The number of newly reported swine-flu cases appears to be ebbing, but the recent health scare, which led some institutions to pull students and faculty members out of Mexico, the epicenter of the outbreak, and to cancel study-abroad programs there, can have some lasting lessons for colleges, says Gary Rhodes, director of the Center for Global Education at Loyola Marymount University.
Just as colleges learned from earlier incidents, like the London subway bombing and earthquakes in China, colleges can use this latest episode to strengthen their response to hazards encountered in overseas work, says Mr. Rhodes, whose Los Angeles-based organization supports an online clearinghouse for information about health and safety in education abroad.
“Working your way through this outbreak can prepare you to respond, whether swine flu gets worse now,” he says, “or whether you’re reinforcing the health and safety of your study-abroad program in all aspects.”
Have a plan, and practice it. Colleges shouldn’t develop responses to overseas crises on the fly, Mr. Rhodes says. Instead, they should have clear protocols for dealing with troubling situations overseas, including health scares, natural disasters, and civil strife.
And much as they need to do fire drills, colleges need to rehearse—and, if necessary, refine—their international health-and-safety procedures. “One thing that I don’t think institutions do as much as they could do in study abroad is practice their plan abroad,” Mr. Rhodes says.
Plans need to be coordinated with overseas staff members, host institutions abroad, and even those who provide housing to students. He suggests providing faculty and staff members, both overseas and on the home campus, with cards detailing steps to take in emergencies as well as round-the-clock contact information for key staff members.
“If you practice it, then people are ready to respond,” Mr. Rhodes says. “One of the challenges is that people freeze when there is a real emergency.”
Develop an open communications strategy. The mass shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 drove home the point that colleges need to have clear ways to communicate during on-campus emergencies, but such efforts are equally important during calamities abroad, Mr. Rhodes says. The decisions administrators make must be easily understandable and accessible to faculty members, students, and their families, ideally online.
The messages college leaders send also must be consistent, he says. Study-abroad directors shouldn’t be counseling caution while campus health officials downplay risk.
“People get stressed out and nervous when they hear different responses from different members of the campus community,” Mr. Rhodes says.
Don’t make decisions in isolation. Decision making about international threats can’t be carried out by the study-abroad office alone. Instead, international educators need to work with health-care workers, risk managers, student-affairs experts, and others on the campus, Mr. Rhodes says.
“One of the most important things,” he says, “is that the home campus have a balanced response, that they involve the broader campus community in making a decision so it’s not just the isolated study-abroad administrator.”
After all, students studying abroad aren’t the only ones affected, he points out. Students participating in overseas internships, traveling abroad with athletic teams, or engaging in international service-learning projects could also be caught up in a crisis.
Consult beyond the campus. Some colleges have staff or faculty members with deep expertise, perhaps even a full-time director of safety for study abroad, to deal with international incidents. But for smaller institutions, a wealth of resources is available to assist in assessing and drafting a response to a situation overseas.
The U.S. State Department—and during a health-related scare, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—posts online guidance about studying and traveling in particular countries. Study-abroad managers can confer with specialists at the Overseas Security Advisory Council, a federally chartered group that provides information and advice about security overseas to American colleges and businesses. They can post questions on dedicated e-mail message boards or consult with professional organizations like Nafsa: Association of International Educators.
The Center for Global Education, Mr. Rhodes’s group, has an online reference for international emergencies and offers health-and-safety training to college officials.
Tailor the action. As the recent swine-flu outbreak illustrates, there isn’t always a one-college-fits-all response to episodes overseas. Some colleges have canceled summer study-abroad programs to Mexico or pulled students from the country, while others are, thus far, just monitoring the situation. At least one institution, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, has temporarily halted all university-related travel to Mexico as a precaution.
Mr. Rhodes says colleges’ decisions are often driven by the particulars of their programs. For example, colleges may consider it riskier to have students travel home through congested airports than to stay put. Institutions with early-summer programs may feel under pressure to call them off than those who won’t send students to Mexico until sometime in June or July.
