Consulars advised of delays in visa processing of up to three or four weeks. But as backlog dragged on for months, students like Pang faced the reality of not being allowed to enter the country in time for classes.

Pang says that during a decade of work and study in the United States, he never had to wait more than 10 days to update his visa.

After leaving the country in 2001 to spend a bit of time back in Malaysia, he applied to design programs in the United States and England. When the GSD accepted him, he turned down other offers and made plans to travel to Cambridge late in the summer of 2002.

When Pang’s first day of class passed months later, he was still in Malaysia, waiting for his visa stamp.

“There was no word back from the visa counselor for the longest time,” he says. Government officials eventually told him that a “visa-issuing freeze” prevented any student visas being issued to Malaysian scholars. “[The U.S.] just stopped issuing visas for a couple of months,” he says.

Panicked as the first day of classes drew nearer, Pang began e-mailing administrators at the GSD. “There was really nothing they could do,” he says. And the only step the GSD might have taken, he adds, it did not. “I was really hoping to get deferred,” he says.

Pang contemplated trying to get re-accepted into one of the British programs he had turned down. Luckily for Pang—unlike about a dozen other students who experienced severe visa delays that year—the long-awaited document arrived in time.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Backlogs in the visa program continue to delay students—about 10 students missed the beginning of the term last fall.

But visa delays are only one of several new challenges to the nation’s international community that has arisen in the wake of Sept. 11.

According to those who have been monitoring the issue since its inception, while still onerous, the process has become more understandable and easier to monitor since that disastrous fall of 2002.

“The process for the students was certainly not without interruption, but it did not rise to the level of our worst fears and it’s seemed a little more transparent than last year’s,” Kevin Casey, Harvard’s senior director for federal and state relations, said in the fall.

Knowing what to expect meant that Harvard administrators were able to take several steps to ensure that as few visa applications as possible were lost in the bureaucratic shuffle, said Harvard International Office (HIO) Director Sharon Ladd. In some cases, she said, this meant talking with the government directly to follow up on specific cases.

Dialogue between the government and academia has been steady as the university has struggled with these issues.

Casey has been working with the Association of American Universities (AAU), an organization including more than 60 of Harvard’s peer institutions that lobby for similar ends in Washington.