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.”