Najam in Metro on Immigration Ban and Higher Ed
Adil Najam, Dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently interviewed on the effect that President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration will have on universities across the United States.
Najam was interviewed for a January 29, 2017 article in Metro entitled “Colleges Fear Long-Term Effects of Trump’s Immigration Orders.“
From the text of the article:
“Our intellectual enterprise has been built on the basic notion of this national ethos, this American idea of openness,” said Adil Najam, dean of Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies.
“When the best and brightest start seeing that this is not a place that is welcoming, that on a whim a whole country will be written off, then they start thinking of alternatives.”
Out of 350 Americans to have received a Nobel prize in research, more than 100 have been immigrants, Adil Najam of Boston University said. In addition to being a dean, Najam, who is Muslim and from Pakistan, is also a professor of international relations and earth and environment. He said he has “no doubt” that the refugee ban represents the first step for an administration he sees as increasingly hostile to certain kinds of immigrants.
“Our students are better off because they can get the best professors from around the world … our conferences are better because the best research scholars come from all over,” he said. “I literally cannot visualize what U.S. higher education and research would be if, indeed, immigrants were taken away.”
You can read the entire article here.
Adil Najam is the inaugural dean of the Pardee School and is the former Vice Chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan. Learn more about him here.