SIn recent months, mainstream universities have canceled partnerships with Chinese institutions due to pressure from US lawmakers. But no university seems to have gone as far as Purdue University in Indiana.
Students and faculty at the public university say an unofficial policy is in place to automatically reject students from China and many other countries.
The alleged change in admissions practices at Purdue follows a letter sent to six universities last year by the US House’s Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) demanding it turn over data about Chinese students, a population they say is at risk. National security.
“Our nation’s universities, long regarded as the global standard for excellence and innovation, are increasingly being used as conduits for foreign adversaries to illegally acquire critical research and advanced technology,” the committee wrote, noting that the admission of large numbers of Chinese students to science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs “is made possible at the expense of American qualifications.”
Students, faculty and alumni are organizing against what they say is a blanket but unwritten policy to bar entry to students from other countries that China and the US have labeled as “adversary countries,” including Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. The Lafayette Journal & Courier first reported on the alleged ban in December.
In a letter addressed to Purdue’s leadership, which was released Friday and shared exclusively with the Guardian, dozens of signatories argued that the university “Softly barring students based on their nationality undermines the core values of meritocracy, equality and academic freedom of higher education”. They called on Purdue to clarify any instructions they gave to graduate admissions committees and to restore offers to international students that they say the university rescinded last year.
Purdue denies that such a policy exists. University spokeswoman Erin Murphy wrote in a statement to the Guardian that “there is no ban” — but did not address questions about the letter’s allegations and rescinded offers.
Graduate admissions decisions are generally made by individual departments. The university signs the offers, which was previously a formality. But last year, several foreign students reported receiving offers and funding from various departments at Purdue, only to have them rescinded several weeks later without explanation. In some cases, they have already turned down other offers and signed leases in Lafayette.
“I was shocked,” said one student from China. “I thought they sent the rejection to the wrong person.”
The student, who asked that he and the department not be named because he is working independently with the Purdue faculty, said he turned down offers from three other universities. He said the supervisor was also blindsided by Purdue’s decision. “He couldn’t do anything,” the student said. “They refuse to give an explanation – it’s like a black box.”
Purdue’s alleged ban is one of the most extreme manifestations of the Trump administration’s campaign against international students. Last year, the administration abruptly canceled the visas of thousands of students — many of them Chinese — and froze billions of dollars in research funding. That landscape has contributed to declining foreign student enrollments at US universities and boosted rival institutions abroad in what experts warn will permanently degrade the global standing of US scientific research.
Another student, who asked not to be named, received an offer from Purdue’s chemistry department last March, but the university rescinded it in May without explanation. Several months later, the student, who had also turned down other offers in the US and remained in China, learned from a faculty member that “there was an internal requirement not to admit Chinese students,” the student said. “No written document was provided. It was communicated verbally.”
Other schools also responded to the legislators’ warning. Last summer, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), like Purdue, which received a letter from the committee on CCP, told committee members it would “ignore” a series of partnerships with Chinese universities, according to public records obtained by students there and shared with the Guardian. A university spokesperson said the decision was made after “a review of international initiatives in light of the current policy environment affecting US higher education.”
In December, Columbia University quietly canceled an exchange program with China after a congressional committee said it was funded by a CCP-linked organization to “advance Beijing’s interests in the United States,” the Guardian has learned.
Nathan Blade-Smith, a master’s student at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs who was supposed to travel to China through the program, said the university kept students in limbo for weeks before canceling funding less than a month before the trip. Blade-Smith, who studies US-China relations, warned that a worsening environment for academic exchanges between the countries would “impossibly allow the next generation of China experts to have intimate experience with the country”.
An outcry against Chinese scholars
In June of last year, Purdue adopted a new policy limiting staff and faculty dealings with US-designated “adversary countries,” which it characterized as a response to state and federal laws. The policy says nothing about banning students from those countries.
Any change in policy appears to be unauthorized. “They more or less demanded that we not extend offers or that we not consider Chinese students,” one faculty member who oversees graduate admissions told the Lafayette Journal & Courier. “Since there is nothing in writing, there is no policy that I can prescribe,” another faculty member told the newspaper. Purdue has warned faculty not to speak to the media.
The Federation of Asian Professors Associations, a national federation of faculty associations, called the alleged ban “immoral” and questioned whether it could violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits publicly funded institutions from discriminating on the basis of race, color or national origin.
“Substituting waivers of categorical admissions for individual consent measures does not reflect principled legal judgment, but institutional risk-avoidance driven by political calculation,” the group wrote in a December statement.
The University of Maryland, University of Southern California, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon also received the letter from Congress, but none of them appeared to have taken action against the students.
Congressional letters targeting individual universities have increased policies targeting Chinese scholars in recent years.
Proclamation 10043, an executive order issued by Trump during his first term, barred the administration from obtaining visas for hundreds of students with ties to the Chinese military. And in 2018, Trump’s Justice Department announced the China Initiative, which sought to identify Chinese spies at US universities, but critics said it led to racial profiling and harmed technology competitiveness. The Biden administration shut down the initiative in 2022, but Proclamation 10043 remains in effect.
“What’s happening at Purdue is not isolated,” said Valentina Dalona, political director of Justice Is Global, a group that advocates for progressive US-China relations. “National Security Fears Override Decades of Academic Cooperation.”
Rose Ying, a graduate student organizer at the University of Maryland, said the targeting of Chinese scholars was chilling. “People are very, very cautious about travelling, about saying or doing anything,” she added. “They don’t want to stop at the border”.
A Chinese graduate student at UIUC, who asked for anonymity to avoid scrutiny, said that in private chats, many Chinese students advise prospective applicants back home to pursue opportunities in Europe, Canada and Australia instead of the US, or choose to stay in China.
“As graduate workers, we don’t get paid much, but we do a lot of work,” she said. “Our work will benefit American industry and science.”
