(continued...) In virtually all ways travel is much easier
these days. My family and I spent a few days in
Paris last week, whisked from the “new” Victorian rail station at St. Pancras to the Gare du
Nord in just over a couple of hours by the Eurostar – a far cry from the rail journey to Calais
I made back then, the ferry crossing of the rolling English Channel, and another train from
Dover to London, which took much of the day.
My daughter Ellen’s Paris hadn’t changed from
what it was during her EAP year in 2006-07,
and she happily revisited her old haunts and
impressed us with her still fluent French.
What doesn’t change, I find, is the effect
study abroad has bred in all of us, the eagerness for experience and the delight in dis-
covery. In Paris I wasn’t afraid to trot out my
ragged college French – to Ellen’s chagrin –
to ask a question, and we were eager to find a previously unknown museum or quartier of Paris to explore. I’m sure you’ll all agree that having studied abroad in our early
20s has somehow marked us and makes us ever ready to pack our bags and be off. What we experience becomes a conflation
of what we remember and what we experience now.
What worries me is that the current state of the University of California is going to limit the ability of today’s students to
experience what we experienced. Study abroad may come to seem an extravagance in the constricted state of the University’s
finances, and there’s clearly been a shrinkage rather than expansion of EAP opportunities in the last two years.
The University is asking all its alumni to make clear to our legislators UC’s necessity to the state’s economy and the danger that a decline in its quality would entail. I hope EAP alumni will join in this effort – and further insist, both to legislators
and to the UC administration, that EAP is not a luxury but essential to a well educated citizenry in the twenty-first century.
More UCSB students than ever are applying to EAP. We need to be sure we continue to have programs for them.
Perhaps surprisingly, given the recession and the economic problems it has brought to California families, more UCSB students than ever have applied to study abroad through EAP in the coming year. (Two years ago we passed even Berkeley in the
total number of EAP students and now lead the UC system in EAP students.) While this is a cause for deep satisfaction in our
EAP office, it’s also a source of anxiety as many of these students will have last-minute problems in financing their travel abroad.
We have, consequently, been attempting to maintain a modest scholarship program to assist in defraying the extra expenses for students who find themselves in difficulty with those travel expenses. The aim is to keep them from withdrawing
because of fear of adding to the growing burden of debt that many students must now take on. I hope you’ll consider aiding
us in building this scholarship fund.
Michael O’Connell
Campus EAP director, UCSB
Professor of English
