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Is it safer to travel to the slums of Detroit or the suburbs of Tel Aviv? How about the Indian side of Kashmir versus the posh campus of the American University of Beirut? According to Harvard’s Office of International Programs (OIP), students are free to visit the formers, but Israel and Lebanon are still no-gos.

Since the start of fall semester, Harvard has been operating under blanket travel restrictions based on of the State Department’s travel warnings. If a country is on the list, no matter the reasons or the nuances of the travel warning itself, Harvard will give neither money for study abroad nor credit for programs completed independently in that country. While this method of assessing risk certainly reduces Harvard’s liability with respect to international travel, we students are left to question the seriousness of Harvard’s commitment to providing us with a diverse set of international experiences.

The downsides to Harvard’s overcautious travel policies are not insignificant. Countries on the State Department’s list include much of the Muslim World and many states in Africa. Harvard students trying to study in the Middle East, for example, are left only with the Gulf States, Jordan and Egypt as possible destinations.

There are too many reasonable exceptions to Harvard’s blanket policies to list them all. Algeria may be an acutely dangerous country for Americans who look and sound a specific way, but for a Harvard student from Morocco, or with family from Morocco, for instance, the equation is completely different. Within countries like Israel, there are dangerous places and there are places where life is almost completely normal. The fact that Harvard students are allowed to travel to the Indian side of Kashmir, yet are banned from studying at universities within Israel proper betrays the extent to which Harvard has overlooked the true dangers facing its students in favor of conforming to easily justifiable State Department warnings.

The bottom line is that safe travelers can study abroad in a broad range of locales. Schools like Yale and New York University already recognize this. They ban students from traveling to dangerous areas within other countries instead of imposing blanket bans on countries themselves. The OIP and the Harvard Office of General Counsel (OGC) must either conform to these more reasonable and widely-adopted standards for international travel or provide a transparent explanation for why they will not.

It’s time for the OGC to rethink its simplistic restrictions on travel abroad. At the very least, the OGC and the OIP should be open to evaluating individual travel plans on a case-by-case basis, taking into account language skills, cultural and ethnic background and the specific regions in-country that each student plans to visit. As Harvard embarks on a major new study abroad initiative, it must affirm its commitment to providing students with as diverse a set of international experiences as is possible.