Academics cancel US travel over fears of harassment and visa issues at border control
Professor Luke O'Neill said he thought he wasn't going to get through immigration in the US after he was quizzed for 15 minutes by officials. Picture: Moya Nolan
Academics are cancelling planned conferences and seminars in the US because of the risk of harassment and interrogation by immigration officials.
That is the warning from Scott Lucas, professor of international politics at the Clinton Institute, University College Dublin.
It comes as immunologist Professor Luke O’Neill revealed he had "never been quizzed as much” on his way to give a talk at Harvard.
The prestigious Ivy League university remains locked in a legal standoff with the Trump administration, which is trying to cut more than bn from the university's funding.
“I have colleagues now who just simply are not going to go to the United States,” Mr Lucas said. “They are cancelling out on conferences and on going to seminars. It's just not worth the risk.”
He has heard this from colleagues in Ireland and Britain, where he is professor emeritus of international politics at the University of Birmingham, as well as from colleagues across Europe due to take up research posts in the US.
Mr Lucas told the he was “shook” after hearing personally of a case where several scholars from a humanities department of a major British university were stopped and interrogated by the US authorities.
Their phones were also taken during the exchange.
“That university is now advising their staff to either delete all social media apps before entering the US or to take a burner phone," he said.
“We can certainly speculate that given what has happened to academics inside the United States that material regarding Israel — Gaza, especially — anything that’s critical of Israeli operations in Gaza, or certain types of support for Palestine would be suspect."
Meanwhile, Professor Luke O'Neill told Newstalk: “I thought I wasn’t going to get through at one point actually. It was a good 15 minutes of asking me where I was going... they asked ‘what's your occupation?’ and I said 'I'm an immunologist' and the guy said, ‘oh are you into vaccines’, I was a bit paranoid.
“Then when he found out I was going to Harvard, he [asked] ‘what are you doing in Harvard?’."
When he eventually reached Harvard and told them what happened, his US colleagues said 'Oh yeah, they're quizzing academics going through'.
“Something has changed there, it's a bit unnerving,” Prof O’Neill added.
The atmosphere in Harvard was “very bad”, he added. “I’ve never seen the like.
"Everybody's anxious because their jobs are being cut, grants are being frozen."
He met one researcher who had just been given a $50m grant for a consortium that has just been taken away from her, as well as a HIV researcher whose grant had been cut.
“What's happening is they seem to be cutting funding for infectious diseases. That's what they were telling me at Harvard anyway, those particular grants were withdrawn.
"They're exploring leaving the US, because they can’t get funding for their research and there's a real worry about the future of their labs.”
Tánaiste Simon Harris said he would be concerned at any curtailment of academic freedoms and the impact it may have on those working in Irish institutions.
"Obviously, it is up to any country to decide the measures it has in terms of who can access their country and the likes, they are sovereign matters for sovereign governments, but I think it will be very short-sighted of any government to do anything that would deprive their universities of that close collaboration that exists."
