I am a rabid fan of the Kansas Jayhawks and the Kansas City Chiefs.
Anyone who knows me reasonably well knows both of these things. I will rearrange schedules around Kansas basketball. I have yelled at televisions during Chiefs games, experienced the peculiar combination of irrational confidence and impending doom that comes with caring far too much about people wearing the same colored uniforms, and occasionally allowed the outcome of a sporting event over which I have absolutely no control to affect my mood more than I care to admit.
I wasn’t born into either of these loyalties.
I came to the United States from India when I was eighteen. Somewhere during the thirty-four years since, Kansas basketball became mine. So did the Chiefs. Nobody handed me a checklist of American customs I needed to adopt. I wasn’t trying to assimilate or prove that I belonged here. I just became a fan.
Which is probably why the controversy surrounding a photograph from a University of Texas football game this past weekend bothered me as much as it did.
Texas had just completed a remarkable comeback against Ohio State. In a short video posted by Texas Athletics, students wearing burnt orange were jumping, screaming, holding up the Hook ’em sign and doing exactly what college students do when their football team pulls off something extraordinary.
One image from that video showed a group of students who appeared to be mostly South Asian.
I saw football fans.
Bo French, the Republican nominee for the Texas Railroad Commission, saw something else. He reposted the photograph, suggested it represented a growing problem at the university and later described foreigners as displacing Americans, despite knowing nothing about the citizenship or immigration status of the students pictured. International students, in fact, make up only about 4 percent of UT’s undergraduate population. French’s comments drew condemnation from several prominent Republicans as well as university leaders.
But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the photograph because I keep imagining myself in it.
Put me inside Allen Fieldhouse after Kansas hits a buzzer-beater against Missouri, or in a bar during a Chiefs playoff game, and catch me at precisely the right moment. You will probably find a 53-year-old brown man screaming, jumping, hugging whoever happens to be standing next to him, and behaving with considerably less dignity than I generally try to maintain.
What would someone who didn’t know me see?
Would they see a Jayhawk? A Chiefs fan? An American who has lived here for most of his life? Or would my face tell them something else first?
For years, one of the recurring demands placed on immigrants has been that we assimilate. Learn the language. Understand the culture. Participate. Don’t remain entirely inside your own ethnic community. Become part of America.
Fair enough.
But what happens when you do?
What could be more culturally American than spending a Saturday afternoon screaming yourself hoarse at a college football game? The students in that photograph were not rejecting American culture. They were participating in one of its most recognizable rituals. They wore the colors, knew the signs, waited for hours to get into the stadium, and cared enough about their university’s football team to lose their minds when it mounted an improbable comeback.
And yet for some people looking at the photograph, none of that seemed to matter once they saw the color of their skin.
If someone can study at an American university, learn its traditions, sit in the student section, cheer for their team, and still be regarded as foreign because they look South Asian, then we should probably stop pretending the argument is simply about assimilation.
My first instinct was to respond with another familiar argument: look at what immigrants have contributed to America. Look specifically at Indian Americans—Pichai, Nadella, Khosla, the doctors, engineers, scientists, professors, entrepreneurs, executives, researchers, small-business owners, and teachers woven into communities across the country.
I could make that case easily.
The more I thought about it, however, the more I resented having to.
Why should an immigrant have to submit a résumé before being granted the dignity of belonging? Why should my claim to America depend on whether enough other Indian Americans have founded companies, performed surgeries, created jobs, or paid taxes?
There is something fundamentally transactional about saying people deserve to belong because they are useful.
And I know that argument well because my own industry makes a version of it constantly.
Whether the students in that photograph were international students is beside the point. What matters to me is what that photograph—and the reaction to it—signals to the students around the world we are asking to come here.
International students contribute billions of dollars to the American economy. They support American jobs. They strengthen research, drive innovation, and enrich our campuses.
All true.
And I hate that this has become one of international education’s favorite defenses of their presence.
We spend so much time explaining what international students do for America that perhaps we have stopped asking what America is supposed to do for them.
That question matters to me because I have spent more than three decades advocating for American higher education around the world. I have sat with students and families and told them that an American education is about much more than earning a degree.
Come here and experience something different. Meet people unlike yourself. Join organizations. Build relationships. Explore. Attend the games. Leave the comfort of what you know and allow another place to change you.
I still believe deeply in that proposition.
But I would be lying if I said my confidence in promoting it has not been shaken.
International enrollment in the United States is already facing serious headwinds. NAFSA projects a possible 9.5 percent decline this fall, driven by falling applications, visa bottlenecks, and increasingly restrictive or uncertain immigration policies. Its analysis focuses, understandably, on what such a decline could cost the United States: as much as $3.4 billion in economic activity and nearly 40,000 jobs.
Those are significant numbers.
But imagine being an eighteen-year-old somewhere in India considering spending four years of your life and a considerable amount of your family’s money in the United States, and hearing our industry’s defense of your presence:
Please come. Look how valuable you are to our economy.
Is that really the best case we can make?
International students are not economic-development instruments. They are students. They come here because they are trying to become something they cannot yet fully imagine. They want knowledge, friendships, confidence, independence, perspective, and opportunity. They want the experience of leaving everything familiar behind and discovering what becomes possible when they do.
Our responsibility should begin there.
We should advocate for international students because of what they have come here to receive, not merely because of what we can extract from their presence.
That requires something more from those of us who work in international education, particularly from the institutions that invite these students here.
American universities have become remarkably good at marketing belonging. Look at almost any international admissions website and you will find multicultural groups of students sitting together on lawns, flags from around the world, and language about global communities, finding your home, and bringing your whole self.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that.
But belonging cannot simply be recruitment copy.
If an institution is willing to travel to Mumbai, Lagos or Hanoi and tell a family that their child will find a home on its campus, then that institution acquires a responsibility to defend that student’s presence when belonging becomes politically inconvenient.
This is where I want to challenge my own industry.
We become vocal when visa delays threaten enrollment. We publish reports when international student numbers fall. We calculate lost tuition, lost economic activity, and lost American jobs. We explain over and over why America needs international students.
Where I want to see the same urgency is when the people we invited here are treated as though their presence itself requires explanation.
To its credit, University of Texas leadership did respond. UT President Jim Davis said the university’s students were exceptional and that “all of them are Longhorns.” The chair of the UT System Board of Regents made essentially the same point.
That matters.
University leadership should not need to know the visa status of the students in that photograph before defending them. It should not matter whether their parents immigrated twenty years ago, whether they arrived in Austin last month, or whether they were born five miles from the stadium.
They were members of the university community. That should create an obligation.
And this is where I think international education has to distinguish between pandering and advocacy.
Pandering is easy. It tells students they belong when we need their enrollment.
Advocacy proves it when someone else says they don’t.
If university leaders genuinely believe the language on their websites, there will be moments when defending it carries political, reputational, or financial risk. That is precisely when the words begin to mean something.
I still believe in American higher education. I have seen what happens when young people cross borders and encounter worlds larger than the ones they knew. I have watched students become more curious, independent, and comfortable with difference. I know that studying in another country can alter the trajectory of a life.
But perhaps those of us who have spent our careers advocating American education need to reconsider part of our responsibility.
For years, we have traveled the world convincing students that America is worth coming to.
Maybe this moment requires us to spend just as much energy insisting that America remain worthy of the students we ask to come here.
Which brings me back to that photograph from Austin.
I still don’t know whether those students were international students. It doesn’t matter.
Those students were not asking to be admired for their contributions. They were not representing India, immigration, diversity, or the global economy. They were watching their team.
And not every student who comes to America will change our economy, strengthen our workforce, or make our universities more competitive. They shouldn’t have to.
They should be allowed to come here, participate fully, make this place partly their own, and occasionally lose their minds when their team wins a football game.
For decades, American higher education has asked students around the world to take a chance on us.
Maybe the question now is whether we are willing to take a stand for them.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
