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Boston Globe: Visa delays affect enrollment of foreign students
Hundreds -- maybe even thousands -- of foreign students awaiting student
visas from applications filed months ago have been forced to delay their
return to U.S. universities this month, in some cases indefinitely, reports
the September 23 Boston Globe. Screening procedures in the wake of September
11, a lack of staffing, and a new policy put in place this summer that
requires background checks on male applicants ages 16 to 45 from 26 Arab
or Muslim countries are overwhelming U.S. embassy officials. There is
concern over the long-term effects of the new policies and the resulting
delays, which could discourage overseas students from applying to American
schools. Besides bringing the advantages of world culture to campuses,
foreign students boosted the U.S. economy by $11 billion during the 2000-2001
academic year, according to the Institute of International Education.
"Clearly, it has the potential to be a really serious situation,"
says Greg Leonard, director of BU's International Students and Scholars
Office. Already, he says, some overseas groups that sponsor students are
steering them toward schools in countries with less strict policies, such
as Canada, Australia, and those in Western Europe. BU had 4,443 students
from other countries last year -- the fifth-largest number in the country.
The total of new students held up overseas is still unclear, but Leonard
expects to lose between 40 and 200 international students because of visa
problems this year.
St. Paul Pioneer Press: Democratic Party no longer
seen as antiwar
Antiwar and antimilitary sentiments have prevailed in the
Democratic Party for more than 30 years, sparked initially by challenges
to Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam in 1968. Now, however, voices to oppose
President Bush's call for war with Iraq are rare, according to a September
23 article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. "The Democratic Party has
shifted," says Bruce Schulman, a CAS associate professor of history
and director of the GRS American and New England Studies Program, who
has written extensively on politics. "It had to shift . . . to be
electorally relevant." Even as late as 1991, the Democratic Party
remained solidly antiwar. But after President George H. Bush authorized
a five-month buildup for war when Saddam Hussein's army invaded Kuwait
in August 1990, and after Bill Clinton sent troops into Bosnia as peacekeepers
and authorized an air war against Yugoslav forces to stop ethnic cleansing
in Kosovo, humanitarian causes prompted a change in the Democratic outlook
on war. "The contours of the American role in the world changed,"
Schulman says. "Overseas interventions were about humanitarian and
democratic issues. Democrats look on that differently. In Bosnia and then
Kosovo, the party became a party of intervention."
Newsday: Pain therapy requires doctors' empathy
In an article entitled "So Many Patients, So Much Pain," published in the September 22 issue of Newsday, Alfred Tauber, a MED professor, CAS professor of philosophy, and director of the Center for Philosophy and History of Science, comments on a July National Institutes of Health conference where experts from various disciplines critiqued physicians' pain-management therapies and suggested ways to better understand and treat cancer-related pain, depression, and fatigue. "Doctors are trained to deal with the 'real,' and pain does not always fall into the class of demonstrable 'things,'" he writes. "So the reality of pain is, in many cases, only the patient's. I doubt this accounts for more than a small fraction of undertreated cases, but it points us toward an interesting hypothesis: Effective therapy for pain requires a different kind of approach to the patient, or perhaps an expanded appreciation of illness, than is traditionally understood by scientific medicine. . . . Doctors must recognized that disease is what clinical science defines, but that illness is what the patient experiences. Empathy is so crucial in the care of patients in pain precisely because science cannot measure distress. The physician thus must rely on his or her sensitivity to another person's misery to assess the need for analgesia and to make it a priority."
27
September 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations