“In Egypt, as boys, we used to kid each other by saying, ‘I’ll kill you’, and good friends often said such phrases jokingly. I became friends with a sympathetic American graduate student, and, at one point, jokingly said, ‘I’ll kill you’. I immediately noticed his reserve and coolness, perhaps worrying that a fellow from the Middle East might actually do it!” wrote Egyptian-American laureate Ahmed Zewail in his Nobel biography for winning the prize in Chemistry in 1999.
Like many other students, we joined a university in the US for graduate school with the hope of immersing ourselves in an inclusive cosmopolitan community, and with an eagerness to absorb a varieties of culture. Expectation ran high and excitement was supreme. But it took many of us only a few days to realise this was only a pipe dream.
A cursory look at the department’s student body page on social media made it quite clear that the reality is not that hunky dory. In the pictures of football games, hiking, birthday parties and dinner outings that were displayed on the student-run department page on Instagram, the number of faces which don’t look like from one particular community was almost next to zero.
I wondered about where all the brown people, black people, Hispanics and East Asians were, considering how the department so proudly flaunts its diversity factor. To be sure, there are minority student leaders part of bodies in some of the other departments – just not ours.
Recently, there was an election for the student body in our department. All the nominees for various posts were from only one community. When I raised the issue of not having any international student in the department body, the reply was predictable – that the department welcomes everyone but that the international students themselves don’t participate.
At one level, they are correct. Most international students and students of colour don’t stand for election. But we need to dig a bit deeper to understand the nuances.
It’s almost impossible for me to accept that a woman from Bangladesh – who could travel 7,000 miles to join a university for her higher education, leaving her family and friends, culture, language and comfort zone behind; a woman who dared to settle in a place with totally different culture, living style and language – could lack the necessary leadership abilities to lead a small department of 200 people.
A student body that represents the entire department needs representation of people from diverse backgrounds. This need was magnified by several recent devastatingly painful events at different parts of the world. For example, take the case of second wave of COVID-19 in India. The toll on the mental health of students with families back at home was grave. Yet, there wasn’t a single solidarity email from the student body.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the first thing that came to my mind was for the many students in the university that would be affected by it. Had there been an international student in the student body, they would have felt the need to express solidarity with the pain of those affected students.
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International students, for most part, are invisible on campus. When I joined the university, one well-wisher advised me that I have to be at least 50% better than a white American male student to become as visible as he is. In other words, as Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out in Between the World and Me, we should be expecting 50% less. Immigrants usually internalise this imbalance of appreciation. Just like most of them internalise that as an immigrant they don’t deserve to lead their departments.
Once, when I was debating this with a friend, he politely told me that that’s the tax we have to pay for our dream as an immigrant. “But we have already paid the tax,” I felt like screaming. We have left our families behind, our friends behind, our culture behind, our food, our songs and, in a way, our happiness behind. The enormous amount of social capital that we had to give up to travel this far is often overlooked. Those are the tax we are paying. How much more tax do we need to pay to get accepted, to become visible?
What people sometimes don’t seem to realise is that this isn’t a ad-hoc university. If we draw a parallel between the country and the university – in the country, as long as we have a visa, we are living temporarily. We are a citizen of a different country where we have the voting rights, whose passports we carry. But when it comes to the university, this is our only university and we should have equal stakes here. It’s not like we are at this university temporarily and we have a real university somewhere else. Whatever school experience we have here is the only experience we will have for our life.
“The ghettoisation of international students in US universities is very common,” wrote Venki Ramakrishnan, the 2009 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, in his book Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secret of Ribosome. And such ghettoisation, according to me, is violence.
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The loneliness and the isolation of an immigrant is deep and at times gloomy. The invisibility makes it worse. It’s also makes us realise everything we have taken fro granted in the past. Today, whenever I see any gathering of friends, laughing, talking, eating; a current of sadness runs through my veins. I miss my days with friends and family back at home. It’s such a visceral and poignant feeling. Back in my country, I never thought that one day something like this would even occur to me as a precious moment to behold.
One might argue, and rightly so, that the spectrum of inclusivity differs based on different visible and invisible parameters. The place where the university is, the diversity within the university and the department, the historical performance of the respective department towards inclusivity, and many more. Across the globe, small places tend to prefer to live in closed circles with people who have the similar physical appearance and follow similar cultural threads. Big cities tend to be more cosmopolitan and more welcoming towards people with diverse backgrounds. Then, some departments are historically more inclusive than others. People from the humanities or art history tend to be more inclusive, mainly because of the very nature of their course-structure which compel and motivates them to learn more about the human societies. They seem to possess greater amount of intellectual maturity that is needed to bridge those differences and absorb all under a bigger umbrella. The isolation of minorities, women, people from LGBTQIA+ community in STEM departments is not uncommon.
From my personal experiences, professors tend to be generally inclusive. There are two reasons for that. First, by the time one takes on the mantle of professor at a university, the person has already got a lot more experience under their belt by the virtue of having travelled and read more. With that, they make international friends from diverse backgrounds, and the horizon of their social outlook broadens to a very significant level. They are in a place where they can appreciate the beauty of diversity.
The second reason is professional. If they are not inclusive, they’ll lose a significant portion of the student population and it’ll significantly hurt their research output and jeopardise their professional career.
Normally, these are not applied for the students. Most of them had never meet anyone before who looks different and who talks differently. Most of them know about us through movies and from an older generation.
The stereotype that international students have to face is that international students all tend to live among themselves only. There are two problems with this stereotype. First, when one says international students, it’s not people from one country or one culture. In my own department, the community of international students consists of people from India, China, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Iran, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Nepal and many other countries. So even if they tend live among themselves, they are still way more diverse and inclusive than the community which consists of only students who are primarily Caucasian. Secondly, international students tend to live among themselves because they are rejected by the white American student community in the university. Sometimes the rejection is subtle, but most of the time it’s very overt and blatant.
The day before I left home to travel to the US, my mom somehow realised that I was afraid. By then, I had already studied in different parts of the country. Till then, I was the only person from my entire village to have gone out of the state to study. Growing up, I was known to be a very confident man.
In reality, I was very nervous. I was afraid. I wish I could say that I met a very good group of local friends who taught us how to navigate, who accepted us as one of their owns. I don’t have any such story to tell. We taught ourselves how to navigate this country. And that’s okay, I guess, as long as we are treated with respect.
Sometimes, I wonder, if after 20 years there is a get-together, will we even be invited? I don’t know the answer. But it oi something that many who aspire to come to the West for a better education and better life should ponder.
Saurov Hazarika is a research scholar currently based in the US and has an MSc in Chemistry from IIT Kanpur.
Featured image: Cole Keister/Unsplash