Guests, visitors, rights, obligations
When we entertain guests or visitors in our home, some things are generally understood even if unspoken.
People invited for meals, or for afternoon tea, or coffee, or for a game, or to meet other people, can expect that what they find is in broad terms what they were invited for.
The hosts on the other hand, can expect that their guests will eat or drink or play or interact with others in accordance with generally accepted norms of behavior and proper social manners. It would be inappropriate for guests or visitors to make uninvited comments about flaws in the house or its furnishings, and it would be totally inappropriate for guests or visitors to use the occasion to solicit their hosts for money for their favorite projects or charities, or their support for particular political or other social initiatives.
I believe that the same guidelines should apply with foreign students who come to the United States on student visas.
They should find that the school or college offers what they expected.
Their hosts — the college or school and those in charge of their residential arrangements — should be able to expect that the students spend their time primarily in studying and learning. It is inappropriate for foreigners on student visas to participate actively in local or national politics, let alone to participate in physical protests that hinder everyday practices of the college or school.
When I was first in the United States, 1956-58 as a postdoctoral research student, I lived in an international house with students from many different countries, and I was unpleasantly surprised that many of those students, all of them benefiting from some aspect of American education and life, complained incessantly about United States foreign policy and the like.
When later I moved with my family to permanent residence here, I made the pledge to myself that I would make no public criticism of conditions or practices here until I had attained citizenship.
Nowadays I take full advantage of that, given the many unlawful actions of the Trump administration. But not all the controversial administrative actions seem to me inappropriate. In particular, I am very much in favor of canceling the visas of foreigners who came here as students but participate in political activism.
The excesses of DEI bureaucracies do also deserve to be checked, though I would prefer a more selective approach than Muskian chain-sawing. I criticized the excesses of “affirmative action” and political correctness when they came to my university in the early 1980s, and matters have become increasingly and egregiously worse since then (for years I had edited the anti-PC Newsletter of the Virginia Association of Scholars, https://web.archive.org/web/20131030115950/http://fbox.vt.edu/faculty/aaup/index4.html).
Thank you for your continued boldness and reminding us of the privilege and understated rules of engagement as guests as well as hosts.
Being a Californian, I am fully aware of the broad number of foreigners, including Chinese foreign students attending the UC universities. I have always found it extremely distasteful when they or any "guests" come and criticize or worse(unfortunately very common) expect to be privileged with all the amenities that local Californians have fought and paid into. Aside from being deeply offended by their demands and attitude(I considered it theft), I have witnessed my entire life how they continue that mentality of entitlement throughout their life here and teach it to their children and demand that their families members and community act in the same manner. I have yet to see them treat and scold their own home country in the same way!
Foreign students have also become a cash cow for American universities, including public institutions. A few years ago, there were 3,000 students from China at the local UC. The universities like having them because they Chinese government pays for the full ride. Californians and other Americans get a discount. I have read that there are 300,000 Chinese students at American universities. I don't see how it is in the interests of the American people to educate students from a hostile foreign police state in preference to Americans