Another Professor Barred From Entering the United States

By Leigh A. Neithardt

Citing visa discrepancies, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security denied professor John Milios entry into the country upon his arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport in June. Milios, a faculty member at the National Technical University of Athens, had planned to present a paper at a conference titled “How Class Works” at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Milios reported that U.S. officials questioned him at the airport about his political ideas and  affiliations and that the American consul in Athens later queried him about the  same subjects. Milios, a member of a leftwing political party, is active in Greek national politics and has twice been a candidate for the Greek parliament. Milios’s visa, issued in 1996, was set to expire in November. The professor had previously been allowed entry into the United States on five separate occasions to participate in academic meetings.

Jonathan Knight, director of the AAUP’s Department of Academic  Freedom, Tenure, and Governance, wrote to secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and secretary of homeland security Michael Chertoff to express alarm over the government’s actions. He commented that this incident is not the first of its kind, noting that in a February letter about an excluded scholar, the AAUP “wrote that our concern about that case was ‘deepened because it appears to be another instance of the government’s barring entry of a scholar who wishes to visit this country for legitimate academic reasons.’ The government’s barring entry of Professor Milios is one more instance, so the available information indicates, of the administration’s seeming disregard for our society’s commitment to academic freedom.”

Replying to Knight, a State Department spokesperson said that Milios had been invited to submit an application for a new visa.

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