Communique Staff

Thankfully, Professor Ghassan Salame arrived safely on campus and began teaching “International Politics of the Middle East “ and “Culture, Peace and War” last week.

Too bad 69 students had already spent six weeks in academic limbo, wondering why they had shelled out more than $40,000 a year to attend SIPA and not know the status of their course nearly halfway through the semester. The administration’s failure to address Salame’s extended absence due to a visa processing delay must not be repeated. With four short semesters to fulfill requirements, complete a concentration and find a job to pay back massive student loans, SIPA students don’t have time for curricular guessing games.

The lack of communication with students and absence of suitable alternatives was unacceptable. Students needed Salame’s classes to fulfill their Middle East regional concentration and interstate relations requirements. Forcing students to enroll in another class so late in the semester, or converting the classes into mandatory independent studies, both options proposed, were simply unreasonable.

The administration should have insisted that the courses begin even in Salame’s absence. E-mail, skype, video lectures and telephone conferencing are all readily available technologies for distance learning and should have been used, or a replacement instructor should have been contracted. In short, every possible effort to grant students access to the professor and class materials they had signed up for needed to be made.

Clearly, the cases of “International Politics of the Middle East “ and “Culture, Peace and War” are extreme and the deans never expected the visa processing delay to continue for so long. The episode provides the perfect opportunity for SIPA to develop a policy to address extended absences, ensuring that future students are never again left in the dark about the status of their courses.