In the News

New Research Voices (NRV) is a community platform for researchers to share their work, opinions, and ideas with other researchers from around the globe. NRV’s inaugural journal issue, Researchers in Exile, features contributors who “have all faced persecution for their work and have sought sanctuary at universities overseas where they continue, despite the many obstacles they have faced, to strive for a better world through their academic endeavors.” Including articles by IIE-SRF fellows from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Syria, the issue explores academic freedom in sites of oppression and the ordeals faced by scholars violently driven out of their native countries.

The IIE Scholar Rescue Fund (IIE-SRF) has announced a new partnership with the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture’s Centre for International Mobility (CIMO) to provide safe places in Finland for threatened scholars from Iraq and Syria to continue their academic work. IIE and CIMO kicked off the partnership today by hosting a breakfast reception with CIMO and other Finnish representatives. At the event, a professor from Syria spoke about his experience coming from Syria with the support of a fellowship from IIE-SRF, which enabled him to be a visiting scholar at a U.S. university.

The Chicago Tribune shares the story of one Syrian student who escaped Syria and the war through scholarships and grants facilitated by the IIE Syria Consortium for Higher Education in Crisis. "Monmouth and DePaul caught her eye because they were part of an Institute of International Education consortium launched in 2012 to aid Syrian students. The Illinois Institute of Technology helped form the consortium, and Illinois State University belongs as well. ‘Chicago, especially, has been a safe-haven city for Syrian students and scholars,’ said Daniel Obst, an IIE administrator.”

IIE-SRF is honored to partner with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation on its launch of the Philipp Schwartz Initiative. With funding available beginning in summer 2016, the Initiative will allow up to 20 scientists and scholars who are under threat from political persecution and war to continue their research for two to three years at German universities and research institutions. IIE-SRF will provide partnering institutions with assistance in identifying and evaluating candidates, pre- and post-arrival advice, and transition support for scholars going off the fellowship. In addition, IIE-SRF will collaborate with the Humboldt Foundation and Scholars at Risk to organize events for German universities, with IIE-SRF in particular aiming to convey best practices in scholar rescue to German institutions.

The launch of the Phillip Schwartz Initiative comes at a critical time when scholars around the world need sanctuary from persecution and violence more than ever. Applications are now open. Visit the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation website to learn more.

Deakin University profiles IIE-SRF Scholar Maysaa Al Mohammedawi of Iraq and the work she is doing on the medical potential of nanotechnology.

What do you call an entire generation that never even finishes college? That’s the threat facing Syria’s young adults. In the years leading up to the current civil war, enrollment figures for Syrian tertiary education had been climbing steadily upward—from 12 percent of the college-age population in 2002, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, to 26 percent in 2010, on the eve of the Syrian uprising. Now, the estimated 100,000 university-qualified refugees currently scattered throughout the Middle East and Europe must place their hopes in schools outside Syria—and that’s to say nothing of those still inside the country, where few educational institutions remain functional. In neighboring Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, all of which have been overwhelmed with refugees since the start of the conflict, only a fraction of students have found ways to continue their studies, despite the number of Syrian students in Turkish universities, for example, reportedly quadrupling in recent years. With professors and researchers displaced as well, Syria’s entire university infrastructure is at risk.