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.