More than two years after a Bolivian historian was hired to teach at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and four months after the university sued the federal government to let him into the United States, he finally has a visa.
Officials at Nebraska, which kept the job open for the historian, Waskar T. Ari Chachaki, said on Friday that he was expected to arrive in Lincoln a week before classes begin on August 27. The government has never given Mr. Ari, or the university, an explanation of why it refused to give him a visa for two years, or why it decided to grant him one now.
“At this point we’re just rejoicing, rather than questioning,” said Peter S. Levitov, Nebraska’s associate dean of international affairs.
Academic-rights advocates say Mr. Ari is one of a growing number of foreign scholars denied visas by the Bush administration, apparently for political reasons, not because they pose any threat to national security.
Jameel Jaffer, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national-security program, said the granting of a visa to Mr. Ari was a very welcome development. He added, “I’m hopeful, but not optimistic, that this is a sign of a shift of policy” in the administration.
Mr. Ari, a specialist in the cultures and social movements of Latin America’s indigenous peoples, and himself an Aymara, one of the largest Indian groups of Bolivia, earned his Ph.D. at Georgetown University in 2005. After Nebraska hired him as an assistant professor of history and ethnic studies, he left for what was to have been a brief visit home.
But when he visited the U.S. Consulate in La Paz, the Bolivian capital, to obtain a new visa, none was forthcoming. Instead, a consular official took his passport and stamped “canceled” on his still-valid U.S. student visa. Mr. Ari spent the next two years teaching at the Greater University of San Andrés, known as Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, Bolivia’s largest public institution, with his academic career in the United States on hold.
“I cannot await to get to Lincoln,” Mr. Ari said in an e-mail message. The delay has “cost me two years of my life.”
There was no movement in Mr. Ari’s case until the university turned to the courts. In March, Nebraska filed a lawsuit demanding that the Department of Homeland Security respond to a petition the university had filed 21 months earlier in support of Mr. Ari’s request for an employment visa. In May, without comment, the department finally approved the petition, allowing Mr. Ari’s request to be considered.
Last Wednesday an official at the U.S. Consulate in La Paz called Mr. Ari and asked him to come in the next day. Mr. Ari left his passport there in the morning, and in the afternoon picked it up with the visa inserted. Consular officials were cordial, Mr. Ari said, but again provided no explanation.
One of the very few other cases in which there was some movement after federal authorities denied a visa to a foreign scholar also involved a lawsuit against the government. Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Swiss scholar of Islam, had his visa revoked in 2004, preventing him from taking up a teaching job at the University of Notre Dame. At the time, U.S. officials justified the action with vague references to a terrorism threat (The Chronicle, September 10, 2004).
But after a federal judge ruled last summer that the government had to provide an explanation, the authorities presented a new reason: donations totaling about $800 that Mr. Ramadan had made to two European groups providing humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians. The Bush administration later said the two groups had provided “material support” to Hamas, the Islamic resistance group that won a majority of seats in the Palestinian legislature last year and is regarded as a terrorist organization by the United States.
The ACLU, which brought the lawsuit in Mr. Ramadan’s case on behalf of several academic groups, is pressing forward with it, asserting that the government’s explanation does not justify keeping the scholar out of the country.
“One of the frustrating things is the secrecy that surrounds all these cases,” Mr. Jaffer said. “This allows the government to act with impunity on political whims.”
Academic leaders say the administration’s motives for banning Mr. Ari have never been clear. Some academics speculate it may have been to show displeasure with Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, who is also an Aymara and has criticized U.S. policy toward his country’s cultivation of coca, from which cocaine is refined.
In a letter sent last year to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and subsequently made public, the American Historical Association wrote: “We recognize that there may be individuals who pose a genuine security risk. ... However, in Dr. Ari’s case, we feel there are no perceptible grounds for such treatment. Within the Aymara community of Bolivia, he is widely recognized as a voice of moderation.”