The future of two planned off-campus programs, an exchange program in Jerusalem and the African and African American studies FSP in Ghana, might be in jeopardy as global conflict and disease present a risk to Dartmouth students.
A exchange program with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem planned for this fall may be canceled because of a State Department travel warning concerning the recent escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while students on the African and African-American studies FSP to Ghana in fall 2015 would reach Ghana a year after the deadliest outbreak to date of the Ebola virus began in Guinea, another West African nation about 870 miles away.
The College has a travel risk policy in place to ensure student safety while abroad, Tansey said. The policy states that any proposed Dartmouth-related trip to countries with U.S. Department of State, the World Health Organization or the Center for Disease Control travel warning may only be approved after a waiver has been granted from the provost’s office. The office consults the College’s international travel risk committee, which includes representatives from Safety and Security in addition to the Health Services and Risk Management offices, during the process, Tansey said.
He said that waivers are largely used for individual student travel to risky countries, but program-wide travel waivers have been granted on specific occasions.
While some institutions, like the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, have shut down programs similar to the Hebrew University exchange, others, like Northwestern University, have allowed them to proceed, executive director of off-campus programs John Tansey said. The College is in the process of applying for a waiver to continue with the program.
Lewis Glinert, the exchange’s faculty advisor and a Hebrew studies professor, declined to comment.
The Ebola virus has claimed more than 1,000 lives in this most recent outbreak and has spread to several surrounding countries, including Liberia.
African and African-American studies professor Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch, who helped plan the Ghana FSP, said that regional safety was important when planning the trip and cited Ghana’s recent record of political stability as one reason that Ghana would make a good destination.
“Safety was definitely part of the decision-making process, but not the most significant factor,” Sackeyfio-Lenoch said. “It was a logical place to take students. It’s a plain fact that Ghana has many long-term relationships with academic institutions.”
Sackeyfio-Lenoch said that she has been closely watching the recent Ebola outbreak but that she is not too concerned, since the region will have had at least a year to contain the outbreak before the trip will arrive. The final decision on whether the trip will happen will be made next summer, she said.
Tansey said that the off-campus programs office is monitoring the situation currently but does not yet know whether the outbreak will affect the trip.
From disease outbreak to coups, global events have affected the College’s off-campus programs and have even lead to the cancelation of programs in the past.
Tansey said that similar safety and security situations have occurred with the 2009 outbreak of avian flu in Mexico, the 2003 outbreak of SARS in China and the economic crisis in Argentina in 2002.
The response to each situation was different, he said. Because the Spanish LSA in Cholula, Mexico had already begun when the outbreak occurred, students were flown out of the region to complete their studies in Hanover. The Spanish FSP in Buenos Aires, Argentina was moved to Montevideo, Uruguay, while the program in China was canceled.
GlobeMed’s two-month summer trip to Thailand this year came shortly after a military coup that led to martial law and curfews across much of the country.
Lisa Carson ’15 is the trip director of this year’s mission, the latest iteration of a three-year long partnership with Thailand’s Kachin Women’s Association, a group that helps refugees of the Burmese Civil War.
Carson said that although organizations at the College such as the Rockefeller Center and the Dickey Center for International Understanding were hesitant to support the trip, the GlobeMed national office encouraged the group to make the journey.
“We just have to have an emergency plan in case something should come up,” Carson said.
Because the travel did not meet the requirements to be “Dartmouth-related,” Tansey said students likely did not have to fill out a travel waiver.
Carson said that while there were some explicit signs of the coup — including an increased military presence — she has not seen any protesting or violence.
The group was especially wary at the beginning of their trip, Carson said, because organizations similar to the one they volunteered for had recently been raided by government forces.
The volunteers originally worked three days a week to keep their work from being noticed, but now works five days a week and are set to return Aug. 18. They have avoided travelling to Bangkok, where most of the violence is centered. The curfew was lifted before the group arrived.
