NAFSA

2 May 2002

The Washington Monthly
733 15^th Street NW, Suite 1000
Washington, DC 20005
FAX: (202) 393-2444

To the Editor:

If it weren't so slanderous, I would have found your article, "Borderline Insanity" (May 2002 issue), a fascinating throwback to the McCarthy era – a time I had frankly hoped was past. Virtually no assertion is documented except by the occasional anonymous source. The article is riddled with elementary errors – don't you people do fact checks? Motivation is constantly attributed to people to whom the author never spoke or did not speak to about the matter with respect to which motivation is attributed.

Here are some facts, many of which we gave your author in writing. Apparently he found them less interesting than his conspiracy theory.

Your article makes three broad assertions about "the university lobby," supposedly as embodied by NAFSA: first, that we opposed Maurice Berez's efforts to implement student tracking; second, that we sought Mr. Berez's removal; and third, that we used the $95 student tracking fee as an "excuse" to delay implementation of the system. Each of those assertions is false.

The notion that NAFSA (by the way, our name is not "National Association of Foreign Student Advisers," and we are not a lobby) "sprang into action" in response to the 1996 law is laughable. That many of our members had serious reservations about the student tracking system is beyond question. Some, including the one you quoted, "loved it." When I took this job in February 1998, our association was so consumed by this debate that it couldn't have sprung into action about anything.

It is a fact that never during Mr. Berez's tenure in his position in charge of implementation of the foreign-student monitoring program did we take an official position on the program, for or against. As Mr. Berez knows very well, my position during his tenure was that student tracking was coming whether we liked it or not, and since our members were the ones who would have to implement it on their campuses, it was in our interest to work with the INS to try to make the system work. From where I sit, we worked toward that end with Mr. Berez as constructively as he was prepared to permit.

In fact, the article by Gary Althen, to which your story refers, followed a largely sympathetic treatment of student monitoring in the summer 1997 issue of our magazine. The juxtaposition accurately reflected the range of sentiments in our association. It wouldn't have taken deep research for your author to discover this.

With his impressive remote mind-reading capabilities, your author states that we "unofficially" worried that a student tracking system would mean "fewer jobs for foreign student advisers." For the record, in more than four years in this job, I have never heard any member of this association voice that supposed worry, and I do not believe it exists.

The article asserts that Mr. Berez was removed from his job in the fall of 1998 and that we made that happen. How strange, then, that in May 1999 Mr. Berez, at our invitation, appeared at our annual conference as an official INS spokesperson on the student tracking issue. Some lobby we are. Since Mr. Berez's presence at this conference is a matter of public record, not to know of it took carelessness at best, a will not to know at worst.

For the record, NAFSA never sought Mr. Berez's removal from his position in charge of implementation of the foreign-student monitoring program. I never met with Commissioner Meissner on this or any other matter. In my time here, neither I nor anyone else authorized to speak for NAFSA, ever met with any INS official for the purpose or with the intent of seeking or securing Mr. Berez's removal from his position.

Perhaps the reason your intrepid reporter could not find my "personal friend" Robert Bach – whom I first met in 1998 in my official capacity as head of NAFSA – is that Mr. Bach is not now and never has been with the Ford Foundation. In fact, we encouraged your reporter to contact Mr. Bach for confirmation of our nonexistent role in any personnel matters pertaining to Mr. Berez. We supplied your reporter with Mr. Bach's correct contact information. According to Mr. Bach, to his knowledge, no attempt was ever made to reach him for this story.

As for the $95 fee, no one doubts the government's right to collect fees for its services. What united virtually every higher education group was opposition to the government's attempt to task universities to be its fee collectors. Most of those groups will be very surprised to learn from your article that their real purpose was to derail student tracking.

Your reporter could easily have learned all of this if he had talked – and listened – to anyone other than Mr. Berez and those to whom Mr. Berez pointed him.

Our nation must address serious questions regarding how to respond to the terrorist threat that was brought home to us by the events of September 11. Spinning conspiracy theories about who was responsible for those events does not contribute to the national discussion that we need to have. The terrorists caused those events; universities and their "lobbyists" didn't.

Marlene M. Johnson
Executive Director and CEO
NAFSA: Association of International Educators