Uncertain Times

At high alert or full-fledged crisis mode since September 11, international educators are at the frontline of institutional responses to students, parents, and university leaders. Here's an overview of how NAFSAns were affected by that fateful day.

BY KYNA RUBIN

Twenty short Greenwich Village blocks from ground zero in New York City, U.S. and foreign students at New York University (NYU) watched in horror as the second plane crashed into the World Trade Center. Soot and ash from the destruction forced 3,000 of them out of university housing. "People here feel tender, vulnerable," says Gail Szenes, director of NYU's office for international students and scholars. 

No one in Szenes's office remained untouched by the tragedy that Tuesday in September: One staff member's brother died in the towers. So did the cousin of another and three friends of a third. Other NYU colleagues lost spouses.

Campuses outside New York City and the Washington, D.C. area, where one of the four hijacked planes sliced through the Pentagon the same day, did not suffer the same degree of shock and unbearable loss. But events of September 11 reverberated across university quadrangles nationwide, sending foreign student and study abroad offices into a frenzy of activity--some more, some less, depending on geography. NYU cancelled classes for three days and focused exclusively on crisis management. In contrast, three hours after the hijacked planes hit New York and Washington, staff at Southern New Hampshire University held a previously scheduled briefing for new foreign graduate students on nuts and bolts issues during which nothing was said about the tragedy. That school, 200 miles from the World Trade Center, cancelled nothing that week except for opening convocation.

An unknown portion of NYU's 4,800 foreign students was among the evacuees who slept in the gym the night of September 11. The university leased hotel space at no charge to students and provided computers, replacement textbooks, and a $200 clothing allowance because most had fled housing with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Displaced students returned within three weeks of the tragedy, some sooner once residence halls were deemed safe, but the trauma has taken a toll, especially on international students. It's harder for them, observes Szenes, because they're far from their families; September 11 came only three days into fall classes at NYU, before new students had time to create a support system on site.

Reaching Out 

To comfort foreign students and their parents, on September 12 Szenes urged students to call their homes. She did this via e-mail from her home in Trenton, New Jersey; NYU was in the city's restricted zone, and tunnels and bridges into Manhattan were closed. Only two of her staff of 13 made it into the office that day. Phone service problems hindered calls to New York City, but students were able to reach families by using a free phone bank that the school operated at the gym, the library, a university restaurant, and a residence hall.

Szenes also urged students to come in to talk. For the first few days, the university set up a 24-hour counseling service in the gym. Her priority was to make sure that international students who needed it took advantage of this support. From September 17-21, her office provided further daily counseling. Over time, the number of students seeking help dwindled, but Szenes's office kept the door open. "Even if only one student came, we wanted them to know we were there," she says. Szenes also had counselors guide her staff in how to help foreign students and how to help themselves. By the last week of September, university counseling services were no longer being offered around the clock. Then, in October, New York City's anthrax scare began, and visits for counseling "skyrocketed." 

In early November, Szenes gathered experts from around campus to brief international students about their greatest concerns--legislative proposals that could affect student visas, bioterrorism and anthrax (New York was the first target of anthrax mailings), and the job market. "Foreign students know they were always low priority in hiring," she says, "but now, with so many lay-offs they fear it's even more likely that companies won't take on foreigners." NYU arts, humanities, and social science students get credit for work experience, which is an integral part of their academic life.

Nationwide, but especially in the cities most affected, one of the biggest challenges for international educators was allaying the fears of parents--both those of foreign students living in the United States and those of American students considering or already embarked on study abroad. NYU's international office added to its Web site a section called "Responses and Resources for the September 11 Tragedy." Under it are eight bulleted suggestions for how foreign students can talk to their families about September 11. Among the suggestions and advice: confirm your safety by establishing regular communication with your family, explain what you are doing to take care of yourself, inform your family of the support available to you at NYU, share uplifting notes of compassion that you've seen posted around the city, visit our office to view the cable channel showing newscasts from around the world to see the media reports your family is getting at home--overseas media may not always provide accurate views of what happened in the United States. 

American University (AU) has taken equally dramatic steps to help its foreign students since September 11. Nestled in an upscale, tree-lined area of Washington, D.C., AU is about 10 miles from the Pentagon attack that occurred across the Potomac River in Virginia. Of the school's 2,100 international students, 270 are from the Middle East. Beginning on September 12, the seven-member staff of the university's international student services office phoned each and every one of them to ask how they were and what the office could do to help. The job took almost three days, says office director Fanta Aw. A few special features of Aw's action plan: working with faculty to learn what issues students were raising in classrooms, and consulting closely with local embassies to learn what they were advising their nationals. 

The provost's office worked with her to issue protocols to faculty on how to handle cross-cultural issues and how to effectively conduct discussion in a diverse classroom, explains Aw, who hasn't had a weekend off since September 11. Their focus was Arab and Muslim cultures but also the assumptions made about people who look different. "A South Asian or South American student could be mistaken for someone from the Middle East" so felt just as vulnerable right after September 11, she says. She is pleased with faculty creativity in bringing relevant discussions into their classrooms. "A statistics professor talked about racial profiling in her class and an accounting instructor was able to talk about how September 11 relates to world financial issues," she notes. The university got positive feedback from students who were relieved by faculty's willingness to talk about events in class, rather than gloss over them. 

Most of AU's Middle Eastern students are from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman. Those from UAE and Saudi Arabia are mainly government-sponsored. Pressure from their embassies to leave was strong and included free plane tickets home. Fifty-nine students went back for the time being. Fanta Aw says that longstanding relationships with these embassies, which have "always opened their doors to us," facilitated communication and ensured a quick and efficient exit for the students who left. In fact, says Aw, one of the embassies asked her staff to help its students in other parts of the country. "They said, 'we know you have a support system in place for students, but some of our nationals in other places around the U.S. don't.' They'd heard reports of incidents at smaller schools in the Midwest. I called these schools and offered to brainstorm on ways to help their students. We're all NAFSA members and support each other."

On Alert for Possible Harassment

The concern about "incidents" was--with a few well-publicized exceptions-- based on fear and rumor rather than reality, was directed toward local off- campus rather than on-campus communities, and was mainly confined to the few weeks or so after September 11. Nevertheless, campuses across the country were vigilant. 

New York City is a huge, diverse place but still, says NYU's Szenes, "things can happen." The small numbers of Arab and Muslim students at her university tend to be very Western looking, she says, but some female Arab-American students dress traditionally. These groups organized to form patrols to escort women who wanted to go out because some were afraid to leave their homes. On the evening of September 11 American University held the first of several meetings for U.S. and foreign students to air mutual perceptions and fears. The public vetting was useful but no substitute for more concrete protective actions. AU's Fanta Aw says her university created a buddy system to walk people who lived off-campus home from class because of concern expressed by women in head scarves. According to Aw, a male student from the UAE was driving home to Virginia on the beltway when he was pursued by someone in a pickup truck who pulled alongside and shouted verbal abuse before disappearing into traffic. 

Southern New Hampshire University (formerly New Hampshire College) in Manchester, New Hampshire, is a small school with 1,800 on-campus students, 550 of whom are from abroad. George Commenator, director of the center for international exchange, says that one faculty member from Bangladesh who attends a local mosque advised foreign Muslim students not to go anywhere alone. A rumor of a Turkish student being spat upon was unsubstantiated. "In Manchester, a city of 100,000, generally we had less acting out against foreigners than other parts of the country," says Commenator. "The worry was early on; then it disappeared." 

At Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins, Colorado--a city of 118,000 north of Denver that houses several federal facilities--Mark Hallett's main worry was the possibility of reprisal against Arabs and Muslims. At noon and later in the afternoon of September 11, Hallett, the director of CSU's international students and scholars office met with leaders from the Muslim student associations and professional groups in the Fort Collins community. The aim was to "see how they were feeling, to know their perceptions." To show the university's support, he attended a noon prayer meeting that Friday at the Islamic Center in town. He was deeply moved to find a hundred people from churches and synagogues "sitting on the grass surrounding the center, holding white carnations to show solidarity and support. They knew there would be fear among the Muslim community." 

In the weeks after September 11, some of the more than 200 students from predominantly Muslim countries at CSU had a hard time concentrating. Relates Hallett, "One guy said to me, 'It's a small town and I've always felt comfortable but now when someone looks at me, I feel half suspicious about what he's thinking and half understanding. It's human to be fearful.'" 

The same mixed bag of responses among Americans, in need of blaming someone for the horrific carnage at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has presented itself across the country. The University of Oregon held several meetings with Muslim students and community leaders to assure them that the community does not tolerate harassment, including one with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.). Tom Mills, director of that school's office of international programs, says that most of his institution's 40-50 Muslim students have grown more cautious on their own, choosing to stick close to the university. "In general, people here have been accepting of different faiths and cultures," he says, but a non-Muslim student out on a jog was assumed to be Muslim and was verbally harassed. 

Sheila Spear, director of the University of Wisconsin's international student services, in Madison, cautions against viewing foreign students as victims. "The first topic that dominated international student mailing lists after September 11 was, how do we help Americans? Lots of students signed up for service activities that week at our Public Service Center. It's all too easy to paint international students as a victim class. They don't see themselves as that." Indeed, several Arab and Muslim students on Duke University's campus in Durham, North Carolina, responded eagerly to invitations to talk about Islam before local church, school, and book groups. Director of Duke's International House, Carlisle Harvard, says that a Palestinian visiting scholar who had just arrived on campus in September was one such volunteer.

Attrition Rates

How many foreign students fled the United States in the wake of September 11? The more relevant question is how many parents insisted their children move home because reports indicate that most students left reluctantly. Some of the Middle Eastern students at American University asked if international student office staff would convince their families to let them stay. "Your parents want to know what will happen next and we can't answer that," Fanta Aw says she told them. All of the 59 students who left AU took a leave of absence and plan to return in January. "Some have e-mailed me," says Aw, writing "'its great being with family and eating home cooking,' but they're bored and have no structure to their days. They want to know about spring courses." At Colorado State University, 13 students from Kuwait, UAE, and Saudi Arabia flew home--many, according to Mark Hallett, because of wives who were afraid to go out. "It's a safe environment, but if you're not feeling safe and you're being phoned daily by your family in the Middle East predicting what will happen to America in reprisal [for U.S. bombing in Afghanistan], it makes people nervous." Unfamiliarity with U.S. geography has also contributed to parents' anxiety. One UAE student told Hallett that his mother called him in Fort Collins on September 12 and asked, "When the plane crashed into the Pentagon, did you hear it?" Metaphorically, of course, he did, loud and clear. 

NYU's international student and scholar office doesn't know how many students went home because many hadn't yet registered for fall semester when the jets crashed into the World Trade Center. Gail Szenes is aware of a dozen or so who chose to leave, mainly Canadians at first because they were the only ones who could return home without flying. Of those who departed, most, she says, said they needed to get away for a week or two or a semester. A Brazilian student working in Szenes's office succumbed to family pressure, after the anthrax outbreak, to go home. "Her parents said she could stay on for the semester under the condition that she not ride the subways, trains, or work in an office where she could be exposed to mail," laments Szenes. That student quit her job. 

On the other side of the profession, study abroad managers have had their hands full dealing with parents who are uncertain about whether to let their children go overseas. In the fall 150, CSU students were studying in 25 countries. No one decided not to get on the plane, but according to study abroad adviser Jason Kinnear, a lot of questions came from both students and parents about whether to go. "Now more than ever Americans need a global perspective; your going abroad is a small piece of that," he says he told them. "We outlined the steps in place if they decided to come home. We told them we didn't want them to make a decision based on the moment, a decision that they might regret later." 

Only one of 150 students opted out. A young woman who had only been in Cairo for a few weeks before September 11 hopped a plane home after witnessing an anti-American demonstration outside her residence hall within an hour of the plane attacks in New York and Washington. 

Kinnear attributes the low drop-out rates to the quick action his office took on September 11. He and fellow study abroad adviser Karen Sweeney faxed or e-mailed every student and partner institution abroad. The message: know how to contact the nearest U.S. embassy or consulate, call your parents, keep a low profile, don't wear obviously American clothing or travel in large groups of Americans, go to class, and maintain your routine. Kinnear, Sweeney, two work-study students, and a transcultural nurse phoned 150 sets of parent to tell them their students--some already gone and some about to leave--were safe. After going home that night, he and Sweeney continued to field calls from parents--worried about their children but grateful for all the information being conveyed to them by the university.

Other institutions report small percentages of students scrapping plans to study overseas. Tom Mills, director of the University of Oregon's office of international programs, estimates that 10 out of 200 to 300 students withdrew from some of the 80 programs in 50 countries that the school offers. Of the 120 Duke University students scheduled to be in England and Spain for fall semester abroad who had not yet left by September 11, only five decided to stay home, according to office of study abroad director, Margaret Riley. 

Communication is everything during a crisis like September 11. Information moving almost at the speed of light via the Internet can foment fear but also can inform and comfort. Being able to hear from and reach out to students, parents, and study abroad directors via e-mail and the Internet no doubt contributed to the relatively small numbers of U.S. students making a beeline for home from overseas. Knowing that students were safe and understanding the situation on the ground around the world went a long way to allay parent alarm. William Thomas, director of international programs at Union College in Schenectady, New York, says technology has taken tremendous pressure off his office to field parent phone calls. "During Desert Storm [in 1991] it was one call after the other from parents," he recalls. "We were telephone-dependent. E-mail wasn't an option then as it is today. With e-mail, I'm not getting a lot of calls because the kids e-mail their parents to tell them what's going on in Athens or somewhere in Europe. And if parents phone, I can feed them the immediate situation as just reported via e-mail from my faculty abroad." For the most part, now it's only when a student forgets to tell his parents that he's going on a three-day excursion from Rome that parents dial Thomas.

In addition to responding to parents' concern via phone and e-mail, Duke's Margaret Riley refers families to her office's Web site, which since October is updated as needed with postings from the State Department and Duke study abroad directors. This step, she hopes, will reduce the multitude of phone calls and e-mails her office has been getting from parents since September 11. 

Future Impacts

New York, Washington, D.C., and other metropolises will continue to attract foreign students for the unique cultural, political, and economic amenities they offer. Gail Szenes says that none of NYU's international students are transferring to schools in Kansas as the result of September 11. "What brings student here are the academic programs and the city itself," she states confidently. 

Fanta Aw echoes that confidence. "The fact that AU is in Washington, which has tremendous resources outside the classroom and where policies are made that have impacts worldwide" will continue to draw foreign students. Moreover, "for countries and for families with means who value a U.S. education, September 11 strengthens the need to understand what's happening in the outside world. Safety's an issue, but it's become clear that nowhere are people safe." Aw believes that Washington's cosmopolitanism makes it easier for foreign students to live there rather than a small American town.

As for American students going abroad next spring, at time of writing it was a bit too soon to know if numbers would be eroded by the terrorist attacks. In late October, enrollment for spring semester in CET Academic Programs in Beijing and Harbin (in northeast China) seemed to be down 20 percent compared to the previous year. But the anthrax scare in the nation's capital, where CET is based, was thwarting mail deliveries; director Mark Lenhart expected to revise those estimates if applications flooded in once mail resumed. "It seems that students across our programs are applying as usual, but when it comes to paying the money and getting on the plane, that may be another story," he says. Deposits for spring semester were due the Monday after Thanksgiving. Lenhart thought it conceivable that over turkey dinner parents could talk their children out of going abroad, in which case he expected more attrition. On the plus side, 10 out of 60 of CET's students in China in the fall opted to continue through the spring--a higher percentage than usual. Lenhart says he will be constantly reassessing the need, if any, to cut staff or programs if enrollments plunge.

Elsewhere, attendance at study abroad fairs in the fall indicated steady interest in overseas programs. The University of Oregon's Tom Mills was pleasantly surprised at how many students showed up at the information sessions his office held for potential study abroad candidates. And more than 1,000 students dropped by Colorado State University's study abroad fair in late September, "our largest numbers ever," says Jason Kinnear. CSU's applications for spring semester abroad were up, even though the study abroad staff was reduced by 50 percent and marketing of the university's study abroad programs was curtailed due to staff shortages. 

In light of the continuing nature of the U.S. war on terrorism, study abroad professionals don't claim to be able to predict what the future will bring. George Commenator of Southern New Hampshire University says he has "no clue" about September 11's impact on future enrollment. "It will be such a perception-oriented process," he notes. "Will parents now say it's safer to send their children to Australia than to the United States?" He also wonders if foreign students will hold back from applying to come here because of the perception of how difficult it will be to get a visa, even though policy won't change that quickly. 

Collateral Damage?

And that points to indirect fallout from September 11. Congressional proposals to reduce the number of visas issued to foreign students (one of the hijackers entered the United States on student visa) are casting a pall over international student offices at time of writing. Assuming a host of new restrictions, students wondered about getting back into the United States if they went home for Christmas; advisers didn't anticipate any hitches for most students but suggested they carry passports, I-20 forms, and transcripts--even, says University of Wisconsin's Sheila Spear, if only traveling within the United States. 

Spear says that Sen. Dianne Feinstein's (D-Calif.) proposal to restrict new student visas and to have student fees fund the automated foreign student tracking system that was mandated in 1996 is "creating a chill." Although Feinstein's proposal never manifested into legislation, the lawmaker's knee-jerk reaction has raised concerns about what future legislation affecting foreign students will look like. Accordingly, foreign student advisers have had to calm down international students fearful of how congressional proposals will affect them. 

"We tell them that senators can make extreme proposals but nothing happens until it passes Congress, and it takes a long time to make a law," says George Commenator, who sees this as a civic lesson for foreign students on how the American legislative process works. 

Providing lessons on the U.S. political system is only one of many new roles international education professionals have assumed since September 11. Growing reliance on their expertise has raised their profile on many campuses. "Normally the role of the international student office is centered on outreach to students, says AU's Fanta Aw. "But the scope of our work, in just two weeks, grew exponentially. We're being called upon more than ever before. Most people thought we just did visas and immigration, but after this, they realize we do more." For instance, Aw has been strategizing with faculty who have called her to ask how to deal with individual foreign student problems, and the university has been sending media questions to her office. In October, Aw was updating the university vice president for student service about international student issues for his weekly cabinet meetings with the president, and the campus division of government relations was in daily contact with her about the university's response to visa proposals in Congress. 

Whatever the long-term effects of September 11, 2001, NAFSAns interviewed for this article agree to a man and woman that in these uncertain times, crossing borders and oceans to learn how the other side lives is more important than ever. Like resilient New Yorkers who are continuing daily routines after a nightmare of unimaginable proportions, international educators are responding to the challenges thrown their way by working harder than ever for cross-cultural understanding--a cliché that has assumed new meaning since the terrorist attacks of September 11.

-- Kyna Rubin is a regular contributor to IE.