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For 'Rescued' Scholars, Persecution Came in Many Forms and Many Lands

The Chronicle for Higher EducationApril 15, 2009
Aisha Labi

For 'Rescued' Scholars, Persecution Came in Many Forms and Many Lands

By AISHA LABI

United Nations

A marine biologist in Ukraine was fired from his university position for studying mollusks in the bay near his institution, despite warnings from the government to focus his academic inquiries elsewhere.
 

An epidemiologist was prevented from publishing material about maternal mortality rates in his country because his findings were at odds with official statistics disseminated by the government, which insisted that the numbers offered no cause for alarm.

A prominent scholar from Belarus experienced a sequence of events that punctuated the unraveling of his academic career and left him in fear for his life. First, he realized he was no longer being quoted in scholarly publications or receiving invitations to academic conferences. Soon people stopped returning his calls and cooperating with him professionally, and he felt a “dead zone” begin to close around him. His teaching assignments and academic responsibilities at the university were scaled back, and he was eventually expelled from the institution. Certain that the next step would be his murder, he sought help from the Scholar Rescue Fund, based at the Institute of International Education in New York.
 

Those cases were among the tales of academic oppression and peril described by Henry G. Jarecki, chairman of the Scholar Rescue Fund, at an event on Tuesday at the United Nations to mark the release of a new report, “Scholar Rescue in the Modern World.”

Dr. Jarecki, who is also a professor of psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine, is a co-author of the report, which details the first five years of the fund’s activity, from 2002 to 2007. The report did not cover the fund’s more recent efforts over the past two years, which have focused on rescuing endangered scholars from Iraq.
 

During the period the report covers, 847 scholars in 101 countries applied for support from the fund, and 140 were awarded one- to two-year fellowships allowing them to work and study in safe havens. The number of countries whose academics felt compelled to seek assistance was a surprise, the authors wrote. “We were amazed that there were this many nations in the world that so oppressed their scholars that they applied to us for emergency assistance."

Please note that this is an abbreviated version of the full article, which is available to Chronicle subscribers at this address:http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/04/15811n.htm

 

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