Colleges across the U.S. face a new set of struggles as international students face residency issues and new government policies threaten financial research funds.
Vacations have come to a close, luggages are packed for school, a new chill comes through the September wind and move-in days get closer and closer. Students all around the U.S. have gotten back into their dorms, or newly rented apartments, some for the first time, and others for their last. Many emotions come from occupying a newly created home, and returning to a routine that holds deadlines, exams, heavier work hours and less time to see friends.
This back-to-school excitement takes priority in student’s minds, and yet there is now an additional presence on the students attending various higher educational institutions. These uncertainties weigh heavily on research foundations and international students.
Tensions have been stewing in schools since the beginning of the year. From an increasing presence of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), protesting for President Trump’s cutting of the federal research funds have caused student protests on campuses across the U.S.
Many remember the internet presence that the Harvard v. Trump case had back in April, when the issue of federal research funding first came up. The Washington Post explained the dilemma as “The government withholding billions in federal funding from Harvard inflamed its dispute with the university, and it came after the Trump administration accused Harvard of allowing antisemitism to flourish on campus and made demands for change at the school, which Harvard leaders rejected.”
Though Harvard University was the most notorious on headlines, many other influential schools were affected such as: Columbia, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, Northwestern, Duke and Princeton.
“‘I do think there’s a big, big spike in how much people feel scared,’ Abdullah Shahid Sial, a junior who is co-president of the undergraduate student body at Harvard, said.
The federal fund cuts and school protests aren’t just important because of the loss in the country’s innovation and health research, but also because of the subliminal message that creates other consequences for schools.
“At the University at Buffalo, the overall decline of about 15% of international students is happening mostly in graduate programs, especially in the STEM fields. But it’s not just Buffalo. Universities all over the country are experiencing similar drops. Arizona State University reported a fall semester decline for the first time since 2020. Declines have been announced at universities in Texas, Missouri and Illinois. The state of Massachusetts is expecting about 10,000 fewer new international students this year,” NPR reported.
“This is obviously the most intense assault on higher education by the federal government in the history of the United States,” Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), said. “Everyone is coming into fire.”
“Following the arrest and the detention and the threat of deportation of several students … I felt that it was too risky for me to do research in the Middle East,” Nadje Al-Ali, a German anthropologist and former director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University, said in court. “Although these were students, I felt like, OK, next in line will be faculty.”
“There’s a lot of hopelessness and devastation – no one I know is feeling secure in terms of affording rent and groceries, or whether they will be expelled or fired,” Maura Finkelstein said, an anthropologist who last year became the first tenured professor to be fired over her pro-Palestinian advocacy since the war in Gaza started. “There’s real, material fear.”
Universities must leave the decision to protect their funding and students up to the courts as they try to resort to a new normal.
