Gotta have foriegn students (Score 2, Interesting)

Basically, MITs reason is much more prosaic than some sort of "intellectual freedom" (*snort*). If MIT was restricted from using foreign students on a research project, that project would very likely die for lack of interest. Let's face it: US students are for the most part smarter than wasting 4-7 years in a PhD program, given the financial risk involved. Thus we have the observation that the graduate student bodies at many (most?) large research schools are foreign.

From the universities point of view, this is just good business sense: large pool of willing labor that works cheap. Also, don't be fooled by high tuition for foreign. That's just a numbers game to charge what is essentially more overhead for these same grants.

MIT sees this as a dangerous precedent. If they accepted these restrictions, it would be more difficult to refuse them later, and could really dent the supply of indentured labor available to fuel university researh programs.

The whole thing make sense in the context of an "education industry".