Our Role in the Syrian Refugee Crisis

Residents of the “First World” often look at the newspaper and see all kinds of horrific injustices and tragedies happening all over the world. There’s a feeling of helplessness in the way we discuss the problems of the day that are distant from our own homes. We usually just shake our heads in dismay and say, “This is awful, but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

But sometimes you actually can do something about it, whether you know it or not. As Travis Sanderson ’19 pointed out in his op-ed from last week, “A Call for Conscience,” we as students at an elite American college have an exceptional opportunity to do our part for Syrian refugees.

We attend a school with a rapidly increasing $1.1 billion endowment. What can we do with that money to help Syrian refugees? Sanderson outlined two important things our school can do to help, but in case you missed it, I will summarize them below:

1. We can partially subsidize the tuition of Syrian refugee students at universities in the Middle East – such as the University of Jordan – with whom we already have a close partnership and a study abroad school.

2. We can offer scholarships and cover transportation costs for Syrian refugee students to come to our campus.

The first option is relatively cheap and easy, both for our administration and for the refugee students. We would have to do nothing more than send money to the University of Jordan for the purpose of scholarships for refugees. As Sanderson points out, a year of tuition at the University of Jordan costs 16,000 Jordanian dinars, or about $22,560 USD, which means that paying for a quarter of one student’s tuition would only be about $5,640 per year. Plus, there are already 619,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan. This option makes a lot of practical sense.

One might then ask, if the first option is so much easier and cheaper, why even consider actually bringing a Syrian student here to campus? I argue that bringing even just a few Syrian refugee students here would make a huge difference for the students, for us and for American higher education as a whole. The Syrian students would bring us their unique perspectives on the world, having firsthand experience with violence in Syria and xenophobia abroad. We would provide them with safety, community and a first-rate education. By meeting and becoming friends with these students and having them be a part of our close-knit community, we would all have a better understanding of refugees as human beings, rather than as statistics in a newspaper.

Most importantly, however, we would be setting an example for colleges and universities all across the United States. Middlebury is no stranger to setting examples for the rest of the country to follow. In 1823, we set an example by becoming the first institution to give a bachelor’s degree to an African-American. We set examples in language instruction with our world-renowned language schools and our Doctor of Modern Languages degree. Today, we continue to set examples with our commitment to sustainability and becoming carbon-neutral by 2016. Middlebury is a pioneer among American institutions of higher education, so it’s only fitting that we should be one of the first institutions to majorly welcome Syrian refugees to our campus. When we do so, hopefully other colleges and universities will follow suit.