CONWAY — A University of Central Arkansas administrator who spent two nights in Cancun, Mexico, at UCA expense and who is under scrutiny over international students’ on-campus workload also has come under criticism for problems tied to an educational course and tour to the British Isles.
“A lot of [the problems] did emanate from Dr. [Alex] Chen and how he was running - or not running - the program,” said Rusty Rogers, the English professor who has taught the Travel Seminar in British Literature class over the past two decades.
Chen, associate vice president for international engagement, has been on administrative leave since Oct. 14 while officials review the university’s international program.
After the British Isles tour, Rogers said the UCA provost called a meeting attended by Rogers, Chen, two representatives of the provost’s office and Amanda Legate, director of Education Abroad and International Promotion.
UCA trustee Bobby Reynolds said earlier this week that administrators are investigating whether Chen made some international students work more than visa regulations allow.
University records also show that Chen and former President Allen Meadors spent two nights in Cancun when, a UCA spokesman said, they originally planned to visit a second college in Mexico. They already had visited one.
Interim President Tom Courtway has declined comment on whether the student work issue, the Cancun trip or the British Isles tour is under review.
Chen did not return phone messages or an e-mail seeking comment Friday.
Rogers, the English professor, said that based on what he has been told, Chen kept extending the British Isles tour’s sign-up deadline, “hoping we’d get more people” to take the tour, even though a UCA employee who worked successfully on the tour in the past “said she repeatedly said we don’t want to extend the deadline.”
“You don’t get more people” by doing that, especially in a bad economy, but you do make hotel and ticket arrangements more difficult, Rogers said.
“They never finalized anything, so the price went up” during the extra time, Rogers said. “They had to come up with some money to cover the difference, or they had to cut stuff out of the trip.”
After the fact, Rogers said, he was “informed a day [had] been cut off the trip” in London. That was to have been a day when students could have visited the Tate Britain art gallery, which he said has the world’s top-rated collection of pre-Raphaelite paintings.
Other problems, Rogers said, included seating at a play at the Globe Theatre in London. By the time things got worked out, one night was sold out, and the next night there were no seats - only places to stand near the stage as Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus was performed.
“That’s fine with me and the students, but some of the people [on the tour] ... were older,” Rogers said. “They couldn’t stand up for three hours.”
The Office of Study Abroad handles several tours, including the Travel Seminar in British Literature. Students pay to take the class and tour for credit,and non-students pay to take the tour without course credit.
The tour’s cost is roughly $4,000 to $5,000, not including tuition.
Based on feedback forms obtained under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, students and non-students on the tour expressed happiness with the trip and with Rogers but disappointment with pre-travel arrangements. In the forms, some participants incorrectly referred to Chen as a dean.
In one form, UCA history professor and tour participant Sondra Gordy wrote, “To be frank, I do not know how the Dean could ‘mess up’ something that has worked so well for years.”
Participants had to repay for play tickets with “obstructed views or standing room only,” Gordy said.
She said the chief person responsible should “write a letter of apology ... to all persons on the trip and refund money lost by both adults and students.”
“As a longtime member of the UCA faculty, I can assure you that if I did something like this to my students I would be reprimanded,” Gordy wrote.
Conway resident Nancy Jackson, who also took the tour, wrote that there was “no monetary compensation for the forfeited day.”
Further, she said, tickets to a Shakespearean play “were poor, marked ‘restricted view’ which in most cases involved sitting behind a support post. In addition, we had to pay extra for these tickets which I thought were to have been included in the price of the trip.”
Jackson also said the group was to have spent one night in an Irish castle. “Instead we were moved to a hotel quite a ways out,” and again no monetary compensation was offered“for this decidedly less desirable accommodation.”
An unidentified student wrote that two women in the Study Abroad Office “did everything they possibly could [to] help the students and participants, however they were [hamstrung] on several occasions because of the funding policies of [UCA and Chen].
“My understanding is that other trips from UCA this summer have also been compromised and I lay the blame [squarely] in the lap of the Dean of International Travel,” the student added. “He needs to apologize to all those involved, should refund money that we paid for services we did not receive and should be reprimanded.”
UCA spokesman Venita Jenkins said the school has not reimbursed tour participants.
Legate helped with tour arrangements this year as she has in the past. Rogers said things always went well until this tour, the first one since Chen came to UCA.
No one criticized Legate’s work in interviews or on the surveys.
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 10/29/2011