Kooi Pang received his visa to enter the country on Sept. 29 and traveled from Malaysia to Harvard’s Design School the next day—arriving three weeks late, on the final day of registration.

While he waited for his visa, Pang missed two weeks of classes and significant work in the GSD’s Urban Planning and Design program.

But he considers himself lucky to have made it to Harvard at all.

Several other Harvard students from 26 countries for which the State Department has new, strict, post-Sept. 11 visa policies were unable to make their deadlines and had to defer admission until next year.

In addition to students from Harvard’s Law School, Business School and the College, a number of professors have faced puzzlingly long waits for travel visas which once took mere days to obtain.

Kept waiting by U.S. Consulates, with no explanation as to why their applications are taking extra weeks and months to process, they say they received little information or help from Harvard.

But Harvard officials say they, too, have faced difficulty in the past few months negotiating a new, complicated visa system while armed with very little information.

Students and Harvard officials worry that if the coming years are anything like this one, the new restrictions could eventually discourage international students and scholars from studying in the U.S.—with repercussions for American higher education and society as a whole.

“Now we’re in a new world, we recognize that,” says Kevin Casey, Harvard’s senior director for federal and state relations. “What we don’t want to do is turn people away before they apply.”

Hoping for Help

Pang—who credits a group called American Universities Alumni Malaysia with helping him get his visa—says he thinks Harvard did little to advance his cause.

“They were sympathetic to my situation but they basically just gave me a deadline,” Pang says.

Halfway across the world, Ahmed el-Gaili, who is slated to graduate this spring from Harvard Law School, is now taking classes at a London law school and hoping to join his class in January.

El-Gaili is from Sudan, one of seven countries the State Department has deemed a state sponsor of terrorism.

With a newly-long wait for a visa, el-Gaili spent much of September living in hotels, hoping to receive his visa and return to Harvard for his third year of law school.