UC Berkeley Banning Students from Far East

[Jerry]

This is an article from CNN. What do you think the implication would be for those of us with wivies planning to attend school after entry into US.

 

 

 

Berkeley turns away students from SARS-hit regions

Chancellor: Ban will last at least until CDC lifts travel advisories

Tuesday, May 6, 2003 Posted: 4:34 AM EDT (0834 GMT)

 

 

 

Chancellor Robert Berdahl meets with Director of the UC Berkeley Center for Infectious Disease Preparedness Tomas Aragon.

 

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BERKELEY, California (CNN) -- Students from China and other regions of Asia affected by the SARS virus will not be accepted for the summer session at the University of California at Berkeley, the chancellor has ruled.

 

The ban will apply to students traveling from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, as well as mainland China. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] has cautioned about travel to those nations and issued guidelines for people who do travel there.

 

"After close consultation with several public health officials and campus experts, and based on the strong recommendation of the city of Berkeley Health Officer, I deeply regret that we will not be accepting enrollments of students from these areas," Chancellor Robert Berdahl said in a written statement issued Friday.

 

"We look forward to the lifting of the CDC travel advisories so that we can once again welcome all of these students to our campus," he said.

 

Several hundred international students are being turned away, and the university is refunding their enrollment fees. The school is also prohibiting the use of its funds for nonessential travel to or from Asia by faculty, staff and student organizations.

 

Berdahl explained in his statement that the university is not prepared to monitor the health of so many incoming students.

 

"All of these students would have to be monitored for a 10-day period," the time it may take for symptoms of severe acute respiratory syndrome to appear after a person is infected. "Should any of them develop SARS-related symptoms, the CDC requires that elaborate procedures be implemented that would include isolation and other labor-intensive measures that we are not able to provide currently," he said.

 

"If the CDC lifts the travel advisories to these areas, then this policy would no longer be in force," Berdahl said.

 

The fall semester is not included in the ban.

 

Current students who travel in the affected areas during the summer, as well as newly admitted students arriving for the fall semester, will be required to fill out a lengthy survey detailing where they traveled and their health condition. In addition, they will be monitored by campus health officials for 10 days after their arrival.

 

Details of the fall program are still being devised, including how the university would handle any confirmed SARS cases.

 

SARS apparently originated in China, and it has had the biggest impact there. As of Monday, China has reported 4,280 cases, with 206 deaths. Hong Kong has reported 1,637 cases, with 187 deaths. Singapore and Taiwan have been less affected, with 204 cases and 26 deaths in Singapore, and 116 cases and eight deaths in Taiwan.

[rfsun]

It will certainly cause a reaction from the Chinese government but I hope it does not start a trend. Why couldn't they try quarantining them or such first. I wonder how many students are actually affected. It is not good news.

[owenkrout]

This is purely and simply a legal issue. If any college or university allows students from an area on the CDC's warning list and that student then passes SARS on to someone else on the campus, the lawyers would be all over the school. It would be a feeding frenzy. Berkley is denying them simply based on fear of what would happen in the unlikely case of a student bringing SARS into the US. The same reason that most (all?) American higher ed has terminated their study overseas programs in China. Many of the students were in areas where they did not feel threatened and wanted to stay but the schools feared possible legal action if someone did get sick.

[wolf]

It's all part of the process to contain this sars sickness. I read today that there are some 70% of major corporations in the US that have told there people not to visit certain countries with sars. Maybe these major corporations are the 10 top ones, the article didn't say. There was also another article in todays papers saying that the newspapers have blown this way out of fact. It wenton to say that the number that have died are killed on US highways every holiday weekend, which is true. Sars is a real problem, but with the population in China and the closeness of living there, I don't fear going there as I will go next month.

[tparrent]

I'm with you Wolf. I'm headed to China at the end of the month interview or no interview, SARS or no SARS. I will not let unreasonable fear rule my life.

 

The company I work with has a 10 day quarantine policy on my return. I will go sailing for those 10 days and work on the boat using wireless Internet. Not a bad life!

[tonado]

The ban is only for summer students. I just saw Dr Peter Dietrich from CNN. He is the Medical Director of UCB. He said they are banning these temp students (600) to protect the students from the Fall. The main reason are health cost and contaminated dorms if SARS spreads in campus. The ban is not for Fall students even if they happen to go home (China) for the summer break.

 

It really doesn't make sense to just ban the Summer students. If they are really afraid, then they should ban all students.

[tparrent]

I think they are counting on SARS fading away before Fall. They probably do not want to have a big drop in enrollment for the Fall term.

 

I read earlier that they would lift all the bans as soon as CDC drops their travel advisory.

[owenkrout]

I've worked in higher ed state-side and seen how these decisions are made. Believe me, if China is still on the CDC list by the end of the summer, they will extend the ban to this fall. Again, it is the financial liability that they are concerned about. They want to keep the Asian students. Foreign students actually pay fees equal to the true cost of their education (and usually a little more) by law in most states. Therefore the schools view the foreign students as a profit making enterprise. However one case of SARS and the profit quickly becomes a huge loss. I expect that other schools will follow their lead if things don't improve in China within the next couple of weeks.

[rocksplit]

Foreign students actually pay fees equal to the true cost of their education (and usually a little more) :

 

Yes, I rember as I arrived on a F1 visa in Brooklyn 1980 with a good dose of cultureshock after Kyoto...

 

Before long both my wisdom theet needed extraction and I had no insurance. The hospital also had a sliding feescale: foreign students paid the most!

 

Yet except for the pain I got away cheap: with an infection and a locked chaw (and helping to fix the dental chair) I flat out refused to pay anything.

 

Visafees: I pay those ! despite the service

[tonado]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/12/educatio...ion/12COLL.html

 

Study Abroad Means SARS Fear at Home

By JODI WILGOREN

 

 

NORTHFIELD, Minn., May 9 — It had the makings of a reality television show: "Real World" meets "Survivor," with a dose of "Fear Factor."

 

Five students at a small liberal arts college, yanked from their experiential learning seminar in China, quarantined in a dean's house for three days after their roommate's 101-degree fever made him suspect for SARS. One cable modem. Five cellphones. Groceries delivered daily to the back porch. All the mediocre movies they could watch.

 

"There are times in your life when you say, `I really want to sit on a couch for eight hours and watch TV,' " said one of the five students, Charlie Carstens, a sophomore from Atlanta who is majoring in economics here at Carleton College.

 

"But when someone tells you to do that for 72 hours, it's really not as fun."

 

The five students have since been set free to roam the Carleton campus, barred only from dormitories, but their friend, who started 10 days of total isolation when his symptoms disappeared, remains sequestered until Wednesday in a college duplex with slow, dial-up Internet access and no cable television.

 

The formerly quarantined, meanwhile, are subject to strange looks from wary classmates and left to interpret the vague guidelines about acting "prudent." Should they or should they not study in the library, eat in dining halls or have parties at their borrowed house?

 

The situation at this insular, highly selective school tucked into farmland about 40 miles south of the Twin Cities is emblematic of how American campuses, increasingly internationalized with the influx of foreign students and the proliferation of study-abroad programs, have forged a front line in the fight against severe acute respiratory syndrome. Across the country, academic administrators have become public health watchdogs, as SARS provides a new test in higher education's perennial struggles with town-gown relations and in loco parentis.

 

[The University of California at Berkeley on Saturday retreated from the tough policy it announced earlier in the week, saying that 80 of 500 students from SARS-affected areas would be allowed to attend summer classes and that the restrictions might be relaxed further in coming weeks.]

 

Like Carleton, other colleges have taken steps beyond the guidelines of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reflecting the paternalistic approach to governing the tight-knit communities of campuses and a fear of public-relations disasters with panicky surrounding communities. They have disinvited parents of foreign students from commencement ceremonies, rerouted research missions and canceled seminars abroad or, in some cases, asked people leaving SARS zones to simply stay away.

 

"Different institutions have tailored their response to the particular circumstances they were facing," said David Ward, president of the American Council on Education, a Washington-based group that represents the nation's colleges and universities. Mr. Ward likened their leaders to the mayors of small towns under siege, and said, "It's always harder when you are trying to deal with it without an official policy, but I've been impressed with this customized response."

 

Harvard withdrew money for student and faculty travel to China, Taiwan or Hong Kong, and ordered people who "feel that you must travel to these areas for personal reasons" to notify administrators and get "medical clearance" before "re-entering the Harvard community," according to its Web site.

 

Kalamazoo College in Michigan canceled its field-based Contemporary China class and hopes to reschedule for December; Mercer University in Macon, Ga., is sending 20 M.B.A. candidates to Paris and Geneva instead of to China and Hong Kong. The student health center at the Georgia Institute of Technology has added protective clothing for doctors and nurses.

 

At Syracuse University, where a student who fell ill on returning from Toronto was monitored for SARS last month, signs listing symptoms of the disease were posted outside commencement events scheduled for this weekend, and administrators today canceled the fall study program in Hong Kong. At Washington University in St. Louis, Case Western Reserve in Cleveland and the University of Rochester in New York, among others, seniors from SARS-affected countries have been strongly discouraged from having relatives from home witness their tassel-switching.

 

"Some have told their parents not to come," Kathy Steiner-Lang, director of Washington University's international students' office, said of the approximately 75 graduates affected by the policy. "Some have decided it would be problematic to come because they might be stranded, they might not be able to get back. Some people are coming anyway and going through the screening process."

 

Here at Carleton, with a small but growing number of international students — 66 — among the 1,900 undergraduates and a dozen study-abroad programs, the focus has been on the 35 students enrolled in "Comparative Political Economies," an 11-week seminar in China, Hong Kong, Thailand and Vietnam. SARS delayed the students' departure for Asia by a week and knocked Hanoi off the itinerary; administrators said Carleton was the last American institution to pull out when the students left early on April 30.

 

Carleton officials met the plane from Shanghai with digital thermometers for each student, asking them to call in their temperatures twice daily to the campus health center. The college bought round-trip tickets home for those who chose not to return to campus; it provided housing and meals for the rest.

 

The quarantine began the next morning, when one of the students, who refused to discuss the situation and asked that he not be identified, woke up feverish and was instantly exiled, interrogated by doctors and the police and shunted off to a Minneapolis hospital via ambulance. College officials now say he had a simple cold, not SARS.

 

"We didn't want to treat these students like prisoners, and they really do feel pretty oppressed," said Mark Govoni, the dean of students, who donated his college-owned, red brick three-bedroom home to the cause, moving with his wife into a nearby motel. "We learned that, short of food and water, it's the Internet that is the next and most essential thing in the world."

 

Unable to concentrate on their assignments — they have three short papers due May 14 and 24 — the five quarantined students stared endlessly at movies. They watched "Gladiator," "Ben-Hur," "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," "The Matrix."

 

Luke Felkey, a junior from Bozeman, Mont., took the helm in the kitchen, frying up tofu squares with pineapple when supplies dwindled.

 

Mr. Felkey and Mr. Carstens slept on the sectional sofa in the den rather than return to their room adjacent to the bed where their sick classmate had slept. They experimented with the dean's croquet set in the yard.

 

"When you're confined to a small space," Mr. Carstens said, "more things become interesting."

 

Northfield residents, and some Carleton students, wrote outraged letters to newspapers about potentially infected people being allowed back in town. Someone threw eggs at Mr. Govoni's house.

 

"We were more scared of the townies burning our house down while we were inside than we were of getting SARS," Mr. Carstens said.

 

The low point, Mr. Felkey said, was watching students flock to the annual spring concert, his favorite campus event, and hearing their faraway cheers from the living room.

 

The quarantine ended May 4, but the students spent the next week in an odd netherworld, fearful of fever at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. temperature checks, and still suspect on campus.

 

[Along with 20 other Carleton students recalled from China, who had spent the 10-day caution period at home or in off-campus apartments, the five students moved back into the dorms yesterday, in time to give Mr. Govoni's daughter, returning home from college, her room back.]

 

"Can I touch you?" one of the five, Yam Ki Chan, 20, of Skokie, Ill., said when he saw a friend off campus this afternoon at an Indian restaurant.

 

"I have a cold," the friend warned.

 

"So I should be more afraid of you than you are of me," Mr. Chan said, laughing.

 

The student who was feverish remains sequestered, talking to visitors behind two screen doors, toggling between e-mail and phone calls and taking frequent naps. Petra Crosby, the director of international student programs, takes him the newspaper each morning and groceries on demand. The first night, she made a midnight run for cough syrup. "My job description goes from mom to immigration lawyer and anything in between," Ms. Crosby said, "so this is not unusual at all for me."

 

Roy Grow, the political science professor who developed the China course, said that SARS had given the students an excellent case study but that it had ultimately made their observations and other travel unmanageable. The last week of the seminar is a simulation in which each student adopts a specific Chinese persona and the group debates the next five-year plan.

 

Just as Chinese businesses and politicians are doing in the days of SARS, the scattered students will have to conduct the exercise via teleconference and the Internet.