The
FBI, the INS and You
By
Greg Walters
The
first call from the FBI came just days after Sept. 11. The Bureau
wanted to know if the College teaches courses in aviation.
“We cooperated,” Oberlin President Nancy Dye said. “We
said no.”
What began with a simple phone call, however, is snowballing into
a national trend.
In the post-9/11 world, the federal government is moving to get
a hold on every possible connection between international terrorism
and American higher education.
From simple home-front reconnaissance operations to holding up student
visas and monitoring foreign students over the internet, the Feds
are slowly and surely getting more involved in day-to-day Oberlin
life — and in the affairs of schools across the country.
Oberlin’s second brush with the FBI, a few weeks after the
first, was a little less simple. This time, agents told the College
that a computer in King had been hacked into as part of an illicit
cyber thread used to spread violent rhetoric — possibly, according
to Special Consultant to the President Diana Roose, by a group operating
in Pakistan.
College President Nancy Dye disclosed the incident at a public forum
shortly after the Sept. 11 anniversary entitled “Civil Liberties
and Academic Freedom.”
“A computer on this campus was being used [as a server] by
a hateful group… for extraordinarily hateful speech,”
Dye said.
College officials, however, maintain the incident was less dramatic
than it may sound. The computer, used for teaching and research
in the computer science department, turned out to be just one of
a long series broken into by the hackers to help cover their tracks.
“It turned out to be something very trivial,” Oberlin
Center for Information Technology Director John Bucher said. “The
FBI from Washington notified the FBI from the Cleveland office that
they saw some suspicious action on UNIX. The FBI had a trail they
were following. It passed through Oberlin but didn’t end at
Oberlin. [Hackers] want to do these kinds of fancy things to hide
what they’re doing.”
The FBI arrived on campus and took a ‘snapshot’ - an
electric copy - of the hard drive, then quietly departed.
“I really don’t know what came of it, if anything,”
Special Consultant to the President Diana Roose said.
“It was not terrorism,” Dye seconded.
The third and final FBI contact with the College came in the form
of a letter from the Ohio Board of Regents for Higher Education,
saying new federal legislation requires research facilities such
as Oberlin to certify in writing the possession or absence of any
pathogens in its laboratories.
“Anthrax and smallpox were given as examples,” Dye explained.
“We don’t have any. It troubled me greatly, however,
that… the government doesn’t know where the smallpox
and anthrax [testing] is going on,” she said.
Still, Dye pointed out the College has been minimally affected by
such visits. Her concern, she said, is Federal legislation —
such as the Student Exchange and Visa Information System.
SEVIS requires the College to register information about foreign
students with the U.S. government online.
“Part of what the USA PATRIOT Act means is that the government
can ask — and will ask, apparently — much more information
about international students than we would normally provide,”
Dye said.
Besides registering a given international student’s arrival
on campus, Oberlin may be asked to report the student’s major
and whether a student drops below a full course load. Although SEVIS
is scheduled to become mandatory as of this January, a recent New
York Times article reports the main system still has serious glitches.
“It does bother me,” Dye said. “The government
is doing just the opposite of what I think the government should
do. The government ought to be encouraging international students
to study in the United States. I think the consequences of these
changes has been to discourage international students.”
For now, the total number of students seeking to study in America
is holding steady, according to a survey by the Institute of International
Education. The decline in applications from the Middle East has
been offset by a general increase from other areas.
What actually happens to these applications is a different story.
Just days into the first academic year after the attacks, the issue
of federal intervention in the student visa process has emerged
as a national phenomenon.
Heightened vigilance in scrutinizing visa applicants in the 16 to
45 male demographic from a smattering of Muslim majority states
has led to a massive backlog of paperwork in Washington.
“…Nearly all colleges and universities with significant
international student populations report that the problems are more
evident this year than in the past,” The Chronicle of Higher
Education reports. Many Universities have been left to scramble
for new teaching assistants, researchers, even professors.
In light of the countrywide scale, Oberlin remains relatively untouched.
Still, of the five students waylaid by the visa application process
this year — as reported last week in The Oberlin Review —
the College is making plans to defer the enrollment of three until
Spring 2003, rather than subject them to the hassle of starting
out two weeks behind. (One student, reported last week to have received
the go-ahead, failed to receive the proper documentation.)
However troubling these developments, critics of the status quo
maintain there are pressing reasons for change. Three of the Sept.
11 hijackers were let into the country as students, and two of those
were issued visas posthumously. Many institutions now registered
to issue I-20 forms — the prerequisite for obtaining student
visas — are no longer in existence.
“Right now there’s no check on whether an I-20 is counterfeit.
[Under the new program], there will be,” Assistant Dean of
Studies Ellen Sayles said.
“Allowing foreign students to study here is one of the ways
we convey our love of freedom to foreign students who will one day
return to their countries and take leadership positions. However,
we will no longer allow our hospitality to be abused,” Attorney
General John Ashcroft said, introducing the SEVIS program.
The overall effect of these policies remains to be seen. The visa
problems may work themselves out as early as next year, and SEVIS
might turn out to be just more paperwork for the College.
“There’s a huge amount of gray area in interpretation
of what the rules will be,” Sayles said. “The gray area
isn’t going to go away with SEVIS.” |