Music Scholar Barred From U.S., but No One Will Tell Her Why

[babylonsister]

Music Scholar Barred From U.S., but No One Will Tell Her Why

Academics rallied to Nalini Ghuman’s cause after her residency visa was revoked last year.

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: September 17, 2007

Nalini Ghuman, an up-and-coming musicologist and expert on the British composer Edward Elgar, was stopped at the San Francisco airport in August last year and, without explanation, told that she was no longer allowed to enter the United States.

Her case has become a cause célèbre among musicologists and the subject of a protest campaign by the American Musicological Society and by academic leaders like Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College at Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., where Ms. Ghuman was to have participated last month in the Bard Music Festival, showcasing Elgar’s music.

But the door has remained closed to Ms. Ghuman, an assistant professor at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., who is British and who had lived, studied and worked in this country for 10 years before her abrupt exclusion.

The mystery of her case shows how difficult, if not impossible, it is to defend against such a decision once the secretive government process has been set in motion.

After a year of letters and inquiries, Ms. Ghuman and her Mills College lawyer have been unable to find out why her residency visa was suddenly revoked, or whether she was on some security watch list. Nor does she know whether her application for a new visa, pending since last October, is being stymied by the shadow of the same unspecified problem or mistake.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/nyregion/17musicologist.html?ex=1347681600&en=f8db6de4c1ad9d36&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

[baldguy]

1. Kafka works at Homeland Security

Or is it the Justice Dept?

Can't tell you, it's a secret.

[Karenina]

3. This is all so far beyond STOOPID...

:mad:

[no_hypocrisy]

2. Ironic, isn't it? Elgar is heard ubiquitously in high school auditoriums

throughout this country in June as his "Pomp and Circumstance" is the ceremonial music to which graduates march en route to their diplomas.