The Northwestern University Graduate Workers union signed an open letter to universities Thursday calling on them to reject a congressional committee’s requests for information about Chinese nationals on their campuses.
The open letter responded to letters sent in March by the House of Representatives Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party to the presidents of Carnegie Mellon University, Purdue University, Stanford University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Maryland and the University of Southern California.
Requests included a list of all university programs with Chinese nationals, questions about student and faculty ties to China, sources of tuition funding for Chinese students and questions about Chinese students’ involvement in federally funded research. Most of the schools said they would cooperate with the committee’s inquiries — and none explicitly refused, according to a report by The Intercept.
Third-year Ph.D. candidate in political science and NUGW Area Steward Daniel Loebell said the federal government has targeted Chinese nationals based on national security concerns since at least the Obama administration. Loebell said scrutiny intensified under the first Trump administration with the China Initiative, which investigated researchers in the U.S. and their ties to China. The Biden administration ended the China Initiative but continued to investigate alleged Chinese threats to U.S. national security.
“What we have now is a Trump administration that is more emboldened to go after Chinese nationals and basically any foreign national that it finds,” Loebell said.
The nonprofit Justice Is Global launched the letter as a coordinated effort with unions representing academic workers at 22 institutions — including the six targeted by the select committee and NU — Valentina Dallona, the organization’s political director, told The Daily in an email.
The letter primarily calls on administrators and trustees of the 22 universities to refuse to accommodate the select committee’s requests unless legally bound to do so.
Loebell said international students come to NU because they believe the University has a good reputation and provides a safe environment for research. If NU received similar requests from the select committee, he said, compliance would not make sense because it would deter prospective international students from applying.
“If Northwestern decides to compromise (its) values, then they’re going to get a lot less international students,” he said. “Just in a soft power sense, this is sort of a no-brainer, even if you are the least sympathetic to a graduate workers’ union.”
Loebell added that he believes compliance with the committee’s requests would violate a provision in NUGW’s contract with the University that bars discrimination based on national origin.
A University spokesperson wrote in an email that NU follows the law when faced with federal inquiries but did not respond to multiple requests for comment on what legal obligations the University has to protect students’ privacy when responding to government requests.
“Northwestern carefully reviews requests when they are submitted by federal agencies and adheres to the law in its responses,” the spokesperson wrote.
A Chinese international student and NUGW member, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the government, said NU was one of his dream schools. He said he could see an argument for cutting ties between American universities and China, but asking universities to release data without researchers’ consent is unfair to students without judicial checks.
The student said he came to the U.S. because of the research offered at American universities and to engage with people from different cultural backgrounds.
“It still holds true that the U.S. is the most powerful country in the world, and it has the most advanced technology,” he said. “Also, maybe based on my own imagination, it would be a very diverse and inclusive community to live in.”
Now, he said, he is working to finish his degree as quickly as possible to avoid future immigration enforcement against Chinese nationals.
In the meantime, he said he has found support from non-Chinese friends at NU, who introduced him to Justice Is Global and to the letter.
“Just know (that) your Chinese friends — and if you know them, you know they are not spies — they’re not trying to make friends with you because they are trying to spy (on) you,” he said. “We’re just good people who do our research and who care about people we love.”
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