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‘This is exclusion’: Florida law restricts hiring of researchers from seven countries

Policy that prohibits partnerships between state universities and ‘countries of concern’, including China, will erode competitiveness, faculty members say.
  1. Amanda Heidt

    1. Amanda Heidt is a freelance journalist in southeast Utah.

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Public institutions in Florida are struggling to adapt after a state law quashed the recruitment of graduate students, postdocs and staff members from China, Russia, Iran and other countries labelled as of concern. The law, passed unanimously by the state’s legislature in May 2023 as a way of addressing foreign interference in academia, has prompted fierce backlash from university faculty members. They say that it will affect hundreds of early-career researchers and that it risks driving talent away from the state.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00554-2

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 06 March 2024: An earlier version of this story did not make clear that the international PhD students who could not be paid as employees needed to be living in one of the seven countries of concern. It also misrepresented Daiqing Liao’s thoughts about hiring assistants and mistakenly stated that a postdoc Zhengfei Guan wanted to hire had accepted a position in another state, instead of China. Finally, it referenced the wrong law in the caption for the main image.

References

  1. Xie, Y., Lin, X., Li, J., He, Q. & Huang, J. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 120, e2216248120 (2023).

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