[Peace-discuss] Antiterror Tactics Chill U.S. Campuses

[ppatton at uiuc.edu]

 Antiterror Tactics Chill U.S. Campuses
by Mark Sidel
 
Washington's war on terror may be quietly taking a toll on
unsuspecting quarters - America's universities. To understand
the effects of antiterror policies on the U.S. academic
sector, it helps to spend time on university campuses in
Australia, Singapore, Britain or other countries. From
Melbourne to Edinburgh, those institutions are now filled with
foreign students, many of whom would have come to the United
States had they not been deterred by restrictive visa policies.
 
The inconsistent and ham-fisted implementation of a valid goal
- preventing terrorists from entering the United States - has
hindered or severely delayed many innocents from realizing
their dreams of education, research, or teaching in the United
States. Thousands who are not terrorists have been denied
visas, and many more have been forced to wait - often for
months or years - preventing them from continuing their
legitimate academic work.
 
Even as policies have eased in the last year or two, the
perception remains that U.S. universities are an unfriendly
destination for the best foreign students and scholars. In the
immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, doors to U.S.
education and research clearly closed - at a time when
Australia, Britain, France, Singapore, Japan and others were
aggressively campaigning to attract the best and the brightest
from abroad. And so the United States is increasingly losing a
global competition for the finest thinkers and innovators,
regardless of their countries of origin.
 
Antiterror policy has also led to direct interventions on
campuses and the occasional silencing of debate. At Drake
University in Iowa, federal authorities issued - and were
later forced to rescind - a broad subpoena seeking information
on student protesters against the war in Iraq. At the
University of Texas in Austin, military intelligence agents
walked the corridors of the law school, seeking information on
"suspicious" attendees at a conference on Islam, law and
gender. Most serious of all, some academics have been caught
up in the web of antiterror policy.
 
Post-Sept. 11 policies have also affected university funding
and grant distribution - a fact virtually unknown outside the
quiet offices of university presidents and academic vice
presidents. As the U.S. government has sought to prevent
charities from being used as conduits for terrorist financing
- an important goal - it has pressured foundations and other
American nonprofit groups to guarantee, under penalty of law,
that no philanthropic money go to ill-defined lists of
terrorists and organizations. In November 2002, the Treasury
Department took steps to limit overseas funding by public
charities, asking nonprofit groups to comply with a
substantially widened and detailed set of new provisions.
 
Forced onto the defensive, their grants scrutinized by the
government, several important U.S. philanthropic institutions
have quietly responded. Some major foundations, such as the
Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, have shifted
part of this risk to their grantees, requiring them to sign
tough new letters taking full responsibility for broad
definitions of violence or terrorism conducted with grant dollars.
 
Several academic institutions have protested against this
move. In April 2004, the provosts of Chicago, Harvard, MIT,
Princeton, Stanford, Yale, and three other universities wrote
to the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, calling the new grant
language vague and warning that it might impinge on political
speech. "Whatever university administrators may think of the
merits of the political views expressed," they wrote, "these
fall under the protection of freedom of academic speech."
 
The key issues here are twofold. First, restrictive U.S. visa
and security policies continue to discourage and prevent many
exceptionally talented students and scholars from even
attempting to pursue their studies and careers in the United
States.
 
Second, the silencing effects of post-Sept. 11 antiterror
policies continue to resonate on U.S. university campuses.
Campuses are not in a new McCarthy era, but views outside the
mainstream are less welcome than before - a development
contributing little to the war on terrorism.
 
Only with continued pressure by the academic and scientific
community, federal legislators, civil liberties organizations
and others can these problems gradually be overcome. The
damage will take years to repair.
 
Mark Sidel is a professor of law at the University of Iowa.
This article, adapted from his book, ''More Secure, Less Free?
Antiterrorism Policy and Civil Liberties After September 11,''
is reprinted from YaleGlobal Online.
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Dr. Paul Patton
Research Scientist
Beckman Institute  Rm 3027  405 N. Mathews St.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  Urbana, Illinois 61801
work phone: (217)-265-0795   fax: (217)-244-5180
home phone: (217)-344-5812
homepage: http://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ppatton/www/index.html

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the
source of all true art and science."
-Albert Einstein
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