Since Sept. 11, he says, keeping the international students’ pathways to Harvard open has been near the top of the organization’s docket.

For most Washington representatives of Harvard’s peers, visa delays were not the most pressing issue under criticism.

For the international offices that handle most students, in fact, the compounding of woes registering foreign students after Sept. 11 was epitomized by the Student Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS, designed as the first nationwide computer database of international students.

Congress first proposed such a program in 1996, but it drew sharp criticism from the higher education community. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, it was moved off of the bureaucratic back burner.

From the start, problems plagued the national SEVIS database.

Technical glitches with the computerized database itself caused students’ records to disappear or to be associated with the wrong school, users of a pilot program complained. And because the system was used to screen for dubious records, the bug-ridden system could have brought hundreds of legitimate students under scrutiny by federal investigators.

Scholars who were not included in the database, or who were registered incorrectly, would be barred from entering the country for registration in September.

Moving thousands of records from the old paper system to the database required months of grind work. Computer systems had to undergo thousands of dollars worth of updates in order to be compliant with new software. And, most frighteningly for international administrators nationwide, schools had to undertake this overhaul on a very tight schedule.

The records for all of Harvard’s international students and scholars and their dependents—more than 5,500 separate collections of files—had to be entered in the new database by Aug. 1, fewer than seven months after the new technology became usable.

The stakes for Harvard were onerous. Schools that didn’t register all of their students by the deadline would be unable to take on new students until the process was complete.

As AAU President David Ward voiced strong criticism before the House Immigration Subcommittee last April in a special hearing devoted to SEVIS, Ladd and her staff at the International Office kept silent, devoting their resources instead toward moving information from their files to the new system.

In May, Ladd’s staff shifted to first gear, working “nights and weekends,” she said. Their work continued through summer, and Harvard made its August deadline with a matter of days to spare.

SEVIS was the most labor-intensive requirement that most universities faced in the wake of Sept. 11. For many international students, other regulations struck far closer to home.

A RACIAL DIVIDE?

A little more than a year ago, a group of Harvard students spent one freezing Friday morning huddled under an overhang in Boston’s Government Center in the company of several local activists. They were trying to disseminate information among the line of men clutching documents that snaked through the lobby of the John F. Kennedy Federal Building.