The Office of Tufts Programs Abroad is working to reinstate its Tufts-in-Ghana program, ending an eight-month suspension that followed the rape of four students.
Tufts students were sent home one week before the end of their semester last spring, but completed their final exams. Those scheduled to go last fall received a letter last summer informing them the program had been suspended.
An administrative team that oversees the program and initiated the suspension recently hired a former Peace Corps worker in Ghana, Janna Behren, as a new program advisor to help restructure the program to ensure the safety of Tufts' participants.
Behrens is meeting with administrators, faculty, students, program alumni, and officials at the University of Ghana to decide on measures to recommend. The administrative committee will decide whether to implement Behrens' proposals.
Behrens will visit the University of Ghana campus in Legon in October to meet with administrators, including the program's resident director, Dr. Kweku Bilson. She will also evaluate the University of Ghana's efforts to increase the safety of foreign students.
Tufts' program is one of many hosted by Ghana's largest university. Since Tufts suspended its program, the University has built a dorm specifically for foreign students. Tufts students previously lived in dorms with Ghanaian students, but a University strike in the spring of 2000 vacated the campus. International students left on campus were relocated to a single dorm.
The dorm for foreign students will have increased security, but critics of the plan say segregating foreign students deprives them of the opportunity to interact with Ghanians. The plan, moreover, will not increase the safety of Tufts students abroad, program alumni say. According to some alumni, the best form of security comes from befriending Ghanaian students in the dorms, not from security guards.
George Akanlig-Pare, a University of Ghana exchange student studying at Tufts, shared this opinion. "I personally thought that foreigners should stay with us," he said. "They would learn a lot of things they wouldn't learn in the classroom."
Behrens worked in Ghana with the Peace Corps from 1995 to 1996, before moving to Boston to work as a Peace Corps recruiter. She said Ghana has changed considerably in the four years since she lived there, but she plans to visit in October to assess the country's security situation.
Many juniors are considering study abroad in Ghana, though the recent rapes gave them and their families pause. "I had thought about going last year," junior Erika Robbins said. "I had talked [my parents] into it before they closed the program. When they heard it was closed, they said, 'no way.'"
Tufts began its Ghana program in 1996 with support from music professor David Locke. Since its inception, 50 students have participated.
The program was suspended last fall after a Tufts student was violently raped on the Accra campus. The rape was not the first instance of sexual assault on the program. A Tufts University Police Department publication lists three reported rapes in 1998 alone.
The University cited the spring 2000 incident as the immediate cause of the program's suspension, but also pointed to prior security concerns.
The University of Ghana, which houses 15,000 students, is located just outside of Accra, the nation's capital. Ghana is regarded as one of West Africa's most stable nations, with a market economy and a democratic government. Last year, Ghanaians elected a member of the opposition party as their new president.
