Antiterror tactics chill U.S. campuses

[struggle4progress]

Antiterror tactics chill U.S. campuses
By Mark Sidel YaleGlobal Online
TUESDAY, JUNE 28, 2005

IOWA CITY 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. <snip>

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/27/opinion/edsidel.php

[Big Kahuna]

1. "ham-fisted"

that's a perfect description of our current government.