A few thoughts about today's vicious ICE modification to student visas in light of my thread from last week about how the pandemic is accelerating the breakdown of a funding model that conceives of higher ed as a consumer good.
ice.gov/news/releases/…
ice.gov/news/releases/…
For convenience, here's a link to the original thread:
Before all else, it's important to name and denounce the unconscionable cruelty of these rules and the obscene forms of hardship they will impose upon students from all around the world who have chosen to come learn and produce new knowledge at US colleges and universities.
The current moment was plenty terrifying for many of these students already. It is outrageous that they are now faced with the impossible choices and the horrific upheaval to their lives that the new rules will impose.
Many people have already pointed to the ways in which the new rules will radically augment pressure on universities to "reopen" or adopt confusing, laborious "hybrid" models despite growing mountains of evidence that in more and more places it will likely be dangerous to do so.
Given the timing of the announcement and the increasing isolation of the Trump administration's pandemic denial in the face of an increasingly deadly reality, it is possible to discern an even more diabolical logic at work in these new rules.
My operative assumption here is that the White House regards institutions of higher education as "hot spots" of hostility to its agenda. Politically motivated denial--whether toward pandemics or climate change--stands up poorly to most academic standards of data analysis.
Moreover, both the political leanings of many academics and the growing reliance of many schools on revenue from foreign students mean that universities are generally positioned, for principled and pecuniary reasons, to oppose Trump's viciously xenophobic, anti-immigrant policies
These new rules basically weaponize the fiscal conundrum I laid out on Friday. By radically augmenting the threat to tuition revenue, they force a horrible choice upon universities all across the country:
If they act upon the growing mass of evidence that COVID-19 is spreading rapidly and a return to campus will put huge numbers of students, faculty, and staff in danger, then they effectively participate in endorsing the deportation of their own students and lose more revenue.
If they now choose, whether to protect their foreign students or their revenues or both, to adopt some kind of hybrid model, then those universities effectively participate in endorsing Trump's alternate reality despite what the science may say.
In other words, the implication of these rules is to say, "You can have your science, or you can keep a few more foreigners in the country. You can no longer have both."
That is an unacceptable choice.
