Opinion: GAA-planned trips are neocolonial and wrong

The General Alumni Association’s advertisement of an 18-day trip to “Mystical India” is inappropriate.

The UNC General Alumni Association might have begun soliciting donations as early as your sophomore year at UNC, and soon after your graduation, it will ask for more money. Just a bit, careful not to make you feel trod upon, intent on getting you into the habit of giving, hoping you will make it big.

Some time after graduation, the powers that be will determine that by now you should have made it big, leveraging your diploma to provide for a “comfortable” lifestyle. Join us, the General Alumni Association, sounds the siren call. Relive the adventures of university life in the company of other Tar Heels. Make real on UNC’s worldly promise; explore the globe! Be reminded of why you should give back to UNC!

The practice of arranging alumni junkets is commonplace; UNC is not alone in facilitating global tourism to retain wealthy alumni support.

“Mystical and spiritual,” the advertisement gushes, “chaotic and confounding, India overflows with riches.”

This language runs counter to the work of our professors and ignores the efforts of the University to understand, dismantle and rise from the violent history of colonialism.

The GAA might reconsider the endorsement of a trip from which the University hopes to glean a hefty donation, among other memories, an alumnus’ satisfaction with a “home-hosted dinner with a multi-generational Rajasthan family.”

First, the GAA should rewrite the trip description. The current version profits from antiquated myths leftover from an imperial obsession with “The East.” The description of a “Mystical India” erases the real experiences and history of people living in the space we now refer to as India.

UNC is not removed from colonialism. As with slavery, our history is intimately tied to it.

The work of three chemists is forever enshrined in our halls, landmarks and endowments. The capitalization by Morehead, Venable and Kenan of Morehead’s accidental production of calcium carbide and acetylene gas proved a long-term financial and public relations windfall for UNC.

When we talk about UNC and India, we should remember the 1984 Bhopal gas catastrophe, an event the BBC called “the world’s worst industrial disaster.” An accident at the Bhopal plant of Union Carbide India Ltd., a spinoff company of John Motley Morehead III, killed more than 15,000 people and affected as many as 600,000. Recognition of this tragedy might not improve “Mystical India” registration numbers, but it provides important context for GAA copy writers.

The Eurocentric distribution of the trips concerns us too: 20 in Europe, seven in the Americas (two in the U.S.), three on the African continent, one in Israel and two in the rest of Asia. We concede that the GAA must cater to alumni preferences, but it, like the Study Abroad Office, has an obligation to provide opportunities to travel beyond the Western world and expand our capacity for empathy.

We should recognize that these trips are often racist and exploitative. However, if the GAA is to continue offering them, it ought to expand their non-European offerings. As a first step towards ethical tourism, it should also take care to publicize these trips in ways that do not further the violent legacy of colonialism.

Instead of publicly and explicitly exotifying the people and history of the Indian subcontinent, the GAA should do what it does with its other trip offerings: Outline the prospective itinerary and describe in concrete terms the attraction and history of the destination.

Our alumni will understand and appreciate the change.