AMHERST, Mass. — Word of the new policy spread through Facebook, text messages and emails, leaving consternation and fury in its wake. The state’s flagship campus had announced this month that it intended to ban Iranian nationals from admittance to certain science and engineering programs, including physics, chemistry, and electrical and computer engineering, citing a 2012 federal law that limits the fields Iranians can study at American universities.
“It was just unbelievable,” said Nariman Mostafavi, 29, an Iranian graduate student in building and construction technology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He compared its policy to one he came here to avoid: “I was myself banned from continuing my education in Iran.”
A provision of the federal law that established new sanctions against Iran because of its suspected nuclear weapons program rendered Iranian citizens ineligible for United States visas if they wanted to study at an American university to prepare for a career in Iran’s petroleum, natural gas or nuclear energy sectors, as well as its nuclear science or nuclear engineering fields.
The law does not explicitly call on universities to carry out enforcement — that is up to the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security. But UMass officials felt that they needed their own policy to make sure they were adhering to the law, and made a move that struck many here as discriminatory.
“It’s counter to our values and counter to our beliefs,” said Mike Malone, a vice chancellor here. “We just felt like we had to do something.”
On Wednesday, UMass officials announced that they would revise the policy, saying that Iranian nationals will not be banned outright from pursuing any academic disciplines, but that the university will develop “individualized study plans” that do not run afoul of sanctions.
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“You should have known better than that,” cried another faculty member.
Some here say they hope the episode will spark discussion on the matter at other schools.
“I don’t think that it’s over,” said Ernest May, a music professor who is the secretary of the Faculty Senate. “It’s a national conversation about welcoming people from all over the world.”
A version of this article appears in print on February 23, 2015, on page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Sanctions Put Academic Freedoms to a Test on a Campus Far From Tehran . Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
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