Allowing foreign students to stay and play the right move
Alas, some common sense. Or maybe it was just litigious behavior augmented by the considerable pressure of thousands of people speaking as one.
The Trump administration last week said it would no longer require international students to attend in-person college classes during the pandemic in order to remain in the U.S., halting a brief and controversial decision that would have potentially deported hundreds of thousands of college students — including student-athletes here under the NCAA umbrella.
The administration’s policy requiring foreign students to attend at least one course in a real brick-and-mortar building to retain their visas during the pandemic went into effect July 6. Given the growing list of schools planning to open with an online curriculum this fall without students even allowed on campus, it was an obvious problem.
“I mean, how in the world were we supposed to handle this if we shut down our campus and did everything virtually, all in the name of public health?” said University of New Mexico athletic director Eddie Nuñez. “It would be hard to attend to get a student-athlete from,
I don’t know, England, into a class in one of our buildings if the doors are locked.”
The policy drew immediate blowback — and justifiably so. Within two days, lawsuits were filed on behalf of students at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On July 7, UNM football player Tyson Dyer got in on the action by using his Twitter account to circulate a petition seeking to overturn the administration’s decision.
A punter from Australia, Dyer is the only foreigner on the Lobos’ football roster, but he’s just one of 29 international student-athletes representing UNM’s men’s programs.
There are 41 foreign women, and all but one of UNM’s 16 sports has at least one international student, the lone exception being softball.
Eight of the nine members of the men’s tennis team (from seven different nations, no less) are from outside the U.S., and more than half the rosters for women’s golf and women’s tennis are foreigners.
Imagine the chaos of rebuilding an entire team after all your best players were deported because the coronavirus kept Mitchell Hall deserted. The men’s basketball team would have had to replace senior Makuach Maluach (Australia), sophomore Emmanuel Kuac (Canada), sophomore Kurt Wegscheider (Central African Republic) and freshman Bayron Matos (Dominican Republic).
Nuñez admits he was well into an action plan when the news broke Tuesdayt that the Trump administration announced it had agreed to back off and let students stay in the country even if their entire class schedule was done online.
UNM hadn’t yet announced its plans for the fall semester, but Nuñez was at least optimistic they would find a loophole to get the athletes to retain their visas.
I’ve spoken to a handful of coaches at UNM in the last few months about the impact distance learning has on student-athletes. Men’s basketball coach Paul Weir said the vast majority of his players rarely see the inside of a classroom on the main campus, that most of their work is done online. Former football coach Bob Davie said the same.
Both said they had implemented team policies to have players attend at least one class on the main campus. It was done, Weir said, to maintain a presence in the general student population, to allow the athletes the opportunity to feel a sense of connection on campus while exposing them to the classroom settings most students prefer.
The New York Times recently reported that about 1 million international students enroll in U.S. colleges and universities every year, contributing approximately $41 billion to the economy.
The NCAA claims 20,000 student-athletes. Some sports, like tennis, golf and soccer are heavily dependent on international recruits.
Not a lot about this pandemic has made much sense. From layoffs and home schooling the grade school kids to fights over toilet paper and debates about masks, it seems an odd time to point the finger at foreign students with a legal right to be here and tell them to get out until the pandemic is over.
With everything going on in this country, kicking the Lobos punter out of the back of the end zone for the sake of public health feels like a dramatic waste of time.
An award-winning sportswriter for The New Mexican for the past decade, Will Webber’s opinion piece runs periodically in this section. To reach him, email wwebber@sfnewmexican.com.