I know; I know. Curmie said he wouldn’t write about the Trump administration, but this is my blog, my rules, and I can break ‘em if I want to. And not only is higher education my turf, but I’m the unofficial coordinator for my department’s international programs. So when the Sphincter Posse at ICE announced that they’d be hunting down international students and trying to deport them if their university decides to go all-online, Curmie turned Mama Bear. Coming after my cubs is explicitly contra-indicated.
The policy change is a familiar one to Curmie, whose life in academia is peopled with a fair number of mid-level administrators whose principal raison d’être is to justify their own existence. So it appears to be with ICE, who are pretty much admitting one of three things: that they don’t really have anything to do, they haven’t a clue how to do their jobs, or they just like throwing their weight around and couldn’t care less about justice. Any way you slice it, patrolling the area anywhere near the southern border and harassing anyone with a “z” or a tilde in their surname just isn’t enough to keep these little weasels occupied. (As usual, Curmie means no disrespect in this nomenclature to actual fauna of the genus Mustela.)
We can expect little else than than petty xenophobia from this administration, and to the feeble minds of the policy-makers the only thing worse than a “foreigner” is a smart one. Curmie gets that. He understands, too, in the words of a Friend of Curmie, “the cruelty is the point.” After all, why else would anyone want to join a notoriously brutal, racist, self-important organization if not to be, well, brutal, racist, and self-important? And we can guess that the students who’ll be the first to be harassed won’t have surnames like Smith or Saunders, but rather Yang, Muhammad, or Lopez.
It’s asking a bit much of an administration founded on jingoism and testosterone poisoning to show any evidence of ethics, but at least some recognition of the pragmatics of the situation wouldn’t come amiss. Students have no say, none, in whether their university holds face-to-face classes or goes exclusively online, yet they’re the ones left hanging if the university makes a decision which, while not necessarily an obvious choice, is certainly a reasonable one.
In many cases, the students are already in the country and literally can’t go home, as a number of countries are closing their borders to people coming from the US, so incompetent is our handling of the crisis. We’ve already talked about some of the numbers in previous posts here, for instance; no need to repeat them. Let’s just say: they’re bad. Other students aren’t here yet, but have non-refundable plane tickets and apartment deposits. Still others, if they leave under threat of deportation, might not be able to return. Plus, of course, if there’s no face-to-face instruction, the majority of international students won’t want to be here anyway, unless they effectively have no choice. And we mustn’t forget the mountain of red tape to cut through for universities and students alike—and Curmie thought it was the Dems who liked governmental paperwork for its own sake. Guess not.
Of course, Harvard and M.I.T. promptly sued the government to stop the rule from going into effect. This is good news from two points of view. First, someone is standing up to governmental bullying and grandstanding. Harvard President Lawrence Bacow sums up the basis for the suit:
The order came down without notice—its cruelty surpassed only by its recklessness. It appears that it was designed purposefully to place pressure on colleges and universities to open their on-campus classrooms for in-person instruction this fall, without regard to concerns for the health and safety of students, instructors, and others.
The University of California at Berkeley announced plans for their own suit, with outgoing President Janet Napolitano describing the Trump administration’s action as “mean-spirited, arbitrary and damaging to America.” She further describes the policy as “illegal, unnecessary and callous.” Of course, she’s right: outrageousness, interference in university operations, and cruelty for its own sake were the obvious goals of this initiative. They’re not collateral damage; they’re the goal.
Equally important is who is taking up the fight. Harvard, M.I.T., and Berkeley are three of the most prestigious universities not merely in the country, but in the world. More to the point, they have deep pockets and high-powered legal teams. Less than 48 hours after the announcement of the policy change, the two Boston area institutions had filed a 24-page lawsuit. Curmie can’t write that fast even when he’s already done the research. That means either that these guys (those would be non-gender specific “guys”) are really good, or they anticipated that the Xenophobe-in-Chief might do something this irrational. Or both.
Curmie’s university and scores if not hundreds of others would also take a major hit if this absurd policy were to go into effect, but we’re not really in much of a position to fight it. So, strange as it seems for this loyal son of Dartmouth, he’s cheering on Harvard with all his might. Strange bedfellows, and all that.
The other good news is that a lot of colleges are looking for ways to circumvent the Stupid. Curmie hereby volunteers to teach an in-person course as a voluntary overload to any and all international students. Much as Curmie would cheerfully teach Fuck ICE 101 and 102, as suggested by the internet meme, we’d need outside permission to develop such a course. But Curmie sees no problem in requiring a Chinese grad student in Chemistry to take a course in Global Theatre. We’d meet face-to-face, but of course Curmie can be as lenient as he chooses in excusing absences. He wouldn’t allow more than 45 per semester, of course. And the academic standards would be at least as high as the University of North Carolina demanded of its athletes all those years. Curmie was thinking of a final exam with a single question: “Have you ever seen a play?” “Yes,” “no,” and “I don’t know” would receive full credit. All other answers would get a B. But shhhhhhh, Gentle Reader, don’t go noising that question around. If students find out what’s going to be on the exam, Curmie would have to think of another question. And that would take more thought than the entirety of the ICE has ever expended.
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