Immigration has always been part of The New School’s story. We often point to the University in Exile — the 1933 initiative that offered refuge to scholars fleeing fascism — as a shining moment in our institution’s history, and today, international students make up 32% of our enrollment. As the Trump administration tightens immigration policies, uncertainty has begun to ripple through classrooms, leaving many students, faculty, and staff wondering what the future holds. What might the effects of these policies look like in our classrooms — in the work we do, the mission we hold, and the conversations that give this place its voice? The New School Free Press spoke with four professors about the effects of changing immigration policies and the possible loss of international students in their classrooms.

Marcos Davi Silva Steuernagel is an assistant professor of theater at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. Originally from Brazil, Steuernagel has taught in Paraná, Abu Dhabi, and the United States. He currently teaches a first year seminar, an independent study course, and Theater Under Fascism. 

Natasha Lennard is a British-born, Brooklyn-based writer and the associate director of Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism at The New School for Social Research. This semester, she teaches an introductory course for the program and an independent study course. 

H. Lan Thao Lam is an associate professor of fine arts at Parsons School of Design and a Vietnamese-born mixed-media artist. They teach Core Studio 2: Topics in 3D, and Core Studio: Senior Thesis. 

Nina Khrushcheva is a Russian-born professor of international affairs and a contributing editor to Project Syndicate. She will be teaching Global Authoritarianism and Media, and Politics of Propaganda during the upcoming spring semester. 

How will the loss of international students impact your classroom?

Lennard: This was always a historic institution of international scholars, but also an internationalism that I think would be tragic to lose. I feel that in class. I have a student from Gaza. I have students from Brazil.
I have students from Italy, I have students from Nepal, I have a student from Bangladesh … The New School isn’t The New School without a huge number of international students and international faculty. One sort of grim point to make about The New School is that this isn’t just for intellectual and solidaristic reasons — the school depends on international student fees. 

Steuernagel: I could sit and tell U.S. students … this theater exists in Japan, and this in Africa, and this theater exists in Latin America, and they might take notes or not, but it’s a completely different experience from having someone who has had embodied experience of those performance traditions, being in the room, someone who’s their age, and who can talk about that experience. That is something that I can’t reproduce as a teacher. So having less and less of those students in the class just impoverishes the whole conversation. 

On our political environment

Steuernagel: There’s definitely a big difference of being just an international person in the United States today … I came here as an international student, later started working on a work visa, then a green card holder, and then last year, got my U.S. citizenship. There are certain things that, when I was here as a student, you could just expect that would be stable enough and exist in the United States, and that have been destabilized by this current administration … the idea that you need to submit your course syllabi to be vetted, that certain topics, certain keywords would raise alarms and flags. With all of the issues of the U.S. education system, I always assume that that would not happen here. And it’s happening throughout the country. I started teaching Latin American theater in 2011 at NYU, and a big part of my semester was dedicated to telling the students what state censorship looks like. What does it mean to have a government that practices repressions and disappearances? And the students were always kind of surprised by this reality, and today, I don’t have to do that work. Today, in a sense, I can just say, “Look at a lot of the things that we’re facing here in the United States today.”

On the American promise

Steuernagel: One of the great strengths of universities in the United States has to do with the maintaining [of] a certain system for decades and decades, in which you can have certain expectations, and that the U.S. becomes the place that, as a top student, from anywhere in the world, you can say, ‘Well, if I can make it there, if I can get there into a graduate program, and if I can graduate, then I can get a job’ … If you kill that, that takes centuries to build … you start to lose that soft power and that kind of capacity of production of knowledge.

Khruscheva: Basically what Trump is doing is contrary … to the American spirit, and certainly then it is contrary to the spirit of The New School, but also the spirit of our classrooms … I don’t know what it is to teach a full American classroom. I’ve never done it. America [itself] is different. California is not New Jersey … but probably it’s going to be more homogeneous. Homogeneity in New York is a strange thing. Homogeneity in The New School is a strange thing. Homogeneity in international affairs is a strange thing.

Lam: The representation of America out in the world is this kind of golden dream … if you make it here, you make it anywhere … but then international students face real financial challenges where they cannot get work. And they can only work in the institution that they enroll. And that is a huge burden, a huge obstacle, more so than ever. And in the last 20 years, I think that that challenge has been compounded over time — new immigration policy, new hiring practices and requirements that slow down the process.

On our collective responsibility

Lennard: Of course, it’s our responsibility to ensure that our students do stay safe and to be in contact with international student services and [to] make sure they’ve got the right legal advice and that they are being aware … I think there’s an extraordinary limit on how much any university administration in terms of staff can actually do in the face of these kinds of national regime policies … There are the faculty members who have been running Know Your Rights training and they’re committing to that kind of work. That was self-organizing; that was not coming from centralized administration. 

Lam: [In] the United States, Northern America, Western tradition actually centers on the self, the individual genius, whereas the international student would think about the community, the legacy, the cultural legacy, but also the familial legacy that one leaves behind. They all come with … the hope for the family, the hope for the generation. That’s an enormous responsibility that they bring to the classroom. Whereas American or local national students might not have traveled around the world, have not had that kind of exposure; that’s the kind of shift that they teach each other. Peer learning is so important. 

Steuernagel: Even when I’m teaching in environments in which there isn’t a majority of international students, I think one of the main tasks is to alert students to the diversity of experiences that exist throughout the world … I teach a first year seminar, and it’s a very interesting environment in which you get a mix of students coming from all around the world, with students that are coming from other places in the United States that might not have had that international exposure … That kind of cross-cultural exposure is one of the most important outcomes of coming to university … For me, the major outcome is the ability to say, ‘Well, the way that I grew up, the way that I was learning, was just one way,’ and recognizing that there are other ways, questioning your own background, and being open to the idea that people grew up with different perspectives. For me, that’s the main benefit of being in an international environment.