Over the past two years, more than a dozen students were not in Cambridge to submit their fall study cards due to visa-processing delays. Some have had to change their plans entirely, deferring enrollment as much as a year, or making hasty plans to study at universities elsewhere.

And now it seems that international administrators’ worst fear—the possibility that many of Harvard’s prospective international students would favor educational programs in other countries—has come to pass.

International applications to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences fell by 15 percent this year, mirroring a trend in more than 90 percent of graduate schools nationwide. Each of Harvard’s nine schools reported similar decreases in international application numbers.

And, according to Director of the International Office Sharon Ladd, this drop coincides with an increase in the number of international applications at universities in England, Canada, and Australia.

The implications of these changes suggest serious problems for a University increasingly attempting to become part of a global community.

Summers’ letters to Powell and Ridge outlined an argument that complicates an already thorny set of issues still further.

“If the next generation of foreign leaders are educated elsewhere we also will have lost the incalculable benefits derived from their extended exposure to our country and its democratic values,” he wrote. “And if other countries feel that we do not welcome their citizens, these countries may feel less inclined to help America.”

The letter is Summers’ first stand on these concerns before Washington leadership. Some scholars who have been kept outside Harvard’s gates because of visa delays argue that this is not enough—that the University’s leadership should have spoken out louder a long time ago.

Regardless of the outcome of the next election, Harvard’s representatives in Washington say the disquiet post-Sept. 11 legislation raises is still palpable almost three years after the terrorist acts—and isn’t likely to disappear anytime soon.

“The concerns that people have continue to percolate,” said Kevin Casey, Harvard’s senior director of federal and state relations. “The international issues are going to be with us for a long time.”

Although Ladd says the process of bringing foreign students into the country this year was much more lucid than it was last year, about 10 students almost didn’t make it to Harvard this fall.

And with a new fingerprinting system, capable of inducing delays, now mandatory only for visa-holders from some nations but scheduled to become universally required this fall, the International Office will have to stay on its toes for some time.

SCIENCE

With heightened fears of bioterrorism in the wake of Sept. 11, the Bush administration has more than doubled federal funding for programs against terror, with nearly $6 billion allotted to a new program called Project BioShield.

Much of this support has found its way to academia. Harvard, in fact, has seen a sudden burst of facility construction and resources development over the course of the past year, largely as a result of the new federal appropriations.