Back in the day that acronym stood for No Irish Need Apply, and of course was blatantly discriminatory and rooted in stereotypes. Today the I is for Iranians and is the stated policy of our public university regarding certain engineering and science classes. It is still IMO blatantly discriminatory and rooted in stereotypes. If there are individuals of concern, fine, but this is contrary to our values and possibly the law. The concern of course is Iranian nationals returning home and helping their country get the bomb, but quite frankly I’ve never understood what right we have as a nuclear power to tell other countries they can’t be.
Please share widely!
http://coreyrobin.com/2015/02/16/these-are-the-terrorists-whom-umass-will-no-longer-allow-to-apply/
They have ended up being a major force for stability in the region.
http://www.newsweek.com/islamic-republic-iran-or-islamic-state-whats-difference-306383
1) The faculty (up to the deans of colleges level at least) were largely blindsided by this.
2) My unit, the School of Computer Science, continues to welcome Iranian applicants to its graduate programs and is treating them like any other applicants in the current admission cycle. (We were not on the list of departments affected by the new policy.) If any of our students have visa difficulties, etc., related to the sanctions we will do anything we can to help them.
3) The lack of clear explanation from our leadership is embarrassing, even if the new policy should turn out to somehow be justified. The faculty are slowly moving to make their displeasure known, for whatever good that will do.
http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/umass-amherst-will-accept-iranian-students
Of course the media shitstorm is ongoing…
…is our university quickly reverses itself and acknowledges its mistake. I fear that in certain states a university might dig in its heals egged on by xenophobic politicians.
I’ve just finished Nate Silver’s excellent book The Signal and the Noise: Why so many predictions fail — but some don’t. It contains an excellent and relevant chapter about how our strikingly similar prejudice towards the Japanese contributed to our vulnerability to the Pearl Harbor attack.
To summarize, we feared sabotage from the 80,000 residents of Japanese descent living on Hawaii. Based on that fear, the military ordered our aircraft parked wingtip-to-wingtip and our ships docked bow-to-stern so that they were easier to protected from sabotage (today we would call that “terrorist attack”). We simultaneously ignored the possibility that Japan might attack us directly. As a result, the attack that actually happened was far more damaging than it might otherwise have been because our strategy — based on fear and prejudice — made easy targets of our aircraft and ships.
More recently, our paranoia, fear, and hysteria from 9/11 greatly contributed to our willingness to shoot ourselves in the foot by invading Iraq in 2003, and blinded us to the way our hysteria was making the 9/11 attack succeed in accomplishing OBL’s primary and explicitly stated goal of bankrupting the US. The enormous amounts of money squandered on our utterly misguided “war on terror” played a huge role in exploding our national debt.
Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, was our strongest and most secular bulwark against Islamic extremism in the ME in general and against Iran in particular. We destroyed that bulwark.
Actions like this, by contributing to the hysteria about Iran already gripping the US, only impede our ability to help more rational and less extremist elements of Iran gain influence.
This approach fails on the moral grounds cited by Christopher in the thread-starter. It also fails on pragmatic and rational diplomatic grounds. It is a terrible idea.
I’ve been watching the messes in the region closely and they have been reasonably honest and effective in the effort to stop Daesh.
The turmoil is partly being fed by wealthy Salafists from various royals among the Saudi clans and the more wealthy gulf states. Think of them as like regional equivalents of the Koch brothers only they are funding an apocalyptic religious criminal gang instead of a bunch of dolt politicians.
The Salafists are determined to thwart attempts to create working secular Arab nations even as the people are pretty eager for the same sort of life they see others enjoying in the EU, Turkey and here.
The Shia Militias and the Kurds have been the most effective opponents to daesh expansion. The Kurds are particularly moving and daesh dreads them because they won’t get to Paradise if a Kurdish woman lays them low.