The narrative surrounding Hurricane Maria is ongoing and gruesome. It’s one we’ve all heard before and yet one we haven’t heard enough. It’s indicative of larger problems—climate change, environmental racism—that some members of the mainland U.S. population won’t admit exist; some others work arduously to combat; and most of us seem just to have accepted as reality.
Homes, businesses, and natural areas in Puerto Rico were decimated by a hurricane, and then their needs were largely ignored by the mainland United States. Its institutions of higher education mark no exception. “The rumor mill runs unusually fast in disasters,” writes Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, a professor at University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, in the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Someone siphoned diesel from a generator at a funeral parlor in Vieques. AT&T Wireless will be out for a year. A ferry is shuttling people from San Juan to the Dominican Republic. Wi-Fi works at City Hall. An ATM near Sam’s Club has cash. The morgue in Aguadilla has been full for days. Cuban doctors are treating people at no charge in Añasco. Classes begin on October 8.”
Herlihy-Mera then qualifies that, in reality, there was neither wi-fi at City Hall nor cash at Sam’s Club. But classes were held on Oct. 8. “We aren’t going to lose the semester,” Herlihy-Mera stresses.
Enter, mainland United States. Enter, Connecticut College.
After Hurricane Maria, a wave of positive press coverage lauded the good deeds of several mainland U.S. colleges and universities that had chosen to offer in-state or free tuition to Puerto Rican students displaced by the hurricane. On Oct. 19, 2017, PRI’s “The World” ran the story: “Some Puerto Rican college students displaced by Hurricane Maria have already started classes again—in Florida.” Three days later, NPR published: “Mainland Colleges Offer In-State Tuition To Students Affected By Hurricane Maria.” Both start with the same appeal, highlighting individual college students and the impact the opportunity had for them. CNBC and Remezcla took a different approach by releasing listicle-style pieces that feature the first wave of institutions to participate—including Brown, Tulane, and NYU. The articles raise some good points about the importance of resources and the insufficiency of relief efforts. “The electricity, clean water and cell service available on campus—not to mention college classes—stand in stark contrast to conditions at home,” Carolyn Beeler writes for PRI. “Much of Puerto Rico is still without power a month after the hurricane. Water contamination is widespread. The scope of the disaster there is still not completely understood.” But, like any form of publicity, this coverage does not capture the whole story, and it does contribute to a trend. The world of academia is notorious for its emphasis on recognition and ranking, and as a result, academic institutions are particularly susceptible to influence from their peers.
This seems to have happened at Connecticut College, which arrived a little late to the white-saviorism party. On Dec. 8, Conn announced the establishment of a guest student program that would provide free tuition, room, and board to “up to six” juniors or seniors at the University of Puerto Rico. The College later updated its guest student website to reflect that students from “any accredited university in Puerto Rico” would be eligible for the program.
Despite the offer’s seeming appeal, no students from Puerto Rico decided to take it, as Dean of the College Jefferson Singer confirmed. “The University of Puerto Rico put out a request in late December to try to keep its students on island and that basically stopped the flow of students to the mainland for the spring,” Singer noted.
In Diálogo, the official publication of the University of Puerto Rico, Julia M. García de León writes that institutions of higher education in Puerto Rico faced challenges in providing essential services even before Hurricane Maria, and after the hurricane occurred, UPR alone took a hit of $118 million in damages, according to a report from Puerto Rico’s El Nuevo Día. “More than 200 thousand people have emigrated to the United States since the passing of the storm in search of better living conditions,” García de León observes*. The emigrant population is largely comprised of “productive youths who, faced with the disjunctive to continue studying here or to obtain better conditions outside their native land, opted for the latter.” This wave had a negative impact on the University of Puerto Rico, which, like any institution of higher education, seeks to fortify its retention.
García de León goes on to describe what we seldom see in U.S. narratives covering the impact of Hurricane María: professors holding classes outside, and students attending them despite the destruction. “The [traditional] classroom was traded for patios, gazebos, [and] tents, where light, air conditioning, and other commodities…were not necessary for the learning process. It was a return to the ancient times, as Socrates [taught] his disciples,” García de León writes.
The idyllic image should not, of course, detract from the severity of the situation in Puerto Rico. What it indicates is not that assistance is not needed, but rather, that perhaps shuttling students away from their home institutions is not the only solution. “It’s now, when perhaps we’ve returned to the traditional classroom, that we face the challenge of retaining student[s] and convincing [them] to stay in [Puerto Rico] to finish their academic courses,” Garcia de Leon adds.
It seems that mainland universities’ offers of education and housing, like many relief efforts, are a well-intentioned but symptomatic treatment that in some ways hinders the resolution of the problem as a whole. Perhaps it’s for the best, then, that Conn had no takers on its guest student program.
*Editor’s note: García de León’s quotations were translated from Spanish by the author.
