Country of Exiles

by William R. Leach

  43. On declining enrollments, see David Riesman, On Higher Education: The Academic Enterprise in an Era of Student Consumerism (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1980); Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge, pp. 309–11; and NYT, January 4, 1995, A17.

  44. Chronicle of Higher Education, July 7, 1995, A41.

  45. On recruitment, see Chronicle of Higher Education, September 25, 1998, A55; also Open Doors, 1994–95: Report on International Educational Exchange (New York: Institute of International Education, 1995), p. viii; and Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 1994, A38–39; and ibid., Almanac Issue, August 28, 1998, 24.

  46. At Harvard, in 1996, more than 400 foreign students got aid; see Chronicle of Higher Education, June 13, 1997, A37. This article also mentions that Yale, Stanford, and Williams College, among others, did not give financial aid to foreigners. Nevertheless, the article also makes clear how many institutions offered such aid, not merely Harvard and MIT, but also many less prestigious colleges and universities.

  47. North, Soothing the Establishment, pp. 12–14. On educated (East) Indians, Joel Kotkin (Tribes [New York: Random House, 1992]) has written that many left India because, among other things, they loathed the increasing Indian reliance on “special preferences for lower castes” as a means of righting historic wrongs (p. 106).

  48. On growth overall, see Chronicle of Higher Education, November 21, 1997, A10–11; and December 12, 1997, A42.

  49. For foreign nationals in the life sciences, see National Research Council, Trends in th Early Careers of Life Scientists (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1998), pp. 21–23, 31.

  50. “There can be no argument,” North has written in Soothing the Establishment, “that the foreign-born graduate students of science and engineering secure their graduate education largely at American expense” (p. 84). According to the testimony of Joel Snyder (professor at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, New York, and a licensed professional engineer) before the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform in 1995, both the foreigners and the universities benefited from this situation. The students got “a free tuition [between $7,500 and $12,000 yearly], which is something they could not normally afford.” For its part, the university got “low-cost labor and an actual cash outlay that is nominal and an in-house book transfer, if you will, of the tuition, which is fairly substantial. So from the university standpoint, to have students willing to live at substandard conditions for free tuition is a tremendous boon because it gives them people to teach courses, to work with students at the lower levels, to teach laboratories and so forth.” See “Report of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform,” vol. II, transcript, 120.

  51. Foreign students, fully aware of Uncle Sam’s generosity, “go where they can get the most assistance,” observed Hyaeweol Choi, in her study of Asian scholars, An International Scientific Community: Asian Scholars in the United States (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995). “From the early 1970s,” an Indian-born scientist told Choi, “the U.S. opened up its doors to foreign students … [and for most Indian students] economic reasons” were the “particular reasons” for coming; “80.2 percent of all Indian students study abroad in the U.S.” “In England,” another Indian-born scientist explained to Choi, “they provided financial aid only to British citizens. I thought the United States was the most easily accessible country in getting a student visa and getting financial assistance.” A Taiwanese-born full professor of science effused to Choi that “even when I was graduate student, my fellowship was so good” that “I saved money and sent some to my family in Taiwan” (pp. 16–43).

  52. Chronicle of Higher Education, December 11, 1998, A18. Choi, An International Scientific Community, p. 131; David North, Soothing the Establishment, p. 70.

  53. On the Association of American Universities, see Steven Muller (former president of Johns Hopkins University), “Presidential Leadership,” in Cole, The Research University in a Time of Discontent, pp. 115–30. “The Association of American Universities,” Muller said, “brings the presidents of major research universities together twice a year, and has been transformed from an organization whose primary activity consisted of free-wheeling discussion of common problems into a tightly organized, well-staffed, and relentlessly active lobbying organization.”

  54. Chronicle of Higher Education, December 11, 1998, A69. Madden, quoted in Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 1994, A40. On number of foreign faculty recruited, see, “Math Ph.D.s Add to Anti-Foreigner Wave,” WSJ, September 4, 1996 A2; and Eric Weinstein (founder of the Pandora Science Policy Project), letter to WSJ, September 24, 1996.

  55. Daniel Greenberg, quoted in North, Soothing the Establishment, p. 98.

  56. The Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology, “Postdocs and Career Prospects: A Status Report” (printed and funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, June 1997), 5.

  57. Lena Sun, “A High Price Tag on Foreign Professionals,” Washington Post, July 10–16, 1995; “59,981 Scholars from Abroad Teach and Study in the U.S.,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 1994, A40; “Number of Foreign Scholars in U.S. Continues to Drop,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 10, 1995, A38. This last article, however, indicated only a slight decline, with numbers actually “going up in California.”

  58. Phone interview, July 12, 1996. (Another group of native-born American scientists to emerge in this period was Boston’s Pandora Science Policy Project, founded by Eric Weinstein, a math post-doc.)

  59. For the percentage of American workers without college degrees, see Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and John Schmitt, The State of Working America 1998–99 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), prepared by the Economic Policy Institute, Washington, D.C., p. 120.

  60. Quoted in Chronicle of Higher Education, March 16, 1996. A52; for the Harvard quote, see Chronicle of Higher Education, June 13, 1997, A37.

  61. Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 1994, A38.

  62. See Lucie Cheng and Philip Q. Yang, “Global Interaction, Global Inequality, and Migration of the Highly Trained to the United States,” International Migration Review 3 (Fall 1998): pp. 626–53. “The flow of professional, technical, and kindred workers (PTKS) to developed countries,” these authors argue, “is an integral component of … the global restructuring process” (p. 626); the authors’ article is built on this contention. Hyaeweol Choi writes in her An International Scientific Community that “a scholar’s decision to migrate goes beyond an individual’s choice for his or her well-being. It reflects factors embedded in the global economic and political systems, and patterns of migration change as the global economy changes” (p. 46).

  63. William E. Kirwan, testimony before the Immigration Task Force and the Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees, and International Law, Committee of the Judiciary, the House of Representatives, March 1, 1990. For similar statements made five years later, also in response to pending immigration reform, see Lena Sun, “A High Price Tag on Foreign Researchers”; and “Proposals Strike Fear at Universities,” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 12, 1996.

  64. In the life sciences over the last ten years, for instance, doctorates have been produced at a rate 2.5 times “the number of Ph.D.s needed to fill jobs that are currently available in academe,” according to the National Research Council in a 1998 report. See National Research Council, Trends in the Early Careers of Life Scientists, p. 78. See also Alejandro Portes, “Introduction: Immigration and Its Aftermath,” International Migration Review (winter 1994), pp. 632–61; North, Soothing the Establishment, pp. 121–59; “Foreign Influx in Science Found to Cut Americans’ Participation,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 14, 1995, A33.

  65. Ibid., pp. 67–68. On the 60 percent of foreign nationals who stay in the country, see p. 24.

  66. Paul Douglas, in preface to Walter Adams, ed., The Brain Drain (New York: Macmillan, 1968), pp. xii–xiii; Paul Douglas, In the Fullness of Time (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971), p
p. 66–84, 274–308.

  67. NYT, May 24, 1991, in file, Office of Public Relations, Columbia University; also vita, same office. In the early nineties, Bhagwati worked as a key economic policy adviser to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in Geneva, striving to shape trade policy at the highest levels; in his words, he attempted to “insert scientific arguments for free trade” into the “economic analysis.” For data on immigrant professionals, see Roger Sanjek, The Future of Us All (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 80–81.

  68. Quoted by V. M. Dandekar in his essay, “India,” in Adams, The Brain Drain, p. 225.

  69. Jagdish Bhagwati and John Douglas Wilson, eds., Income Taxation and International Mobility (Cambridge; MIT Press, 1989), p. xiv; Jagdish Bhagwati and Martin Parrington, eds., Taxing the Brain Drain (New York: North-Holland Publishing Co., 1976), pp. 4–5.

  70. Co-authored with Milind Rao, this piece appeared as “Foreign Students Spur U.S. Brain Gain,” in WSJ, August 31, 1994, A12. Bhagwati republished it in his Stream of Windows: Unsettling Reflections on Trade, Immigration, and Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 353–72.

  71. On the way India’s relatively small elite still systematically exploits the poor, see Peter Waldman, “For the Lowest Caste, Cleaning Toilets Remains Life’s Work,” WSJ, June 20, 1996, 1.

  72. Adams, The Brain Drain, p. 227.

  73. Professor Kumar (assistant professor of social science), quoted in Choi, An International Scientific Community, pp. 128–29. Universities have been unmatched in their sophistication regarding the laws, so much so that they have enlisted immigration lawyers to get the foreign faculty they desire. In 1996, for instance, the University of Chicago School of Business actually hired an immigration lawyer to “argue that the newly hired junior finance professor, Nicholas Barberis, a native of Britain, was a certified ‘genius’ who deserved a special visa from the U.S. government. The school won its case” (BusinessWeek, October 21, 1996, 126). Universities have also helped foreigners negotiate the thicket of regulations to become, in all due speed, American citizens. It is thanks to this expertise, so generously bestowed, that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has approved almost all applications for green cards from foreign scholars and faculty (see North, Soothing the Establishment, p. 65).

  74. For an account of this growth, see “New Marketing Magnets: Student Unions,” WSJ, March 3, 1997, B1.

  75. Academia has, in recent years, become the country’s biggest laboratory for the study of “prejudice” and “bigotry.” Some scholars, of course, have grappled with these subjects with care and intelligence. But others have approached them as “viruses,” invisible and lurking, or as things “intrinsic” to small-town life or to the very nature of all “backwater communities.” An exemplary figure, who combines the lurking-virus approach with the small-town angle, is Raphael S. Ezekiel, senior research scientist at Harvard’s School of Public Health (see his The Racist Mind [New York: Viking, 1995]). On campus “prejudice professionals,” see “Breaking the Prejudice Habit; or, Can the Habit of Prejudice Be Broken?” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 27, 1995, A12; “A Tour of Prejudice,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 23, 1996, A41.

  76. Recently, Michael Young, vice chancellor of student affairs at the University of California, Santa Barbara, officiated at that school’s sixth annual “Queer Wedding,” a public same-sex marriage ceremony that was held on campus and was attended by more than 200 people. “Gays and lesbians,” he said, “they don’t have their rights as heterosexuals. That’s wrong, and as an ally I am a part of an effort to change that” (quoted in Daily Nexus, the student newspaper, April 28, 1997), 1. Andre McKenzie, student affairs officials at St. John’s University, in New York, observed at a 1993 “diversity event” that “without residence halls,” students will only “go back to the worlds they came from—where all the faces are the same” (author’s notes, NYU Diversity Event, May 1993). According to David Finney, NYU’s chief of admissions, NYU aimed to get Americans out of the “cornfield” into the wide-open spaces of the urban university. New York City, Finney said in 1997, “is a place where people go about living. You can’t come out of quiet reflection in a cornfield for four years and know how to live a life” (quoted in Chronicle of Higher Education, September 26, 1997, A46). “If you can’t have groups on the margin here, where can you have them?” said Roger W. Bowen, president of the State University of New York at New Paltz, who in the fall of 1997 had helped organize a conference at his university on such subjects as “Sex Toys for Women” and “Safe, Sane, and Consensual S&M: An Alternate Way of Loving” (quoted by Karen W. Arenson, “At SUNY, A Conference About Sex Is Criticized,” NYT, November 7, 1997, B5).

  77. Author’s campus tour, May 1997.

  78. Author’s interview with Juergensmeyer, May 23, 1997, Santa Barbara, California.

  79. See 1998 brochure, “Project on Cities and Urban Knowledges,” NYU, International Center for Advanced Studies and 1998 fellowship announcement; Liz McMillen, “A New Cadre at Chicago,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 22, 1996, A10–11; and phone interview with Rashid Khalidi, director of the Center for International Studies, the University of Chicago, September 12, 1996.

  80. John Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University (1853, 1858; New York: Doubleday and Co., 1962), p. 149.

  81. John Lukacs, Confessions of an Original Sinner (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1990), p. 149–50; for the quote from the Japanese and Indian scholars, see Choi, An International Scientific Community, p. 50.

  5. COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE ART OF MOPPING UP

  1. Walter Capps, C-Span (coverage of Democratic National Convention, Chicago), August 24, 1996.

  2. Robert Jay Lifton, The Protean Self (New York: Basic Books, 1993), pp. 230–32.

  3. For literature on cosmopolitanism, see Friedrich Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970; orig. pub. 1907); William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963, 1990); Thomas J. Schelereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977); William Leach, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (Basic Books, 1980, Wesleyan University Press, 1989), pp. 13–15, 337–46; Christopher Lasch, True and Only Heaven (New York: Norton, 1991), pp. 120–26; and Peter Riesenberg, Citizenship in the Western Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 52–55. For a more recent discussion of the subject, see Joshua Cohen, ed., For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); and Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

  4. William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West. See especially pp. xvi–xx and chapter 8, “The Rise of the West: Cosmopolitanism on a Global Scale 1850–1950 A.D.,” pp. 726–92.

  5. Daryl Pinckney, in Marc Robinson, ed., Altogether Elsewhere (San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1994), p. 28.

  6. On the decline of Western dominance, see Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations (New York: Touchstone, 1997), pp. 51–53, 66–68.

  7. Judith Lichtenberg, “National Boundaries and Moral Boundaries,” in Peter G. Brown and Henry Shue, eds., Boundaries: National Autonomy and Its Limits (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981), pp. 79–100.

  8. For these quotes, see Martha Nussbaum, in Cohen, For Love of Country, pp 3–17, 131–44; and Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” The Boston Review, October–November 1994, 5, 3–6, 14.

  9. For good critical discussions of multiculturalism, see James W. Ceaser, Reconstructing America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), esp. chapter 5, “From Ethnology to Multiculturalism,” pp. 106–35; and Stanley Fish, “Boutique Multiculturalism, or Why Liberals Are Incapable of Thinking About Hate Speech,” Critical Inquiry (winter 1996), 378–95.

  10. On early multiculturalism the best account is
still Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). On the countercultural enthusiasm, see Charles Reich, The Greening of America (New York: Random House, 1970), a popular countercultural manifesto coming out of the sixties; in page after page, Reich praises all outsiders, insisting that youth link arms with them and suspend all “judgment” in regard to them. “Because there are no governing standards,” he said, “no one is rejected” (210). “An individual cannot hope,” moreover, “to achieve an independent consciousness unless he cultivates … the feeling of being an outsider. Only a person who feels himself to be an outsider is genuinely free of the rules and temptations of the Corporate State (210).… So the generation struggles to feel itself as outsiders, and it identifies with the blacks, with the poor, with Bonnie and Clyde, and with the losers of the world” (221).

  11. In the early 1980s, Walzer was not so multicultural (indeed few people were in those days). See, for example, his informative “The Distribution of Membership,” in Brown and Shue, Boundaries, pp. 7–9.

  12. Michael Walzer, What It Means to Be an American (New York: Marsillio Press, 1992), pp. 13–15.

  13. Here Walzer made arguments resembling those developed by the conservative multiculturalist Michael Novak who, in 1972, in The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, claimed that “the new ethnic politics … asserts that groups (sic) can structure the rules and goals of procedures of American life. It asserts that individuals, if they do not wish to, do not have to ‘melt.’ They do not have to submit themselves to atomization” (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 318.

  14. Walzer, On Toleration, p. 110.

  15. Walzer, What It Means to Be an American, pp. 17–18.

  16. Gary Gerstle, “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans,” Journal of American History, September 1997, pp. 527–58.