The rules after 9/11 - publisher's letter - tracking foreign students at colleges and universities - Brief Article

Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, Nov-Dec, 2001 by Dan Shannon

What should our collective response be to the government's intense pressure to enlist colleges and universities to help track foreign students?

That pressure, of course, is linked to Hani Hanjour, who applied for and received a student visa to study English at a Berlitz course taught at Holy Names College in Oakland. He never attended classes, and no one paid any attention to his country-wide wanderings until he was identified as one of the Sept. 11 murder/suicide pilots.

Higher-education's response to the government's request, of course, must be: Glad to help, the sooner the better.

Make no mistake: Of the half-million foreign students studying here, only a handful can be reasonably considered a threat, so curbing student visas and tracking students might have as much impact on controlling terrorism as banning curbside check-ins at the airport, which is to say none at all. But keeping tabs on foreign students is the least we can do as we struggle to keep the bad guys out of the country. Also, between 1999 and 2000 the federal government issued more than 3,000 visas to students from nations on the United State's terrorism watch list. That's a good place to start. (If the students are fleeing repression, they should apply for political asylum, not student privileges.) And U.S. embassies must do a much better job weeding out visa applicants.

It's simple, if somewhat chilling, to create a database of visiting students and require schools to keep tabs on them. The government can collect finger prints and photographs at the visa-issuing embassy, and colleges and universities can make regular reports listing residential addresses and courses foreign students are taking. (Why the worry about course work? No one wants a would-be terrorist coming to America to study, say, English lit and then switching to nuclear physics.)

Will a national tracking system stigmatize international students, especially those from the Middle East? I doubt it, but for those who might come under a little undue scrutiny, it's time to suck it up.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service has the funding from Congress it needs to move forward with automating its paper-based system that tracks foreign students. We need to reverse course and support a requirement of the 1996 Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act that forces colleges to collect fees from international students to pay for the system.

My answer today is different from the one I would have offered on Sept. 10, but the world's a different place.

dshannon@matrixmagazine.com