VOLUME 101, ISSUE NO. 17 | STUDENT-RUN SINCE 1916 | RICETHRESHER.ORG | WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2017
TINY’S: A BIG HIT
New dessert location solidifies Tiny franchise in Houston food scene
RAISE NEW ROOFS
Rice should heavily invest in college buildings
see A&E p. 6
see Ops p. 5
HOUSTON PREPARES Students help organize Super Bowl activities
see Sports p. 9
RVP requests loss of blanket tax funds Emily Abdow News Editor
International Iranian students face uncertainty after immigration ban photo illustration by christina tan
Yasna Haghdoost Editor-In-Chief
Last year, Iranian graduate student Behnaz was admitted to Rice University’s electrical engineering doctoral program along with her husband, whom she had met five years ago at Iran’s prestigious University of Tehran. Behnaz began her studies at Rice last semester, but her husband’s visa didn’t process in time. Prior to President Donald Trump’s executive order banning immigration from seven countries, including Iran, for at least three months, the couple was hoping his visa clearance process would finish in time for him to join Behnaz. Now, these hopes are dashed. Behnaz, who wished to only be identified by her first name, isn’t sure if she wants to continue with her doctoral degree, as the new restrictions won’t allow her to see her family and her husband in Iran or for them to come visit her. She is considering pursuing a master’s degree instead, and perhaps applying to universities in other countries. According to Rice President David Leebron’s email sent in response to the executive order, Iran is the only country of the seven affected that has students enrolled at Rice. The latest numbers published by the Office of International Students and Scholars indicate that in fall 2014, 30 international graduate students were from Iran. Until 2011, Iranian students were only eligible for single-entry visas, unlike students from other nationalities. Once single-entry visa holders leave the United States, they are not necessarily guaranteed a renewed visa to return. In 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that Iranian students would become eligible for multiple-entry visas, though only a fourth of Iranian students who applied for these visas received them. “Going outside of the U.S. is the equivalent of giving up your Ph.D.,” Hamed, a third-year electrical engineering doctoral student at Rice, said. When the news of the executive order first broke on Friday, many Iranian graduate students expressed disappointment, sadness and doubt. “Every time I wanted to continue to read a paper, do my project, do my homework, I couldn’t concentrate,” Reza Amirmoshiri, a second-year chemical engineering doctoral student, said. “I was just on Facebook, CNN, Fox News, what’s going on? What’s going to be next? You cannot neglect this news. It’s affecting me, and there are many students just like me.” Amirmoshiri, who has a single-entry visa, said
he was frustrated with being caught in the crossfires of a political battle. “Why should I be sacrificed because of the conflict between two governments?” Amirmoshiri said. “I just came to study, to learn from my professors, advisors, to do a project, to contribute as a young researcher. It’s not only me, [it’s] any other student. You cannot even find something illegal in their driving records, let alone terrorist attacks.” ‘A big, nice prison’ Though the Iranian graduate students interviewed in this piece all pointed to what they describe as discriminatory visa policies against Iranians over the past years, Trump’s executive order on Friday has cast even greater uncertainty and disarray over their futures. “If a student from Iran wants to come for a Ph.D, he’s going to need at least five years [to complete the degree], which means he’s not going to be able to get back to his country and see his family for at least five years,” Amirmoshiri said. “And after five years, I’m not sure what’s going to happen. Is it going to be possible for us to apply for a green card? To find a job position here? [The executive order] has made everything very complicated.” Hamed attended Sharif University of Technology, Iran’s top-ranked engineering school. He is one of few Iranian graduate students who risked returning to Iran with a single-entry visa in February 2015 for his mother’s funeral. However, his visa reapplication process took four months, causing him to miss a semester of his studies at Rice. Hamed was granted a rare multiple-entry visa in June 2015, and prior to the executive order, intended to return to Iran this summer before his visa expired. He and his wife, another Iranian graduate student at Rice whom he had met at Sharif, were planning on having a full wedding ceremony with their families in Iran. Now, this seems unlikely. “To summarize my feelings, it’s a combination of being shocked and feeling insulted,” Hamed said. “I feel really sorry for whoever is thinking like this, banning an entire country and labelling them. It’s not right and it’s not fair. There are so many Iranian students in the U.S., and having the right to go and visit their families, and for them to come here and visit them, all of them should have this right. Otherwise, it’s like being imprisoned.” Amirmoshiri expressed similar sentiments. “You try so hard, you apply for a well-known school in the U.S., you get admission, you enter the United States for a brighter future with lots
of hopes, you make a lot of friends here,” Amirmoshiri said. “Then, by seeing these kind of laws, you feel like you are in a big, nice prison. I can’t go to my country, my families cannot come to visit me. It sounds like a prison.” Shaghayegh Agah, a chemical engineering doctoral student who has studied here since 2012, describes herself as one of the “luckiest” Iranian international students with a single-entry visa, because she managed to travel to Iran in 2014 and have another U.S. visa reissued within a month. “I decided to take this risk because it was very difficult for me to tolerate being separated from my loved ones,” Agah said. “Even before this executive order, there was lots of discrimination towards Iranian students without even being guilty of doing something. The time I went back, I felt it was a blessing to have my parents close to me. Nobody can understand how valuable that is, unless they are separated by a rule like this.” Community responses In response to the executive order, Dean of Graduate Studies Seiichi Matsuda and Associate Vice Provost Adria Baker of the OISS sent emails to Iranian graduate students to express their support, in addition to Leebron’s email to the community reaffirming his commitment to immigrant and undocumented members of the Rice community. “Absent legal compulsion, we will not reveal the immigration status, citizenship or national origin of any student,” Leebron wrote in the email. “I have asked our general counsel to develop a plan to provide legal assistance to any student or employee detained upon entry because they are from one of the seven countries. The plan will include the creation of a fund to support such assistance when volunteer legal services are not readily available or sufficient.” Outcry over the executive order extended to a national petition signed by nearly 15,000 academics, including more than 50 from Rice, condemning the ban. One of the signees, bioengineering professor Rebecca Richards-Kortum, emphasized the importance of immigrants in academia. “We need diverse perspectives to solve complex global challenges,” Richards-Kortum. “This is true across many disciplines — all six of the of the American Nobel Prize winners in economics and science announced in 2016 were immigrants!” Amin, a chemical engineering doctoral student in his last year of studies, said he finds these 0see VISAS, page 3
The Student Association dissolved Rice Video Productions as a blanket tax subsidiary organization in a vote that was unanimous except for one abstention. The Monday vote came after Jeremy Kao, the RVP station manager, sent a letter to the SA on Jan. 23 requesting RVP no longer receive blanket tax funds, prompting the Blanket Tax Committee to recommend dissolution to the SA. RVP’s executive board requested dissolution on Jan. 19, stating it had decided its mission was not limited to serving the student body. “While we still fully intend to produce media that does entertain and inform the entire campus, it is not our only mission and therefore we feel we should no longer receive priority access to blanket tax funds,” Kao, a Hanszen College senior, wrote in his letter to the SA. In February 2016, RVP came 19 votes short of losing its blanket tax subsidiary status in a general election referendum, when 65.1 percent of the student body voted to remove RVP but a two-thirds vote was required for removal. The Blanket Tax Committee had recommended RVP’s removal following a 2015 Thresher investigation into RVP, which prompted the BTC to re-evaluate the organization’s eligibility. In 2016, the BTC found RVP had provided inaccurate budgets to both the Thresher and the BTC, creating the illusion of little to no rollover funding while they had an excess of $5,344. RVP said the budget issues were a result of miscommunication with former adviser Will Robedee. In 2016, the BTC also found RVP had violated the blanket tax organization criterion of benefiting all students by transitioning from filming student programming events and cultural shows to creating original short films, without polling the student body. SA Treasurer Maurice Frediere presented the BTC’s 2017 recommendation to dissolve RVP at the SA meeting on Monday prior to the SA’s vote. A student body vote is not needed to dissolve RVP, because this year the organization has chosen to dissolve themselves. In addition to RVP’s letter, Frediere said the BTC’s recommendation was influenced by a decline in content production and a failure by RVP to spend its blanket tax allocation last fiscal year. According to Frediere, RVP produced at least 20 videos during the 2011 to 2012 and 2012 to 2013 academic year, but in the last 10 months they produced three. In addition, from July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2016, RVP spent less than 40 percent of their blanket tax allotment; every other blanket tax organization spent at least 64 percent. “These factors made the decision to recommend RVP’s blanket tax status be dissolved relatively straightforward,” Frediere, a Duncan College sophomore, said. However, Kao said there has not been a sharp decline in video production: RVP is projected to produce 10 videos, which is consistent with production level in past years. “There has been a negligible decline in video production between this year and past years,” Kao said. “We do not upload all the videos we create to our YouTube channel due to copyright issues with putting full performance recordings online, but we have remained productive as a video production organization.” Kao also said the lack of spending in that time period was not the fault of RVP. “During the July 2015 to June 2016 fiscal year, a large amount of our blanket tax money went unspent due to issues with our old faculty advisor,” Kao said. “We have since changed faculty advisors and have been able to spend the proper amount of the money budgeted for us.” Furthermore, Kao said RVP has no present need to make large purchases. 0see RVP, page 3