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Visa Shortage For Visiting Professors Worries Universities

Convinced that the current H-1B visa arrangement is not helping the academic world, officials at a number of American universities are asking for a separate visa category for professors.

"Visa shortage is creating a serious problem, we are not able to get adequate number of professors from abroad," said Lisa Vogel, the associate director for the Office of International Students and Scholars at New York University.

Though the number of H-1B visas available for this year has risen to 115,000 from 65,000 last year following the intervention by Congress, college and university administrators complain that most of those visas go to high tech experts from India and other countries, and only a few dozen visas are left for academia.

According to the Immigration and Naturalization Service about six per cent of H-1B visas last year went to academics.

What is scaring the academic world is that the H-1B visa quota would revert to the original 65,000 in 2001. But some Congressman, urged by the high-tech industries, are thinking of fighting the proposed reversal.

Even if the proposal by Senator Phil Gramm (Republican-Texas) to raise the annual cap to 200,000 comes to fruition, educators say that a separate visa category for professors is desirable.

But to do that Congress would have to establish a new visa category, and many top officials wonder if any law-maker is interested in introducing such a legislation.

Several academic programs which were to start in September will suffer because the schools are not in a position to hire professors from abroad, Vogel said.

"We are not looking for professors who will come here to teach a course and return to India or the country of their origin," Vogel said. "We want professors who would be eligible for tenure."

H-1B visas are given to highly skilled foreign workers for three years; professionals can renew the visas for another three years, if they have not found someone who will sponsor them for a green card. The H-1B renewals are not counted against the cap.

She said part of the problem is due to the way the academic institutions work. "By the time we have finished the interviewing process, and are about to send out the contracts for classes beginning in September," she explained, "the INS would have given out all the visas, mostly for technical jobs. " "Our hiring cycles have their own logic and dynamism," she added.

The INS will accept new H-1B visa applications only in October. "That does not help us at all," Vogel said. "Our classes should have been started by then."

Newsday reported that officials at Columbia University, NYU, Queens College and Stony Brook in New York are reporting the difficulty. Similar complaints were heard from universities in the Midwest and the Westcoast.

"It causes a lot of anxiety because it means some critical research projects are delayed," Elizabeth Barnum, assistant dean for International Services at Stony Brook said. "It means that once the best candidates are found, we are not able to bring them in."

The number of foreign professors sought out each year varies considerably from school to school. NYU seeks about 25 while Columbia University wants to hire over 60.

Gail Szenes, director of the Office of International Students and Scholars at NYU, believes that educational institutions ought to have the same claim over H-1B visas as the Silicon Valley or other high-tech pockets.

"You want the best physicist, historian, linguist, scholar," she said. "But that person may be from another country."

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