The window of opportunity for Russian scientists and students – including those who do not support Putin’s policies – is getting smaller and smaller. Recently, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH) adopted new security rules that effectively make it impossible for Russian students to enter the university’s master’s and doctoral programmes. T-invariant managed to talk to students who have lost the opportunity to study at this prestigious institution, and to take comments from the ETH itself.
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ETH is one of the world’s leading research institutes. 22 Nobel Prize winners, two Fields Medal winners, three Pritzker Prize winners and one Turing Prize winner are associated with it. ETH alumni include such global science stars as Albert Einstein and John von Neumann. In 2023, 25380 students from more than 120 countries were enrolled at ETH, and 4425 received doctoral degrees.
– People from all over the world teach and conduct research at ETH, which is crucial to the university’s success. As the world’s political situation changes and wars break out, this internationality also creates challenges that affect more and more ETH members,” the university’s website says.
on 24 October, the ETH – the first and so far the only Swiss research institute – announced that it had tightened admission requirements for master’s and doctoral programmes in a range of fields.
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zürich)
– ETH Zurich and its employees must comply with Swiss export control and sanctions regulations in their work,” ETH spokesman Markus Gross points out in an official response to T-invariant. – Violations can have consequences under criminal law. The ETH has to minimise the risk of misuse of new technologies and knowledge. We have to carry out security checks on applications for international students, employees and guests who may gain access to dual-use goods or key technologies.
The ETN website lists the criteria where the University recommends that an application is rejected. Among them is the country of origin: whether it is subject to sanctions and whether export control provisions apply to it. This paragraph notes that the applicant’s background and country of residence are taken into account. Most Russian students, if they have not yet left the country, automatically fall under this criterion.
Another item is previous education. Most of the leading Russian universities have fallen under sanctions, which means that for most Russian students this criterion will be taken into account. The academic field and educational programme are also taken into account. All applied specialities and topics in “critical research areas” are subject to increased official control. It is precisely for its applied and technical programmes that ETH is famous. So most of those who wish to study and work at ETH fall under this criterion as well.
The only point that does not practically concern Russian students is the source of funding. It is undesirable that study, internship or work at ETH be paid for by an authorised state. But today the Russian government does not encourage study in European countries and certainly does not allocate money for this purpose.
– Strong mathematics and programming were very important to me, which is exactly what distinguishes the programme in my speciality, bioinformatics,” one of the students who planned to study at ETH tells T-invariant. – I know from descriptions and real feedback from students I know that the studies and courses in my field are deep, interesting, and most importantly useful and applied. It is not for nothing that this programme is one of the best in Europe.
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Our interviewee, currently a fourth-year student at one of Russia’s leading universities, asks not to be named: she does not yet know how her fate will turn out, and being active in the media can be unsafe. She confesses that she had originally planned to receive a scholarship to study at ETH:
– Studying at ETH itself is not very expensive. The other thing is the accommodation. Switzerland is a very expensive country. I naturally applied for a scholarship, I thought up and described the project. But even if I hadn’t been able to get a scholarship, I would have gone anyway. My family understands how important education is and what a prestigious and high-quality Master’s degree will give me in my future career.
Our interviewee tells us that she chose ETH several years ago and carefully prepared herself for entering the Master’s programme:
– ETH has additional exams that other universities don’t have. I had already paid for them, the preparation courses, and collected all the necessary documents. Then I crossed paths with an acquaintance, a programmer, who was also going to enter ETH. He told me that three of our mutual friends had already been rejected for political reasons. It was a shock for me. It turned out that only a fortnight ago new rules had been introduced.
Iran, Iraq, Syria, Russia, Belarus and Russia were quite expectedly among the “undesirable countries”. But China is also on the list. And it was Chinese master’s students, doctoral students and professors who began to actively draw attention to the problem. Even under the publication itself on the ETH website there are several comments from scientists and students.
Dr Jimbo Huang, a postdoctoral fellow in synthetic biology at ETH, writes the following:
“This is one of the most shameful moments in the history of ETH. I once thought of it as an academic haven, an institution renowned for its independence, autonomy, commitment to science and fairness. But now it has lost those values, as well as, it seems, the ability to think independently. This is a sad reality not only for Switzerland – a country that claims to be permanently neutral – but also for students around the world who seek fairness and justice. I call on the university to seriously reconsider and reverse this decision. I hope that ETH will uphold the values of fairness, independence and integrity, remaining a place where students from around the world can trust in its commitment to academic freedom and inclusivity.”
On the local Swiss part of the Reddit forum, one section of participants took the new rules to heart, recalling the spying scandals involving an Iranian-German professor in Norway and a Harvard professor. Thus, one of the panellists writes: “Of course it annoys the individual, but it is essentially the right political/legal decision. Such checks are most likely carried out at all Western universities, it’s just not publicised.” Other users, however, accuse the university of being biased against students from certain countries.
It seems that the university administration has been facing such accusations on a regular basis over the past month. However, Markus Gross wrote the following in response to T-invariant:
– Students or PhD candidates are never rejected solely on the basis of nationality. Country of origin plays a role, but background is also taken into account. ETH maintains a sense of proportion and fairness when evaluating candidates, and each application is assessed individually. In principle, people can study any course regardless of their background. However, we have a responsibility to uphold the law and to ensure the safety of all our students and staff. ETH is committed to preserving academic freedom in its institution: all staff and students should be able to research, teach, learn and work with as few barriers as possible. But when, for example, a student from a military university that has come under EU, US, UK or UN sanctions wants to do a master’s degree in cyber security at ETH, we must reject the application based on established criteria on security grounds.
Markus Gross, Professor of Computer Science at ETH
All Russian students with whom we have been able to speak are seriously questioning whether it is worth applying to the ETH now: it requires expenses, and at the same time, after the tightening of the requirements, there are no known positive decisions on the part of the university. At the same time, our interlocutors assure us that among their acquaintances who have been rejected, there are those who applied for theoretical areas that have no practical application at present. All our interlocutors are unanimous in their assessment of their current state and feelings: shock, confusion, a feeling of injustice. And also fear that ETH will be the first, but by no means the last, institute to officially close its doors to Russians.
Swissinfo, in an article on the new security rules of the ETH, writes that although the ETH is state-funded, the university is free to determine how to comply with laws related to national security. And now the important question is whether other educational and scientific institutions will follow the example of the most prestigious Swiss institution. For example, the article already mentioned cites a representative of the German Rectors’ Conference as saying that educational institutions are discussing whether to introduce vetting procedures for students “in the context of risk management”. According to the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, more and more academic institutions are establishing ethics committees and export control services that monitor research flows to address national security risks associated with foreign students.
– Russian scientists are cut off from conferences, international projects, research, and normal libraries of scientific articles. Internships and exchange programmes are no longer available to Russians. And this is critical, people are simply suffocating here. No normal equipment, no normal reagents, no access to technology,” says one of our interlocutors. She met an explanation that such measures are connected with the increasing cases of espionage, including espionage in favour of Russia. But she strongly doubts the validity of this explanation, believing that the scientific sphere is the sphere with the highest percentage of anti-war people.
Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, we see more and more sanctions being imposed against Russia. And these attempts to stop aggression in a non-military way are very important. The trouble is that these sanctions often become painful not only and not so much for Putin’s associates and those who support the war with Ukraine, but precisely for those who hold anti-war views and do not want to work in Russia. Such scientists and students have fewer and fewer opportunities to leave the country. One can understand the leadership of universities and institutes who fear the possible leakage of important information. But so far the most obvious result is the trap in which the opponents of the war have been trapped.
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Text: Julia Chyornaya
Yulia Chernaya 26.12.2024