Cut the campus cruelty: put yourself in the overseas student's shoes
Lisa Pryor
How to tell whether a neighbourhood is full of university students? Easy. By the speed at which discarded furniture disappears from the nature strips. Chipboard kitchen tables, slightly waterlogged. Office chairs missing wheels. They all go.
I noticed this at the beginning of the university semester, hanging out on the grass in front of my grandparents' old house in Newcastle. The place, right near the university, was being cleared out for the arrival of student lodgers from overseas. As the latest batch of first years arrived in this neighbourhood, the streets were full of Malaysian, Saudi Arabian, Chinese and African students, getting to know each other, carting home old furniture from the footpath and fresh supplies from the shopping centre down the road.
The atmosphere is not so merry now. Thugs have attacked several international students in this neighbourhood. Victims - Vietnamese and Saudis, among others - were robbed on the dark campus, others set upon at the shops. Police arrested some teenagers but fear lingers.
Last weekend in Melbourne an Indian student was stabbed with a screwdriver - such attacks have been big news in India. Now the Federal Government has promised a roundtable to deal with issues affecting the 430,000-odd international students arriving each year.
It's one thing for dumb thugs to be prejudiced against foreign students but what is just as disturbing is the prejudice shown to these students by local uni students who should know better.
This Twitter post from a university student shows the attitude I'm talking about: "to all Monash Students, never ever take group assignments with asian international students, their academic english knowledge is sooo poor!!"
Then there are the grumbles about the very presence of foreign students on campus, as this post from another website shows: "i hate how there are too many international students [at the University of NSW]. some are fine and dandy, if i have to, ill get along with them fine, but if they come in groups of 10 or so its f---ing hard to walk past them. especially since they dont even know how to move out of the bloody way and have some courtesy!"
The irony is that many Australian students spend summer holidays exploring the culture of our region by backpacking through Asia, while wasting the opportunity during semester to get to know peers from these countries. Not only is this division alienating for foreign students, it is a wasted opportunity for locals, too.
Veronica Meneses, who works for the Newcastle University Student Association as the education and welfare officer for international students, says there has been an influx of students from Saudi Arabia because Australia is perceived as safer than the United States, especially since September 11. So we have lots of young people arriving from the Middle East, keen to learn our language and share our culture, and we're the ones ignoring them, shepherding them into ghettos.
Meneses has had Saudis asking why there is so little integration with locals. They come to learn English and find themselves in classes where all the students are Saudi. Cut off from Australians, the best they can do is team up with students from other countries to practise their second language together.
The perception of foreign students as rich cash cows gives local students, even those who see themselves as progressive and right-on, a weak excuse to exclude and denigrate them without feeling racist.
"What no one wants to mention is a lot of the international students are coming in with scholarships, government scholarships," Meneses says. All the Saudis she has met have been on scholarships awarded by their own government, including one who was attacked at the local shopping centre and had his nose broken.
Lots of Australian students head overseas on exchange at some time during their degree. And I bet they imagine, or at least hope, they will be included in university life, regardless of their poor language skills. If only more students thought about this before blowing off international students.
