Want to Open an Overseas Campus? Here Are Some Safety and Security Considerations

Opening an overseas campus, or a University-controlled overseas space, presents a unique blend of opportunities and challenges that universities must carefully navigate.

While the allure of global expansion and international recognition is enticing, the path to establishing a safe and secure overseas operation is fraught with complexities. From understanding diverse regulatory environments and cultural nuances to addressing geographical hurdles and operational constraints, institutions must meticulously plan and execute their strategies.

This article delves into several of the multifaceted safety and security challenges of opening an overseas campus, offering insights for educational leaders considering this ambitious venture.

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Safety and Security Compliance Considerations

1. Higher ed compliance in the United States follows strict federal, state, and local regulations. Overseas campuses must contend with local laws and regulations that might be dramatically different than U.S. standards. Data privacy, drinking age, definition of consent, and classification of medication are just some examples and topics the university will need to address internally and with its overseas campus community.
2. If the university is a Title IV recipient and has established control of its overseas location, Clery compliance mandates similar requirements on the overseas location. As with any decentralized organization, safety and security aspects of policy and protocols, effective and timely crisis communications, training and documentation are just several topics that complicate Clery compliance with overseas locations.
3. Title IX can drastically change every few years. Title IX policy adjustment to overseas locations is a challenge, nevertheless, it is highly likely that the university will have a Public Relations disaster on its hands when it comes to overseas sexual assaults, sex-based discrimination, sexual harassment, policy discrepancies, and more.

Operational Measures and Capabilities

1. Effective initiation and supervision of an overseas safety and security strategy require additional budgets and manpower for the departments responsible.
2. Emergency communications and long-distance timely crisis decision making is extremely challenging even under the best of circumstances. Time differences, language barriers, system compatibility, risk tolerance, and cultural diversity are basic complexities.
3. Different fire codes can alter or even prohibit your U.S.-based access control strategy.
4. The use of common visual and physical risk deterrence and risk transference measures in the U.S. might be limited, prohibited, or culturally intolerable overseas.
5. Vendor availability, infrastructure limitations, and specific regulations can affect your standards as they relate to CCTV, public announcements, panic buttons, radio frequencies, access control systems, license plate reader systems, Wi-Fi and network setup, and more.
6. Security service providers might adhere to entirely different regulatory standards, or lack thereof. These standards can dictate armed officer status, uniform appearance, legal protections, licensure, and more. In certain countries, security officer vendors might be unofficially dependent and loyal to different entities and have an agenda that’s different than the university needs. In some cases, a local security provider might be politically aligned with specific individuals, and the utilization of their services can directly reflect on the university.

Geographic and Environmental Changes

1. Managing global teams is difficult. Managing global teams in crises is exponentially testing. Distance in these circumstances negatively affects time and speed.
2. The geographic location of the campus can expose your overseas residential on ground campus community to specific natural disaster risks such as flooding, hurricanes, tsunamis, snow accumulation, hailstorms, local health risks, altitude sickness, and more. Overseas emergency responders might also have different standards and capabilities.
3. Exposure to manmade threats and risks such as crime rate, terrorism, gang activity, road quality risks, political and social unrest, public expression of religion, sexual orientation, display of intimacy, and more.
4. Overseas relations with law enforcement, emergency responders, and possibly the military can be significantly different. Contracts and MOUs with specific government agencies can carry a political significance; passive or active bribes might be expected in certain circumstances or be illegal or highly offensive in different cultures.
5. The availability of information needed for data-based risk assessment might be highly restrictive, thus hampering the ability of accurate analysis of risks and trends. As a result, you might not have sex offenders’ information, employee background checks, local crime trends, and more.
6. Political instability might also directly affect the campus community and the overall goals of the venture.

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Academic Partnerships and Local Collaborations

1.  An overseas partner is bound to have its own safety and security culture, brand, risk tolerance, emergency response procedures, safety systems, and more. No contract can balance all safety and security aspects of the partnership, address every contingency, or predict crisis response.
2. Every compromise in an external relationship that creates deviation from the strategy and standards used in the USA is a potential risk and a liability. Public opinion will be indifferent to legal, cultural or partner constrains and question any seeming compromise.
3. In a collaboration, the notion that a campus assumes the nature of its campus president over time is not necessarily equally beneficial to the two sides of the agreement. A limited span of control and limited enforcement is bound to generate discrepancies from the original safety and security contract stipulations.

Ensuring a safe and secure overseas operation should be a top priority for any university considering global expansion. Unlike opening a new local campus, the complexities of international operations require strategic planning aimed at balancing local constraints with the objectives of the entire venture. Intuition, total reliance on local partners, or attempting to replicate the local model in an international setting are likely to fail during challenging times. Strategic, well-informed planning, including thorough research into the local legal, cultural, and operational environment, is essential to tailor the university’s practices appropriately.

Additionally, utilizing global service provider companies can provide valuable insights and help build a robust support network to ensure the smooth operation of the overseas campus.

Oren Alter oversees crisis management, business continuity, safety, and security for 30 Higher Education campuses in the Southeast United States. He is a security expert with over 25 years of experience, including the Israeli Special Forces, the Israeli Security Agency, Corporate Security for an international multi-billion-dollar global company, and Higher Education. Oren is also a certified instructor for the Department of Homeland Security Office of Bombing Prevention.