Harvard, MIT, Northeastern file suit to block ICE action against international students

ASAM NEWS

Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Northeastern University are suing the Trump administration over a guideline that would prevent international students from taking online classes in the US, CNN reports. 

On Monday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released guidelines which stated that “students attending schools operating entirely online may not take a full online course load and remain in the United States,” according to CNBC

The University of Southern California will file an amicus brief in support of the legal action by the eastern schools.

The University of California, which has over 41,000 international students, said late Wednesday that it fight the ICE action. It is unclear if UC will join the lawsuit by Harvard, MIT and Northeastern or if it will file a separate suit.

Students enrolled in educational institutions operating entirely online “must depart the country or take other measures, such as transferring to a school with in-person instruction.”

The Department of Homeland Security has said that “all students scheduled to study at a U.S. institution in the fall will be able to do so, though some will be required to study from abroad if their presence is not required for any in-person classes in the United States,” according to CNN.

ICE has recommended that international students enrolled in programs going online-only in the fall consider transferring to schools that will be offering in-person instruction.

According to CNN, there are more than 1 million international students in the United States. Many are enrolled in schools that will be using online-only instruction for the upcoming fall semester.

Harvard is one of those schools. Earlier this week, the university announced that all course instruction would be delivered online. They say the ICE guidelines could impact 5,000 international students.

Harvard and MIT jointly filed the lawsuit against ICE and the Department of Homeland Security in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. They say that the ICE guidelines violate the Administrative Procedures Act and put universities in an “untenable situation” of either proceeding with online-only instruction or attempting to implement some form of in-person instruction.

“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,” Harvard’s President Bacow said, according to CNBC.

The lawsuit also says that the guidelines create challenges for international students. It argues that many international students will not be able to access online instruction if they are forced to return to their home countries.

“Moreover, for many students, returning to their home countries to participate in online instruction is impossible, impracticable, prohibitively expensive, and/or dangerous,” the lawsuit states, according to CNN.

It criticized ICE’s suggestion that international students simply transfer to schools offering in-person instruction.

“Just weeks from the start of the fall semester, these students are largely unable to transfer to universities providing on-campus instruction, notwithstanding ICE’s suggestion that they might do so to avoid removal from the country,” the lawsuit states.

Bacow said that Harvard and MIT are committed to ensuring that international students can continue their studies without worry.

“We will pursue this case vigorously so that our international students — and international students at institutions across the country — can continue their studies without the threat of deportation,” Bacow said.

Views From the Edge contributed to this report.

Universities question FBI calls to monitor Chinese students and scholars

L. Rafael Reif, MIT  president

ASAM NEWS & VIEWS FROM THE EDGE

The FBI is stepping up their investigations against China's alleged efforts to steal US research and secrets by asking American universities to keep a close eye on Chinese students and scholars.

The public radio network, National Public Radio, reports authorities have visited at least 10 universities to make that request.

“We are being asked what processes are in place to know what labs they are working at or what information they are being exposed to,” Fred Cate, of Indiana University, said. “It’s not a question of just looking for suspicious behavior — it’s actually really targeting specific countries and the people from those countries.”

Amid the Trump Administration's request and warnings about Chinese espionage, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) last week wrote an open letter to “members of the MIT community,” in support of students and scholars of Chinese descent. 

L. Rafael Reif wrote that he felt compelled to share his “dismay” over the Trump administration’s scrutiny of Chinese and Chinese American researchers and pupils due to heightened concerns about academic espionage.

“Faculty members, post-docs, research staff and students tell me that, in their dealings with government agencies, they now feel unfairly scrutinized, stigmatized and on edge – because of their Chinese ethnicity alone,” he wrote. “Nothing could be further from – or more corrosive to ­– our community’s collaborative strength and open-hearted ideals. To hear such reports from Chinese and Chinese American colleagues is heartbreaking.”

The increased emphasis comes against the backdrop of what FBI director Christopher Wray said at a speech in New York back in April.

RELATED: 'Yellow Peril' fears arise in Chinese American community

“China has pioneered a societal approach to stealing innovation in any way it can from a wide array of busi­ness­es, universities and organizations,” he said to the Council on Foreign Relations, according to the South China Morning Post. “Put plainly, China seems determined to steal its way up the economic ladder at our expense.”

As AsAmNews previously reported, Xifeng Wu was recently asked to step down as director of public health for the Center for Public Health and Translational Genomics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center under suspicion of strong ties to China.

The request by the FBI has left many universities confused and uncertain. Yale University president Peter Salovey is among them.

He said he was “working with my presidential colleagues in the Association of American Universities (AAU) to urge federal agencies to clarify concerns they have about international academic exchanges. The AAU has encouraged agencies to use the tools already in place, such as export controls, while affirming the principle of open academic exchange for basic research.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists fears that scientific partnerships are being criminalized. The organization posted on its blog:

Scientists of Chinese descent are being put into an impossible situation. On the one hand, they have been encouraged for years by their research institutions in the United States to seek out relationships with their international scientific peers in order to work together and solve hard problems. The clearest example of this collaboration comes from cancer research. The NIH’s Cancer wing, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), has stressed the importance of international collaboration in order to improve cancer outcomes in the scientific literature and in the webpage of the NCI’s Cancer Moonshot program (one of the tag lines read “Cancer knows no borders”). There is even a NCI group dedicated specifically to the purpose of international research collaborations.

On the other hand, several of the FBI actions towards Chinese or Chinese-American scientists (i.e. arrests, house visits to ask about “loyalty,” and reading private emails) have been directed at cancer researchers who were carrying out perfectly reasonable scientific partnerships with oncologists in China. And through these actions, the US government may be scaring off brilliant scientists of Chinese descent from conducting research that could help find treatments for cancer.

The increased scrutiny by the government is creating a new landscape for ethnically Chinese researchers in the United States, says Frank Wu, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings, and a member of the Committee of 100, a group of prominent Chinese Americans that works to advance US–China relations. Whether the US government’s focus on foreign influence in academia is right or wrong, he says, researchers need to understand that behaviours that were once considered OK, are now questioned or banned. 

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Women in STEM; MIT team invent text-to-Braille converter

Team Tactile, from left: Chandani Doshi, Jialin Shi, Bonnie Wang, Charlene Xia, Tania Yu and Grace Li.

SIX ASIAN/AMERICAN students from MIT won a student technology competition by designing and building a device that translates the written word into braille - in just 15 hours.

The tight-knit friends, known as Team Tactile, are now among four groups of innovators accepted into the new Microsoft #MakeWhatsNext Patent Program, giving them the chance to get the legal help they need to navigate the complicated and often expensive process of obtaining a patent.

“There are a lot of potential barriers for women entering tech and staying in tech, from not enough exposure as children to lack of encouragement as they grow up,” said student Tania Yu. “This program makes it a lot easier for women to pursue what they’ve been working on, instead of just dropping a project because they feel like they couldn’t get intellectual property rights.”

RELATED: #LookLikeAnEngineer looks at Silicon Valley's workforce, board rooms

Besides Yu, the other members of Team Tactile are Chandani Doshi, Jialin Shi, Bonnie Wang, Charlene Xia and Grace Li.

The idea for the competition came earlier this year, when Microsoft connected with girls in New York for International Women’s Day, and young students were asked to name an inventor. The answers came quickly: Ben Franklin. Nikola Tesla. Thomas Edison.

But when they were asked to name a female inventor? The question was met with uncertain silence.

The #MakeWhatsNext Patent Program seeks out industrious women, or groups that include at least one female member, who are working on advances in technology that could make a real difference in the world. 

The Tactile prototype is the size of a candy bar.

It then connects them with Microsoft patent lawyers and a newly formed Patent Board of senior company leaders, researchers and technology experts to provide them with mentorship and connections across Microsoft and the tech industry.

With the help of the patent lawyers, Team Tactile formally applied for a patent for their real-time text-to-Braille converter, called Tactile, last September. 

Although there are already translation devices available for the blind, their cost is in the thousands of dollars and the devices need to be hooked up with a PC and a scanner. The Team Tactile invention would cost only a couple of hundred dollars making it more accessible to more people and it's the portable invention is the size of a candy bar.

The Tactile team would love to see the invention help boost Braille literacy around the globe. They hope it can help many people gain more independence, and they’ve even been discussing how they could make it available to schools that don’t have the budget for expensive technology.

“The thing that’s really pushed us is there’s not really something like this yet in the world… and it’s something that’s needed,” said Li. “That’s really motivated us to continue to develop this and make it happen.”

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