Updated: Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024, at 5:55 p.m. 

The Columbian College of Arts & Sciences in August reinstated academic travel reimbursements for tenured faculty and graduate students after officials eliminated the funding last year.

After CCAS officials notified department chairs in spring 2023 that the school was cutting reimbursements last academic year due to a decline in graduate enrollment and expenses related to inflation and compensation, faculty and graduate students said the lack of funding hindered their ability to complete their research goals because they could not attend conferences or visit archives. Faculty said they are happy to have the funding back, but the $1,250 in reimbursement credit they receive from CCAS is still too low to cover their travel costs.

CCAS Dean Paul Wahlbeck said the school notified all department chairs and directors in the spring that travel funding would return during this academic year and notified all full-time faculty Aug. 1.

He said funding would return for doctoral students this academic year, but some graduate students said they haven’t received word on the funding while others have received notification from their departments that they would not be receiving funding this year.

“This reinstates the previous scholarly travel policy, providing up to $1,250 to support expenses for faculty presenting or actively participating in conferences,” Wahlbeck said in an email.

In June 2023, 37 professors sent a letter to University President Ellen Granberg that discussed the harm posed on their research by the lack of travel funding, which the letter said was counterintuitive after the University that month joined the Association of American Universities — an invitation-only group of top research universities.

Masha Belenky, a professor in the Department of Romance, German & Slavic Studies and a faculty senator, said she is “delighted” that the funding was restored but that the $1,250 per year she receives barely covers the cost of travel, lodging and food for a domestic conference about 19th-century French studies she attends every year.

“Even with that amount of money, we’re only able to travel to one conference, and even there, I usually share a room with a colleague,” Belenky said. “It’s just not enough, it doesn’t go far enough to cover all the expenses.”

She said she had never seen the reimbursement cuts taken away since she joined the University in 2001, besides during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that faculty previously couldn’t complete an “intrinsic” part of their jobs when officials took away travel funding.

“Traveling to conferences is not something that we do for fun, it’s part of our jobs in the University, and I think that’s a good thing,” Belenky said. “The college did not change its requirements for promotion or merit and promotion and merit is based on research and on participating in conferences.”

Maddie House-Tuck, a doctoral candidate in the American studies department, said she received an email from the department in August that said CCAS would not be providing reimbursements for doctoral students for this academic year, but the department would provide $750 for travel reimbursements for each student for the year.

She said she would previously receive $600 to travel from CCAS and an additional $600 from the department, which would match the CCAS rate.

House-Tuck said there is some research she can’t do without the additional CCAS funding because she doesn’t have the financial means to travel to archives as needed for her work.

“If GW really wants to be responsible for its graduate education and how it’s producing new academics entering the fields that they’re working within, they also do have this responsibility to support our travel, to meet other scholars and to present our work and to become established in the field,” House-Tuck said.

Daniel Ziebarth, a doctoral candidate in the political science department, said he had previously received a $700 reimbursement to attend a conference before officials cut the travel funding last year. He said he sent an email to a department official to ask about funding for this year and was told none was available, forcing him to look for funding provided through some conferences themselves and affiliated groups.

“These conferences are really meaningful to us, especially as graduate students, and without funding, it’s just essentially impossible,” Ziebarth said.

Eric Lawrence, an associate professor and the chair of the political science program, said there were repeated discussions about the state of the travel funding throughout last academic year in meetings with department chairs and CCAS leadership, as well as a Dean’s Council committee, a group of 15 CCAS faculty members that meet with Wahlbeck and CCAS leadership regularly, which Lawrence chaired from 2022 until the end of last academic year.

“The view of all the faculty, and I’m not gonna speak for the deans, but everyone believes that this should be a very high priority because we are a research university and expected to do research, and we want to allow faculty to pursue that,” Lawrence said.

Thomas Guglielmo, a professor and the chair of the American studies department, said he is glad the University has restored the funding, but it is “woefully insufficient” and below what other peer schools offer.

Guglielmo said he and the department faculty were “dismayed” and “demoralized” after CCAS cut the funding last year, with many faculty having to change their research agendas as they could no longer travel to conferences or archives and field study to do research.

“If GW is serious about faculty research, as it should be, as a so-called R1 school and as a member of the Association of American Universities, it needs to invest real resources in supporting research and commit to this support through thick and thin,” Guglielmo said in an email.

American, Georgetown, New York and Boston universities all offer reimbursements for faculty travel, including transportation, lodging and food, but it is unclear how much each university covers. 

Kai Blevins, a doctoral candidate in the anthropology department, said officials didn’t definitively tell graduate students in the department that they wouldn’t receive funding for the 2023-24 academic year until last March, after department leadership repeatedly pressed CCAS officials. Blevins said they went into credit card debt this summer to attend a conference in Amsterdam but haven’t received word on if they will be reimbursed for the trip.

“We’ve been told they’re optimistic that they might provide us with some travel funding this year for students, but I don’t believe it, honestly,” Blevins said. “Because we’re already this far into the year, none of us expect that the University is going to deliver on that.”

This article was updated to clarify the following:

Eric Lawrence chaired the Dean’s Council the past two academic years, but no longer chairs the council.