Imagine you are a citizen of Mexico, South Korea, France or any other non-U.S. country — and you have accepted an offer of a full-time faculty job at Trinity University. You sign an employment contract that includes the university paying all of the associate visa fees, and you begin the tedious process of gathering documents and filling out government forms. You leave your extended family, your culture and your home, and you find a place to live in San Antonio, Texas. You buy furniture, get a new driver’s license, maybe support your spouse while they look for a new job and help to find daycare for your young children. Your first semester is stressful but exciting, when you read in the news that the U.S. president has issued an executive order increasing fees for the visa you require to $100,000. What would you hope your new boss would do?
This was the situation for several new foreign national faculty who came to Trinity this year. Since 1990, the U.S. has granted special visas to degree-holding professionals to work in the United States, generally called “H-1Bs,” referring to the sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act that were altered to create the special visas. On Sept. 19, 2025, the White House issued an executive order increasing the fees associated with H-1Bs to $100,000 each. Though the conditions under which this fee would be applied aren’t clear yet, it has significant implications for the faculty here now and those who may become faculty in the future.
Rather than reaching out to impacted faculty or calling an emergency faculty assembly, the provost — when asked about the executive order — said she was unaware of the situation and that she could not guarantee the visa fees would be paid. When the White House added an exception for foreign nationals already in the country a month later, she quipped that she was relieved because there was no money for such fees. Needless to say, this was not the reassuring leadership faculty deserve. We ask the provost or the president to state in no uncertain terms that the university will stand behind its promise to pay international faculty visa fees, should the situation become necessary. As non-citizens, our international colleagues are especially vulnerable to the wildly fluctuating policies of the Trump administration. They deserve the extra protection that their employer can provide.
The university owes this support for several reasons. First, the university must fulfill the commitments it made in employment contracts. To do otherwise is to put its reputation at risk. Second, failing to support current faculty undermines the work of the faculty at large. Each full-time faculty member at Trinity is carefully chosen by their colleagues, after hundreds of hours dedicated to the faculty search process. Hiring committees create job position descriptions, recruit in person and online, sift through dozens if not hundreds of applications, conduct interviews and bring finalists to campus for multi-day interviews, holding innumerable meetings along the way. This process makes choosing a new faculty colleague unlike hiring employees for most jobs. Because of the extensive vetting and close working conditions in a liberal arts setting, we assume we are creating decades-long relationships. Departments change teaching schedules, curricular expectations and research programs when new colleagues join. Why go through this extra work if the administration does not stay true to employment contracts?
Trinity is a relatively small school, now employing only twenty full-time faculty who are foreign nationals. They are among the many excellent faculty who have served the university through H-1B visas, and are treasured members of the Trinity community. University leadership has been silent about whether we should now exclude foreign nationals from future faculty searches. To exclude foreign nationals would be to impoverish our campus, and allow the policies of a decidedly anti-liberal arts presidential administration to shape our campus for decades to come. Trinity University should and must provide leadership on this issue. This could be accomplished by finding money in the university’s budget to cover associated fees, or working with department chairs to figure out an alternative.
Education and scholarship should not depend on national boundaries. Keep in mind that of the 425 Nobel Prizes awarded to U.S. Americans since 1901, roughly a third have been immigrants to this country; half in the sciences in 2025 alone.
AAUP Email: [email protected]
*This column was updated on Jan. 28, 2026.
