Arts & Sciences Council discussed faculty concerns over international students’ safety under the Trump administration and Duke’s response to federal immigration policy changes at its Thursday meeting.
Council members also heard presentations on the financial status of the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences’ graduate programs, the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program’s academic requirements and progress on implementation of the new Trinity curriculum.
Threats to international students
On behalf of Stephen Jaffe, Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans distinguished professor of music composition, who was absent at Thursday’s meeting, Council Chair Denise Comer, professor of the practice of the Thompson Writing Program, shared that an unidentified graduate student allegedly had their bank account frozen because “the United States government has restricted banks from opening or maintaining banking relationships with individuals who are ordinarily residents of Iran.”
According to Jaffe’s statement as relayed by Comer, the student lost access to all funds in the account, including their graduate stipend. Jaffe also wrote that Graduate School faculty and international student support staff have been “extraordinarily generous in responding” to the student’s situation, further noting that University officials believe not all Iranian students at Duke have not been similarly targeted.
“While Duke's aspirations are to be international — ‘global Duke’ — foreign students are now feeling very insecure about leaving to go home or do research in the summer, or worse, being picked up in white vans and deported,” Comer read.
Justin Wright, professor of biology and dean of graduate education in the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, said that Duke Visa Services is “very aware” that students and visitors at other schools have had their visa statuses changed without their knowledge, though he asserted that no one at Duke has experienced that yet. Wright added that DVS is “reviewing every one of our students on a regular basis.”
Several faculty expressed worries about student safety amid new policies targeting international students — with many in attendance inquiring about what the University was doing to respond to the Trump administration’s actions, including why its legal department has so far stayed silent and what resources students can access in the event of being detained.
One faculty member pointed to the Law School’s Immigrant Rights Clinic as a resource for international students, though he noted that the clinic can only provide consultations, not legal representation.
Comer said she would refer the matter to Gary Bennett, dean of the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, but cautioned against expecting answers to all questions.
Graduate program finances
Wright delivered a presentation to the council reviewing Trinity College’s graduate programs and answered council members’ questions on program funding. He addressed the ongoing trend of declining doctoral student enrollment at Trinity, which began after fiscal year 2021.
“We've had to make cuts, and it's simply a fact of the matter [that] the costs have gone up. Revenue hasn't gone up,” Wright said. “There's only so much money to go around.”
Including tuition, fees and a full stipend, each doctoral student cost the University $107,771 in the 2024-25 academic year, up from $88,275 in 2021-22. Tuition has increased from $61,900 to $66,620, while a nine-month stipend rose from $24,750 to $28,950. Duke also moved in 2021 to allocate a summer stipend of $10,000 to doctoral students, further raising costs, though Wright mentioned that the Graduate School has helped cover some of those expenses through research fellowships and faculty grants.
Wright explained that cuts have been spread evenly across departments, with natural sciences, social sciences and humanities seeing their support reduced by the same amount — noting that “there's not a single program that hasn't been cut.”
“We don't know what it's going to cost next year. We are currently in the midst of union negotiations,” he said. “… We're not sure where we are on that, but it will be higher.”
Wright also addressed the growth of master’s program enrollment at Duke, calling master’s education “an increasingly important certification in the evolving labor market.” Despite this growth, he said Duke is “falling behind … most of its peers,” citing reports that Ivy+ institutions displayed an average annual increase of 10.4% in conferral of Arts & Sciences degrees, while Duke had an annual growth rate of roughly 5.1%.
According to Wright, amid high faculty enthusiasm for creating new master’s programs, Trinity is attempting to find the “sweet spot” between intellectual engagement and meeting labor market demands.
“We know we have been producing too many Ph.D. students for the academic job market in all of the disciplines,” he said. “… So if we're creating fewer Ph.D. students, how do we make sure that that experience is tailored for the job market that exists, rather than the job market that all of us were hired into?”
Responding to budgetary constraints, Trinity has attempted to offload costs, largely by endowing faculty chairs with donor funding and increasing the number of fellowships offered to doctoral students.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Sign up for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.
In other business
The council’s Officer Education Committee, co-chaired by Professor of Political Science Peter Feaver and Michael Gustafson, associate professor of the practice of electrical and computer engineering — alongside three undergraduates in the Naval, Army and Air Force ROTC programs — briefed the council on the committee’s role in supporting programming for ROTC students.
Deborah Reisinger, dean of undergraduate education and professor of the practice of Romance studies, updated the council on the new Trinity curriculum’s development. She said that more advising will be made available to faculty and that the first cohort of graduate student fellows has been selected to work with incoming first-years, who will choose between a Constellation or FOCUS cluster this fall.
Comer shared that departments will be notified soon if their council representatives’ terms expire at the end of the academic year. Each department has authority to decide how to select new members.
Samanyu Gangappa is a Trinity sophomore and local/national news editor for the news department.