SARS Travel Ban Lifted

The University lifted its ban on travel to mainland China last week, ending the last of its restrictions on travel to SARS-infected countries.

The lift on the moratorium was announced in a June 24 letter to the Harvard community by Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences William C. Kirby, though some students affected by the travel ban said they had not received a copy of Kirby’s letter from any Harvard department.

The decision followed the World Health Organization’s removal of its last remaining SARS-related travel advisory, on China.

Harvard officials had originally expected the ban to last much longer.

“Most experts felt the epidemic wouldn’t be over by now,” said Provost Steven E. Hyman. “We are surprised and pleased that China, after a late start, would be able to contain this epidemic.”

Hyman said that like other Ivy League institutions and universities across the nation, Harvard pegged its travel policy to the recommendations of the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control.

Although the policy change now allows students to travel to mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam and Toronto, some who intended to pursue grant research in China have nonetheless had to change their summer plans because of the early deadlines on grant applications.

Julie E. Hackenbracht ’04, an East Asian Languages and Civilizations (EALC) concentrator, had planned to spend her summer interning for the State Department in Beijing and conducting field research for her thesis.

But after winning her grant from the Weissman Foundation, Hackenbracht was told she could only use it for an internship in a region not affected by SARS.

“Since my goals were to learn about U.S. and China relations, that made it difficult,” she said.

Hackenbracht opted to leave the Beijing internship, which she was slated to begin in early June, rather than pursue the position in Mongolia that the Department of State in Washington had offered her. Instead, she is staying in Cambridge, researching her thesis and volunteering with Evening With Champions.

“It is just frustrating that Harvard forced me to cancel my summer plans in April (through the loss of funding and the moratorium) because of a health concern that was nearly over before I was supposed to even start my internship,” she wrote in an e-mail. “In addition, the Weissman did not offer me the option of receiving the grant money if the SARS ban was lifted, so I don’t even have the option of beginning my internship a couple of weeks late—even though I still technically could meet the grant’s requirements.”

Some students said they will rework their summer plans in light of the lift on the ban.

Another EALC concentrator, William J. Adams ’04, was allowed to keep his grant money from the Harvard Asia Center, which had been intended to fund travel to China, and find new uses for it.

“To work around the travel ban...I created a new proposal where I would do my research project in Harvard libraries,” he said. “Now that the travel ban is lifted, I’m going to Beijing to continue my original project.”

Adams said that because of the changing international situation, figuring out whether he would be able to use his grant was difficult.

“When I finally got in touch with [the Harvard Asia Center], they invited me to sit down and talk about what my options were. We discussed how I could do a similar project,” he said. “It was sort of at the mercy of the disease.”

But Adams said the travel ban “definitely impacted” his thesis. “It’s sort of inevitable that when you’re doing field work, the quality of your research is dependent on your access to the field,” he said.

“The people I feel really bad for are the graduate students who are supposed to be researching their bachelor dissertations now,” he added. “I think my situation isn’t that bad [in comparison].”

Victor D. Ban ’04, a history concentrator, had planned to use grant money from the Harvard-Yenching Student Fellowship Program to study in Beijing his senior year. But the SARS epidemic became an obstacle to his fall plans.

“They announced in mid-May that they would not fund any travel to China for studies in the fall, and that...we could go in the spring or the following fall,” he said.

Ban accepted the Yenching program’s offer to take classes in Korea for the fall, and will “hopefully” travel to Beijing in the spring to start his research.

“Initially I was a bit frustrated because they didn’t provide any sufficient explanation for the decision to postpone the funding until spring,” he said. “After I met them I felt they made the right decision.”

According to Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Literature David McCann, head tutor of EALC, many concentrators “had to start over again.”

“It really was a very disruptive and a difficult time,” he said. “Everyone [had] to make a new summer for themselves...To have, all of a sudden, the United States government and the University administration saying you can’t go to China or some of the other places—that’s a difficult thing to overcome.”

McCann said he wasn’t sure how students were dealing with the lift on the moratorium.

“I haven’t heard from students since the end of school, so I don’t know how they’ve been doing this summer,” McCann added.

He said he was unsure about travel plans of the East Asian Studies faculty, but “most of the faculty in the department do get over there in the summer.”

McCann said that since many students’ alternate plans involved programs in the United States, the department has generally had less direct communication with students than the organizations that actually give grant money.

East Asian studies concentrator Claudine C. Stuchell ’04, Hackenbracht and Ban said they did not receive any notification about the lifting of the travel ban from their respective departments.

Adams, however, found out about Harvard’s decision almost immediately. He said that he checked the Harvard SARS alert page and the World Health Organization’s website each morning to see how many new SARS cases there were that day.

“It’s something that I’ve been following very closely,” he said.

—Staff writer Ryan J. Kuo can be reached at kuo@fas.harvard.edu.