Academics Worry Trump's Ban Impacts Education, Science

Science will suffer under President Donald Trump's immigration ban on seven mostly Muslim countries linked to terror activity, according to The New York Times.

According to the Times, foreigners fill the undergraduate and graduate ranks at many American universities, while many new Ph.D.s comes to the United States for research and teaching spots – and there might be about 17,000 students at U.S. universities from the seven now-banned countries.

"I'm concerned about it hampering our ability to recruit outstanding graduate students," Samuel Stanley Jr., the president of Stony Brook University on Long Island, told the Times.

Soumya Raychaudhuri, a Harvard Medical School professor whose Iranian postdoctoral researcher, Samira Asgari, was barred Saturday from boarding a flight to begin her job in his laboratory at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, told the Times: "Immigration into the United States is tremendously important to science."

"There are other countries competing for this talent pool, and walking away from that jeopardizes our standing," he added.

The executive order also could stop many foreign researchers from making short-term trips to attend conferences and other scientific meetings overseas for fear of not being able to return, the Times reported. The country's largest general scientific organization, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, holds its annual meeting in two weeks in Boston.

Jennifer Golbeck, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, said her department had a number of Iranian students and researchers, telling the Times:
"Suddenly there's this possibility that faculty members, students, postdocs, and others who are outside the country for one reason or another suddenly can't come back."

The order might also affect work at some of the country's most prestigious medical institutions.

Eleven patients from the seven affected countries, which also include Iraq, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen, were planning to travel to Johns Hopkins University for medical treatment within the next 90 days, Pamela Paulk, the president of Johns Hopkins Medicine International, told the Times.

"We are taking steps to see what the ban means for them," she told the Times. "Right now the ban is vague, and we don't know if there will be health exceptions."

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