The Scholar Rescue Fund World Report, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, is an effort to share with a larger community the breadth and nature of the persecution of scholars around the globe. It is based on the data from the first five years of activity of the Scholar Rescue Fund (SRF).

 

SRF is a program of the Institute of International Education (IIE) to provide support and safe haven to threatened scholars. Scholars in any field and from any country may apply for one-year fellowships (renewable up to one additional year) at safe host institutions anywhere in the world. In addition to salary support, SRF helps scholars find host institutions, access other resources, and adjust to life in their host countries. Scholars applying to SRF are selected for support by an independent Selection Committee based upon three criteria: level of scholarship, level of threat, and strategic value of their work. The goal is to save the lives, voices, work, and ideas of the most senior, most threatened academics in the world.

 

During its first five years of activity, from its founding in 2002 until 2007, the Scholar Rescue Fund received over 1,000 inquiries from persecuted academics around the world. This does not include a recent ramp-up in SRF activity to implement a specific project aimed at rescuing Iraqi scholars, who are being threatened in great numbers. This report is based primarily on data collected from 847 applicants to the Scholar Rescue Fund, 140 of whom were awarded life-saving and career-saving grants. This data is, in some instances, correlated with data from other sources in an effort to illustrate potential links between the persecution of academics and conditions that exist within specific countries. For example, in some cases the persecution of academics may serve as an indication that the political situation of a country is about to worsen; conversely, specific situations that arise in some countries may warn us that academics are about to be targeted. These correlations, which are important from both a theoretical and programmatic point of view, are more fully described in the section titled, A Geo-political Perspective of the Attacks.

 

In analyzing these cases, the SRF World Report has four goals: first, it aims to illustrate that academic oppression is a widespread and serious problem that often goes unnoticed and unpunished; second, it attempts to provide an understanding of who is being persecuted, how, and by whom; third, it seeks to explore why scholars are being persecuted in certain countries, extrapolating from correlations between various country indicators and conditions of academic oppression; and fourth, it proposes a number of new ideas and programs to aid in reducing the persecution of academics worldwide.