Graduate students at ND deserve better

Graduate student appreciation week was in full swing as I began to write this column last week. Once a year, Notre Dame shows its appreciation for the vital role we play on campus by feting graduate students with food, swag and special events. For instance, my Monday morning went from zero to a hundred at the sight of Rise’n Roll donuts outside the library that were just for us. I took two and turned to the other side of the courtyard, where graduate school staff were handing out shirts, knit caps, pens and other branded paraphernalia. I gobbled down the donuts with a cup of coffee. I broke in the shirt during a sweat-drenched four-mile jog. And the pen inked the first draft of this column. Can Notre Dame buy my affection with such trivial things? Truthfully, yes. Feed me, clothe me, and I will be yours forever.

But my friend Subhas Yadav, a third-year Ph.D. student in Spanish, has a point when he says that graduate students get short shrift on campus the rest of the year. A few days after that sugar-addled Monday morning, Subhas and I stood chatting by the statues of Fr. Edmund Joyce and Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, not far from the site of the donut bonanza. More or less, we came to the conclusion that, as older graduate students, it was incumbent upon us to complain about the lack of attention the University pays to us outside of graduate student appreciation week. Indeed, part of my inspiration for writing this column — The O.G. Grad Student — is that I feel strongly that graduate student issues are overlooked at Notre Dame. The genesis of this column, in fact, was the sudden closure of the graduate student lounge in Hesburgh Library in April. As I wrote last month, Subhas is currently petitioning interim dean Margaret Meserve to open an alternative space for us in the library. We’ll see how that goes.

In the meantime, in the spirit of graduate student appreciation week, I figured I would hone in on an issue affecting many graduate students — new visa rules. At the end of August, the Trump administration proposed a four-year cap on international students. This would have a seismic impact at Notre Dame, where roughly a third of graduate students are international, a much larger proportion than for the undergraduate population. The issue is serious enough that Notre Dame’s graduate student government, which ordinarily stays out of politics, sent out an email last month asking students to oppose the changes during a public comment period. As they noted in the letter, a Ph.D. in the humanities or social sciences can often take six or more years, far exceeding the new limit. Currently, international students are eligible to stay as long as they are enrolled in an educational institution, a rule that is known as “duration of status.”

A friend of mine in the history department has been keeping a close eye on these developments. Nurullah Hergul, a Ph.D. candidate in his sixth year, is from eastern Turkey. He specializes in medieval histories of Kurdish people in what are today Armenia, Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. On Tuesday, we sat down by the reflection pool in front of the library to talk. When Nurullah saw the email from the GSG last month, he didn’t hesitate to respond to the request for public comment.

“There is so much to read, so much to learn,” he told me. “It is impossible to finish a Ph.D. in four years, even if you are a genius.”

On the one hand, Nurullah feels there are a lot of opportunities in the United States for scholars like him who study niche subjects. Ideally, at the end of his studies, he would find a tenure-track job and stay in the country. But on the other hand, he says living in the United States has lost its luster in the last few years. Before, he bought into the idea of the American dream, and its attendant promise of buying a house, getting a car and raising a family. Now, he doesn’t know if he belongs in the U.S. The new visa rule, he said, makes it “very clear that you come here and then you leave.”

Notre Dame administrators are monitoring the situation closely. At the end of September, Michael Pippenger, vice president and associate provost for internationalization at Notre Dame, sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security asking them to dismiss the proposal. “The University of Notre Dame is deeply committed to the engagement and growth of our international student and scholar community, as they enrich our campus community and further our faith-based mission,” Pippenger wrote. “…[I]t is in the best interest of academic scholarship, our communities, and our nation, to dismiss this proposed rule as currently written.”

In the spirit of graduate student appreciation week, all of us — admins, students, staff — should work to make our international brethren feel welcome at Our Lady’s University. With a bit of Irish luck and a lot of lobbying, we can topple this proposed change. So says the O.G. Grad Student. Peace.