Sheila Sundar on International Scholars

Following ICE’s detention of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil and the sudden revocation of hundreds of student visas across the country, professor and novelist Sheila Sundar joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about the targeting of international university students, especially those involved in pro-Palestine speech or protests, by the Trump administration. Sundar reflects on a childhood spent partly among intellectuals travelling between countries, and explains how this led to her recent novel, Habitations, in which the protagonist leaves her home in South India for graduate school at Columbia. Sundar discusses international students’ contributions to American intellectual life and how the current assault on diversity damages academia. She also talks about how work-restrictive policies treat international students as “takers” who are not welcome to integrate fully into American society. Sundar reads from Habitations.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/. This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: Surely the students that you know and the families who are thinking about sending these students to school [in America] are reading stories about what’s happening in the United States. Do you have any private conversations with students about that?

Sheila Sundar: The maddening part of this moment is that students arrive on campus to be students. So when I do meet with my international students, it is to talk about their writing, which is not to say they’re not having these conversations, but the time that they have to interface with their professors is time they really want to talk about the work that motivated them to pick up their lives and move across the world. And I just cannot believe this is something that we actually have to do. I cannot believe, in general, any moment where people have to actually declare their dignity to a world that challenges it. It just, it is a shock. But international students, when they set foot on campus, they’re there as students. And so I don’t doubt that these conversations are happening. They have to. They have to, for people’s survival, for their emotional well-being, but when they meet with us, with me, at least, they want to talk about the arc of their characters, the development of their dissertation, their segment of their publication, their submissions, and they’re coming here to study, and that’s what we’re taking from them.  

So no, I haven’t, but on the other end, I think that these conversations on the level of violence in America have long been part of the international student conversation. The dialogue right now, to hear over and over the statement that people should be fortunate to come to the U.S., that’s something that I am really interested in talking about today, this notion that people are somehow taking, that they’re extracting resources by studying in the U.S., and it’s actually very much the other way around. These are students who are contributing far more to a university than they take in ways that are both measurable in terms of student research and scholarship and creative work, but also immeasurable.

But I’ll pause there by saying that I’m eager to get back to that point, but I do know from the international students that I have, or the family members that I’ve spoken to in India prior to their—or as they work through their decision of whether or not to come to the States, the looming threat of American gun violence is always part of the conversation. Where can I go to be safest? Is it true that there are more guns than people in the US? Is it true that there’s racial violence? Is it true that I’ll be unsafe? We never have been able, as Americans, to offer much assurance on that, but certainly in this moment, we can offer no assurance on those questions.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: Your point about who’s extracting what from whom is really well taken, and you’re also talking about a broad chilling of speech. I’ve been traveling a bunch, and I recently had a conversation with an international student, and they asked me a question, and I responded with a particular piece of editorial advice, and then they told me they would not feel safe taking the editorial advice I had given in the current environment. And I was like, “Okay. I mean, I can’t really argue if it’s about how you feel putting words on the page and how you feel depicting things. I certainly can’t responsibly steer you in another direction at this moment. You have to feel safe doing what you’re doing, and I hope that in your classroom you’ll feel safe doing this. I hope that you feel safe writing the story that you want to write.” But it was a pretty horrifying moment for me, when all those things came together, and it was the first time I’d had such a conversation. I really, really freaking hope it’s the last.

SS: That is chilling.  

V.V. Ganeshananthan: It was not a great moment. And I mean, as you say, so much of the life of being an international student is lonely, and part of the reason it has been lonely, from what I understand from my friends who have you know been international scholars, is that the mechanisms of U.S. bureaucracy, both government and academic, separate international students in such a way to cause them to face an apparatus that is so labyrinthine and discriminatory, right? You have students, maybe, who are educated in English, taking TOEFLs. You have questioning of ability to instruct, again, when there are students who are prepared to study in English. There’s just  a lot of administrative and financial hurdles, like the fact that you can’t—work restrictions on you are different, so that your financial life is different. And so that bureaucracy has always been there, and now it is being weaponized in a way that I’m not sure is totally clear. I mean,  certainly the videos of people being abducted are totally clear, but there are other things that are—For people outside that apparatus, I think it’s not always clear. And one of the things that your book does is depict some of that bureaucracy in really, really human terms. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the bureaucracy that international students deal with.

SS: Sure. I think the point that you made about work restrictions is something that we note on a theoretical level, that these are the parameters of the visa, this is what the visa offers, this is what the visa prohibits. But to not work as an international student assumes so much about what a person needs to survive. And I work at a university, right? And the cost of living is exorbitant, and it’s largely driven by Southern nostalgia, by football culture, and by the presence of Airbnbs and people who rent their homes or their apartments for football weekends, which is a huge industry. I mean, if anybody who’s ever lived or worked in an SEC town, it drives the culture. And so you have a market where, in general, graduate students are struggling to make it for their years on campus. And to add to that, the inability to work creates a—One conversation I have had with international students is, if I can’t work, I don’t know if I can finish my degree here. And so that policy is so restrictive, and it creates a stress that is just incompatible with the demands of scholarship. I mean, these have to be years where you’re devoting yourself wholly to your academic pursuits, and that’s being taken from people.

And then, the point that you made also about the labyrinthine process, but that knowing that your legal presence in a country is fully tied to your status as a student, so that the clock stops the moment you are no longer enrolled. And when we think about the elements of our education that have given it humanity and connection and connectivity, there’s an entitlement to our presence on campuses when you’re not an international student.  You could linger for a while. You can take a little bit of time off if you need to. You can take a job to allow you to sustain yourself. You could work longer hours one semester and then in another, when you’re taking more classes, you can pull back. 

So the restriction on the mechanisms that allow people to survive is something that we are okay with because we’ve never gotten out from under the notion that immigrants are takers and that we have to punish the immigrant experience just enough to let people know that they’re not in the US on equal footing. There is nothing to be gained, nothing to be gained by limiting the capacity of international students to work. There is nothing to be gained by cutting off their legal ability to be in a country the moment that their academic lives—There’s nothing to be gained from restricting. There’s nothing to be gained by the administration of TOEFL exams. We are consistently so intent on this reminder that your status in the country is precarious, and if it’s not precarious, then we don’t trust that you will somehow not take advantage of the extraordinary generosity of the U.S. Or you might, for a moment, think that you are on equal footing with those around you who are U.S. born. And I think in this horrible moment, we need to rethink this at every level, that the rounding up of international students is so terrifying, it’s so vile, it should chill us all, but should also remind us that these small and sinister policies have long been hampering the freedom of international students, and it’s to a much lesser degree, but they are something that this moment should call into question. 

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Vianna O’Hara.

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Sheila Sundar

Habitations (2024) • “Yellow Curtains” The Massachusetts Review (2023) • “Diplomacy” Virginia Quarterly Review (2022) • “The Death of Tyler Clementi” The Threepenny Review (2021)

Others:

Meghan O’Rourke on The End of the University, Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 8, Episode 27 • Nearly 150 Students Have Had Visas Revoked and Could Face Deportation – The New York Times • Secretary of State Marco Rubio Remarks to the Press • Trump Immigration Policies Increase Peril For International Students