's happening, but over the last few weeks we've heard more reports of researchers getting a letter that says, ‘hey, your research is not aligned to our priorities, we are not funding that research anymore.’ It’s really the studies that are losing their funding because they seem to qualify as diversity, equity and inclusion. Those are what more widespread, and they also have a direct effect on institutions’ bottom line, because the question is, does that research stop, or does the research continue, but institutions are going to have to foot the bill?"
"And if institutions have to foot the bill, the money has got to come from somewhere. And for public institutions, where is the money going to come from? Like are state governments going to fill in the gap? That’s unclear. Private institutions? Maybe their endowments, but that's really hard, and not how endowments work. Maybe it will come from tuition revenue."
"But I think at a bigger picture level, what could change the most? I mean, what we're looking at right now is like a fundamental shift in the federal government's relationship to colleges and universities. The government is asking for a lot more and is getting more prescriptive in terms of how that money should be spent, where it should go to, and what colleges that get money should be required to do. And that's just not the way the federal government has historically interacted with institutions."
"And the people we talk to say that that undermines institutional autonomy. Being able to research what you want is core to academic freedom, to be able to teach what you want to teach. How involved is the federal government going to get in the running of institutions, from the research that's conducted, the classes that are taught, to the students who are taught there?"
"Because they're trying to change the admissions practices at colleges to change who gets into these institutions. It’s just unprecedented, and it's hard to say where it leads to, but people that I talk to are not optimistic that it's going to lead to positive changes."
Katherine Knott is the news editor at Inside Higher Ed.
