Trusteeship - May/June 2020 - 48

A QUESTION FOR MARTHA JOHNSON, PhD

How Did the Coronavirus Pandemic
Impact Students Studying Abroad?
On March 9, 2020, the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidance for campuses to "consider postponing or canceling
upcoming student international travel programs" and "consider asking current program participants to return to their home country"
due to the COVID-19 crisis. Getting students home safely, especially with more than a thousand students abroad, is not small feat.
Trusteeship spoke with Martha Johnson,
assistant dean of learning abroad at the
University of Minnesota, about the steps
and logistics in getting students abroad
back to the United States. Overseeing one
of the largest education abroad offices in
the country, which sends more than 4,000
students abroad annually, Johnson leads
the Learning Abroad Center's innovative
international learning experiences for a
diverse population of students, colleagues
and staff, which offers a variety of program
options-250 programs in more than 70
countries-to address the diverse needs of
students.

What were the decisions made and
the steps you took to bring home
more than 1,100 students from
abroad programs in light of the
COVID-19 pandemic?
This was a process and series of decisions. We started by cancelling programs
in China on January 28 and finally required
all students around the world to depart
their programs on March 15. Between
those two dates, however, we addressed
programs based on a combination of State
Department warnings and CDC warnings.
On February 26, we instituted a daily "situation room" at 9:00 a.m. every morning
for various campus and system stakeholders. That model allowed us to create a daily
plan and delegate effectively. Ultimately,
serious concerns about the trend towards
closing national borders and cancellation of
flight routes led us to determine students
should depart immediately. I believe our
timely decisions contributed to our students' successful return. We had constant
communication and support from univer48 TRUSTEESHIP  MAY. JUN. 2020

sity leadership, but trust and autonomy in
our decisions saved time and allowed us to
respond quickly.

What was the most difficult aspect
of bringing home students during
this crisis?
The hardest aspect was tracking the travel
logistics. Flights were being cancelled as
soon as they were booked, airports were
closing, airline call centers were overwhelmed and unresponsive. During the
height of the travel for students in Europe
the TSA stopped international flights to
Minneapolis/St Paul Airport, which was
many of our students' ultimate destination.
Students' flights were being cancelled and
rerouted as they travelled. We also worked
with the university to identify housing
for students who needed to self-isolate
and could not go to their homes for
various reasons.

What changes will your
study abroad program
make in the future or
lessons learned from
the experience that
you can share for other
campuses?
We do not buy or organize
individual plane tickets for
students on semester programs. But we quickly
saw that the usual system was not working,
so we decided to have
our trusted travel
agency purchase
tickets for students
from locations

like Senegal, Ecuador, and Morocco immediately rather than require the students to
make the changes themselves. The system
is hard enough for a student to navigate
under normal circumstances and this was
a system meltdown. We are very proud of
this decision. There was an up-front cost
to all of those tickets but compared to the
cost of stranded students, both in terms of
duty of care and public relations, it was one
of the best decisions we made. Our philosophy was just to get the students out and
sort out the finances later. We will likely
add this sort of protocol to our emergency
plans for the future.
Trusteeship - May/June 2020

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