Haiti Travel Ban Flap Endangers Florida Grad Students' Project

University of Florida graduate students Jon Bougher and Roman Safiullin were
in Haiti collecting footage for their thesis on a philanthropic organization when January's massive earthquake occurred. Determined to continue with their project, they subsequently returned to the country to finish it.

But the University of Florida has ruled that they cannot use the additional footage because they defied a school-sanctioned travel ban in going back to Haiti -- and now Bougher and Safiullin may not be able to graduate.

The Independent Florida Alligator reports:

In February, the university established a policy banning UF-sponsored travel to Haiti, so all the material gathered after the earthquake cannot be used in the students' final project.

According to UF spokesman Steve Orlando, the university's travel policy is meant to ensure student safety. The university is not certain students who travel there would have access to food, water and shelter, Orlando said.

The controversy has put the university in an awkward position, caught between safety policy and academic freedom. Inside Higher Ed has more:

To the students and their professors, the ban is a threat to their academic and artistic freedom. From the university's perspective, it's an issue of liability: The students ignored institutional rules and put themselves in danger.

"Never in my professional life had anybody told me what could or couldn't be in a student's thesis," said Churchill Roberts, the students' adviser and co-director of the Documentary Institute in the university's College of Journalism and Communications. "It's contrary to anything I've ever seen at a university. It's so absurd that some outside person would come in and dictate what the story should be."

For now, Bougher and Safiullin's project remains incomplete.

What do you think? Should Bougher and Safiullin be allowed to gradaute?

Comments

[basslice]

04:44 PM on 04/07/2010

Interesting case. As a professor, my knee-jerk response is to side with academic freedom. But what if the following scenario were presented: A student was working on a thesis on Haiti and after the quake was told she had to follow up and go again to finish - even if the student did not want to. The student is then denied a degree because she refused to finish her original thesis due to safety concerns - or worse yet, the student feels compelled to finish with post-quake work and is killed or injured in order to finish the degree. Then what? On one hand, the University cannot give favoritism to students willing to take a risk and on the other hand, they cannot tell people they cannot do their research. Like I said, interesting case.

[SPQR1775]

02:10 AM on 04/01/2010

The UF is wrong is America moving towards FACISM?

[Eva Adams]

04:54 PM on 03/31/2010

It's tragic to me that UF is more interested in their rules than what grad students need to learn about real life in order to go out and get a job. By grad school, these are adults who no longer need stringent protections when presented with risks they know the school can't cover them for. It's absurd these guys may not be able to get their degrees for completing a valuable project they were totally dedicated to. I hope very much constitutional law will end up working in the students' favor.

[BlueZoo]

02:45 PM on 03/31/2010

The University of FL laid down the rules re travelling back to Haiti and they did so early on. These kids have got to understand that there are rules everywhere in this world, particularly in their future workplaces, and breaking the rules has consequences. You may not agree with them but you'd better abide by them!

[Flip75]

04:42 PM on 03/31/2010

Wrong - the University refused to sponsor any travel there, but it has no power to tell a student that travel there is forbidden. While I did agree to follow the codes of conduct expected of all UF students, I didn't sign my life over to the university when I enrolled here. This is just a case of UF trying to pull a power play on some decent, hardworking graduate students, perhaps to shift attention away from the case of the disabled grad student that our police goons shot in the face.

[dteg]

05:04 PM on 03/31/2010

We have moved past 1865. A university can not tell you where you can travel. They can choose to not sponsor the trip. This is absurd. Let the students graduate and quit telling them what to put in their thesis.