THE
Daily Egyptian SERVING THE SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY SINCE 1916.
DAILYEGYPTIAN.COM
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 23, 2025
VOL. 108, ISSUE 30
SIU admin, faculty seek clarity as ‘multiple’ international students affected by visa crackdown
Jackson Brandhorst @jacksondothtml
While it is still unclear exactly how many Southern Illinois University students in Carbondale have had their visas revoked, the university now confirms that several have been impacted by the federal government’s sweeping crackdown on international students. At an SIU Faculty Senate meeting on Tuesday, April 15, Provost Sheryl
Tucker told concerned faculty members that “multiple” students had been affected – though she declined to give an exact number, citing federal privacy laws under FERPA. “There are multiple students,” Tucker said. “But because of FERPA, we would not confirm the number of individuals at this time.” This marks the first acknowledgment from SIU that more than one international student has
been caught in the federal dragnet. Previously, the university had only confirmed a single case – a student whose visa was revoked and who has since left the country. The crackdown has sent ripples through the campus community, leaving international students anxious, faculty seeking answers and administrators under pressure to address growing demands for clarity. With few details and no
formal explanations from the federal government, SIU – like many institutions nationwide – is struggling to navigate a shifting legal and political seascape. Since U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared late last month that he would be intensifying efforts to revoke the visas of international students who act counter to U.S. foreign policy, the total number of students affected nationwide has been
CARDBOARD BOAT REGATTA | 50 YEARS
reported by multiple news outlets to now be in the thousands. These actions have caused chaos within many university entities, not only among international students, but also within university administration, faculty groups, legal scholars, student organizations and the public. The sporadic nature of these revocations and the unprecedented VISA CRACKDOWN | 3
OPINION
SIU’s silence on visas rattles campus Daily Egyptian Editorial board editor@dailyegyptian.com
Photo of the first Boat Regatta in 1974 provided by SIU Special Collections Research Center.
‘If you can build a good cardboard boat, you’ve done something’: Founder reflects on 50 years of the Great Cardboard Boat Regatta Annalist Schmidt aschmidt@dailyegyptian.com
SIU will mark a milestone this year as it hosts the 50th Great Cardboard Boat Regatta on Saturday, April 26. The races will begin at 1 p.m. at Campus Lake’s Becker Pavilion. The event first launched in May 1974 as a challenge for students in Design 102 — then called Design Fundamentals. According to longtime regatta organizer and current SIU chemistry professor Mary Kinsel, the course’s instructor, Richard Archer, asked students to build
boats using only cardboard, tape and other basic materials that could carry them across the lake. “We are now celebrating the 50th running of the Great Cardboard Boat Regatta,” Kinsel said. “It’s been 52 years since the first event, since we took breaks during COVID because students weren’t here in 2020, and we were only partially back in ’21.” Larry Busch hasn’t missed a single regatta and can regale you with tales from his memory bank of a half-century of
races. A retired faculty member, Busch helped coordinate the event for decades. “A design faculty member went on sabbatical, which required us to move teaching positions around, and the regatta started in class I taught for several years, but I moved on to teach somebody else’s classes,” Busch said. “And Archer, who was also a very young faculty member, moved in to teach my class, and he and I conferred on, what are you going to do? And so forth and so on. He came up with the idea of challenging students to build
cardboard boats.” It began as a simple class assignment, never intended to become a campuswide event. “We agreed this would be a worthwhile project, and didn’t ask permission, because we didn’t know what it was going to be, and just did it,” Busch said. What started as a class project for first-year design students quickly grew beyond expectations. “This was just a class project for BOAT REGATTA | 2
The trees on campus are budding with the promise of a new season, and the sun shines down on students preparing for finals and the end of the semester. For the international students on our campus, the end of this semester has brought fear and uncertainty as students around the country face revocations of their visas and the threat of deportation. SIU administration, faculty and students, now is not the time to remain silent. On March 28, SIU confirmed with the Daily Egyptian that an international student’s visa was revoked. Since then, the university has gone cold. After weeks of reporting, we now know of three students who have had their visa revoked or their Student and Exchange Visitor Information System status terminated. University communications officials stated that the school would not release any information regarding the revocation of student visas to “respect their privacy in this sensitive situation,” and that silence has rattled campus. These revocations are new territory for the university, which only adds fuel to the
SILENCE | 4