3 Academics Forced to Seek Safety in the United States

Like no other time since World War II, foreign academics and students are being forcibly displaced due to violence and political persecution. The Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund, which helps relocate threatened academics and intellectuals, is seeing an increase in requests for help, with Iraqis and Syrians facing the greatest need.

Following are stories of three scholars —a Syrian engineer, an Albanian writer living in Greece, and a Thai anthropologist—who have recently fled to the United States. The stories demonstrate the growing threats to dissident intellectuals around the world.

Moaath Rajab

Syrian Academic Finds His Political Voice and, Eventually, Exile

By Aisha Labi

Mark Abramson for The Chronicle

Growing up in Syria, Moaath Rajab had little interest in politics. He preferred studying computers to discussing, let alone criticizing, the authoritarian government.

His passion for technology and how it works led him to get a doctorate in mobile computing at the University of Leeds, in Britain. After working for a time as an assistant professor in Dubai, he decided to return to Syria in 2010. With his wife, a doctor, he wanted to raise his young daughter in his hometown of Homs, and to start building a career at Al-Baath University.

Not long after returning, however, his priorities changed abruptly. After witnessing first hand President Bashar al-Assad’s violent crackdown on peaceful street protests in the spring of 2011, he and his friends, many of them fellow professors, felt compelled to get involved.

“We all felt that the demands of the people were just and fair. They were asking for reform and to advance the country and end the corruption,” he recalls. “We wanted change, and the response of the regime was so brutal, we began to sympathize with the opposition.”

In his lectures, Mr. Rajab began to touch on sensitive topics. “It might sound strange that someone in engineering might criticize the government, but the Syrian regime was so corrupt that it was involved in every aspect of life,” he says. He used the monopoly on mobile-communication networks by one of Mr. Assad’s cronies as an illustration of how corruption had stymied Syria.

His outspokenness quickly got attention.

About six weeks after the uprising began, he was called in for questioning by the security forces. He was not tortured in that initial 11-hour session but says that screams and moans from nearby rooms made clear what would be in store if he continued to support the opposition.

Undeterred, Mr. Rajab continued speaking out, facing more interrogations, detainment, and eventually torture. As the uprising entered its second year, he quit teaching and led efforts to distribute humanitarian aid to the destitute people of Homs. By this point, much of the city was besieged, and the university was barely functioning. “We tried to keep the education cycle going, but the university was hit several times,” he says.

Ugarit News via AP video, AP Images

In addition to the dangers posed by the forces loyal to Mr. Assad, Mr. Rajab also saw a growing threat from some opposition fighters. “The revolution had started to become radical, the opposition was becoming more extreme, more Islamist, and there were jihadis and groups with ideology beyond the ideal of the Syrian revolution, which was about changing the regime and reform.”

The uprising, which was quickly metastasizing into a full-blown civil war, took its toll on Mr. Rajab’s family. A government airstrike killed his brother and much of his brother’s family, and Mr. Rajab’s father was killed in the summer of 2013.

The professor felt increasingly threatened and finally decided to flee, walking for several days in the desert to reach Aleppo. From there, he made his way over the border to Turkey.

His wife and daughter were initially thwarted in their efforts to join him, but the family was reunited after his father-in-law paid a hefty bribe to border patrol and security officers. In Turkey, they joined many of their fellow countrymen in exile. “There were many academics like me in Turkey, trying to do anything to secure jobs,” he says. Unlike him, many were senior academics who had not even been active in the opposition. Often, they simply had the misfortune to come from regions that the government had designated as opposition enclaves.

Eventually, with help from the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund, an American nonprofit that supports threatened academics, Mr. Rajab and his family were relocated to the United States. Today, he is a visiting researcher at Parsons the New School for Design, in New York, where he is conducting research into image processing.

Since joining the faculty at Parsons, he has learned about the New School’s vaunted role in the 1930s and 40s as a “university in exile” for social and political scientists who fled Europe.

But unlike the exiled scholars during World War II, many of whom stayed in America permanently, Mr. Rajab plans to return to his homeland as soon as he can.

“I would love to help the people who are there,” he says. “There is no doubt in my mind that once the situation in Syria stabilizes that I will go back.”

Gazmend Kapllani

Threatened by Greek Neo-Nazi Group, Writer Continues a Life of Crossing Borders

By Lawrence Biemiller

Stephanie Mitchell, Harvard U.

Borders have “an almost metaphysical dimension” for Gazmend Kapllani, thanks to his having become a refugee not once but twice.

The first time he was 24 years old, and as a student leader of antiregime protests he had to flee the chaotic collapse of the dictatorship in his native Albania in 1991. “I was chased for almost one month by the Communist secret services,” he says. “The situation was very dangerous because they were settling scores with their enemies. It was a situation of revenge.”

But in his haste to get out of Albania, he hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about what would happen when he did. He reached Greece, where he did not speak the language and expected to remain for no more than a few weeks, only to find that borders again played a determining role: Having crossed one, he became an immigrant, with limited rights and an uncertain place in society.

He stayed in Greece, working odd jobs at first and then studying philosophy—"What else would you study in the country of Plato and Aristotle?"—and earning a Ph.D. He became a well-known writer and a columnist for a left-leaning newspaper, but he never stopped thinking about borders.

In his first novel, Mr. Kapllani says, “my main character suffers from border syndrome—borders had a terrifying presence in his life.” The volume, A Short Border Handbook, is “a mixture of fiction and reality with many autobiographical elements.” The book, he says, is a mélange that is unmistakably the work of someone who was “born in a region like the Balkans, where the whole 20th century was a century of borders,” and who grew up reading banned books in Italian and French. “Almost all books worth reading were banned in Albania,” he remembers.

Milos Bicanski, Getty Images

As a journalist in Greece, he took up causes like human rights for immigrants and minorities. “I struggled very hard for a more fair society, a more open society.” These were not always popular causes. He was harassed by “uncontrolled groups within the police,” he says, and in 2003 “I was taken from my house by two policemen in plainclothes, and I went through a procedure of intimidation which was meant to make me shut up my mouth.”

“I had problems renewing my residence permits,” he continues. “Finally the secretary general of Amnesty International got involved, and after three months of protests my residency permit was renewed.” But Mr. Kapllani’s troubles didn’t end there. The Golden Dawn, a nascent extremist party with anti-immigrant views, made him a target of repeated tirades, and at a 2009 book event in a public square in Athens he was attacked and his life was threatened.

Greece is not alone in experiencing a surge in far-right political groups. Their popularity has grown in countries including France and Hungary as well, where academics have also been subject to bullying.

Mr. Kapllani tried to fight back. “I was part of the media,” he says. “I tried to sensitize people, but no one wanted to listen. I went to the Athens city council and told them the neo-Nazis were organizing a systematic campaign of violence against immigrants and human-rights activists. I was met with indifference and hostility.”

In 2012 he accepted a Radcliffe fellowship at Harvard University, right around the time that Golden Dawn candidates won election to the Greek Parliament. “I was very lucky,” he says. “The situation in Greece was becoming more and more violent because of Golden Dawn. It is not safe for me to go back there.” An invitation to read at Emerson College led to an offer to teach creative writing there—an offer that support from the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund allowed him to accept.

“I have full classes,” he says. “For me it’s a very, very exciting experience—it empowers me as a writer.” Writing in English is his next challenge: “I have been in love always with the languages of others—I owe my own spiritual survival to the languages of others.”

Does he see himself moving back to either Albania or Greece? Not for the time being. “I’m at an age where I don’t ask myself whether I want to go back somewhere,” Mr. Kapllani says. “I’m still thirsty to explore new things.”

Yukti Mukdawijitra

Anthropologist Flees Thailand’s Bloody Politics

By Lawrence Biemiller

Narayan Mahon for The Chronicle

Lèse-majesté isn’t a concept that many Americans can pronounce, much less explain, but it’s a significant part of what brought Yukti Mukdawijitra back to the University of Wisconsin at Madison as a refugee scholar seven years after he earned his Ph.D. in anthropology there.

Mr. Mukdawijitra is an assistant professor in anthropology at Thammasat University, in Bangkok, where he grew up. His chief academic interest is in the languages of ethnic minorities in Vietnam and the policies that successive governments have adopted to encourage or discourage them. But in Thailand he is known as a political activist and spokesman for groups of Thai academics and others who have campaigned in recent years for meaningful elections and for reform of Thailand’s lèse-majesté law. Also known as Article 112, it makes defaming the monarchy a crime punishable by three to 15 years in prison.

The problem with Article 112 in its current form, Mr. Mukdawijitra says, is that anyone anywhere in Thailand can charge anyone else with defaming the monarchy. And the law is vague about what actually constitutes an insult or threat.

“If you’re in Bangkok and someone hears you say something on the TV, they can charge you in a province and you have to go there to answer the charge,” he says. “Lots of times this has been used as the means to harass others, like political opponents.”

“You can be in jail for 15 years for one charge. If you text something involving the king or the queen, texts to two people could be 30 years. We don’t think that’s right for insulting the head of state.”

Piti A. Sahakorn, Lightrocket via Getty images

Several academics, including a history professor at Thammasat, have been charged in recent years with violating the century-old law. Two years ago, Mr. Mukdawijitra was among professors, students, and other activists who formed the Campaign Committee for the Amendment of Article 112, which proposed key changes in the law: Charges could be brought only by the royal household, and the maximum prison term would be three years, with no minimum. The government, however, refused to consider any reform of the law, and the country’s constitutional court subsequently upheld it.

Mr. Mukdawijitra, who says he has been interested in politics since he was in high school, was more recently part of an effort to publicize information about a 2010 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators that killed 99 people. “Most of them were civilians,” he says. “We tried to find out more information because it was very clear that there was excessive use of force by the government.” The effort put him and other outspoken intellectuals in the spotlight again.

This year that attention became uncomfortable. As unrest has continued—Thailand’s political history is Shakespearean in its intricacy, intrigues, players, parties, protests, corruption, and coups—the Thai army in May overthrew a six-month-old caretaker government. The generals suspended most of the Constitution and announced that civilians accused of acting against the monarchy or the junta would be tried in military courts.

Mr. Mukdawijitra felt threatened immediately. “I left the country almost right away and went to stay in Hanoi for a month, because I had lived there before and I felt it was a safe place for me.” While he was in Vietnam, he says, American academics told him about the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund. A former adviser at Wisconsin put him in touch with the university’s anthropology department, which hired him as a visiting assistant professor on a one-year contract with the fund’s help. He’s teaching a course on language and culture this semester, and next semester he’s teaching “Introduction to Anthropology.”

“It’s very convenient now that we are living with the Internet—you don’t feel that you are that far away,” he says. “I can still follow what’s going on in Thailand.”

“There is no good sign yet,” he adds. “The junta hasn’t announced elections yet. They keep saying we will have elections, but when?”