Bruce Gilley’s article “Florida’s H-1B Visa Crackdown” (Dec. 19) raises legitimate concerns about higher education, but its argument fails on its own terms and is inconsistent with the broader goals of higher-education reform.
The problem in American universities is not faculty nationality but the erosion of academic standards and intellectual seriousness. Insisting that universities hire exclusively from a system widely acknowledged to be broken is illogic: One cannot simultaneously claim the system is failing to produce talent and insist that it alone provide the talent pool.
It is also ironic that the author’s broader—and highly controversial—work has emphasized the supposed benefits of cross-national influence and the contributions of foreigners. Yet this article treats foreign-trained academics as a problem rather than a solution, highlighting the intellectual inconsistency of his work.
Effective reform includes recruiting scholars trained in systems that have not experienced the same degree of ideological or curricular decline as America has. Excluding these candidates to teach a new generation of students risks reinforcing exactly the mediocrity institutions like the Martin Center seek to combat.
Even the article’s own example supports this point: Hiring the two biologists trained in Argentina may have been perfectly reasonable because biology there remains a rigorous discipline. Having worked in Argentina as a lawyer and in higher education myself, I can personally attest this to be the case. But perhaps I shouldn’t since I worked there as a foreigner?
Ultimately, some of the most consequential contributions to American higher education—from Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt to many Nobel Prize laureates—have come from foreign-born scholars. American higher education will not be strengthened by restricting talent—it will be strengthened by seeking it wherever it still exists. And more often than not these days that is abroad.
-Christopher L. Schilling
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Letters to the Editor
