Private University in North Korea Reopens Despite Travel Ban<br />Washington has said it would consider a one-time, special-validation visa for journalists, humanitarian workers, Red Cross officials<br />and those who travel for "the national interest." The Pyongyang university said it would apply for such a visa for American volunteers.<br />4, 2017<br />SEOUL, South Korea — The only foreign-funded private university in North Korea started a new semester on Monday,<br />but without its usual American professors because of Washington’s ban on travel to the country, university officials said.<br />The university’s founding chairman, James Kim, and its chancellor, Park Chan-mo, both American passport- holders, visited the campus in August<br />but had to leave last week before the travel ban went into effect, university officials said.<br />The United States announced the travel ban in July in response to the death of Otto F. Warmbier, an American college student who<br />had been serving a 15-year sentence of hard labor in North Korea after being convicted of trying to steal a political poster.<br />The travel ban, which took effect Friday, has threatened the operation of Pyongyang University of Science<br />and Technology, a school in the North Korean capital that was financed by evangelical Christians abroad.<br />But the university’s rare experiment came into question as two of its volunteers, both of them Korean-Americans,<br />were detained this year by the North Korean authorities on vague charges of committing "hostile acts."<br />The ban came into effect amid heightened tensions between Washington and Pyongyang over North Korea’s latest nuclear test.
