Protesters demonstrate outside the trial, in 2015, of Turkish academics who signed a petition calling for the government to stop fighting Kurdish rebels. Attacks on Turkish academics helped, in part, to spur the creation of the University in Exile.Lefteris Pitarakis, AP Images
In the 1930s, as German universities purged Jewish scholars from their ranks, a relatively new American institution acted as an escape hatch. The New School, then known as the New School for Social Research, welcomed scholars whose lives and livelihoods were at risk under the tightening grip of Nazism.
Eventually, the New School’s president, Alvin Johnson, helped bring more than 180 threatened academics and their families out of Europe. Some remained at the New School, in New York City, and became part of the inaugural University in Exile. This semester, amid worldwide assaults against academic freedom, a version of that haven will be rebooted.
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Protesters demonstrate outside the trial, in 2015, of Turkish academics who signed a petition calling for the government to stop fighting Kurdish rebels. Attacks on Turkish academics helped, in part, to spur the creation of the University in Exile.Lefteris Pitarakis, AP Images
In the 1930s, as German universities purged Jewish scholars from their ranks, a relatively new American institution acted as an escape hatch. The New School, then known as the New School for Social Research, welcomed scholars whose lives and livelihoods were at risk under the tightening grip of Nazism.
Eventually, the New School’s president, Alvin Johnson, helped bring more than 180 threatened academics and their families out of Europe. Some remained at the New School, in New York City, and became part of the inaugural University in Exile. This semester, amid worldwide assaults against academic freedom, a version of that haven will be rebooted.
Eleven American colleges and universities, a mix of private and public institutions, have agreed to host at least one endangered scholar for a minimum of two years as part of the New University in Exile Consortium. Along with the New School, its organizer, the group, mostly in the Northeast, includes Barnard, Connecticut, Trinity, and Wellesley Colleges; Brown, Columbia, Georgetown, George Mason, and Wayne State Universities; and Rutgers University at Newark.
Member institutions can either embrace a new endangered scholar or support someone already at the college. Scholars will research, teach, or do both. They’ll also interact with one another at seminars and conferences.
That peer-group community is what defines the revived University in Exile, said Arien Mack, a psychology professor at the New School who is spearheading the project. Though the institution couldn’t sponsor as many people as it did in the 1930s, Mack wanted to replicate that era’s sense of togetherness. Persecuted scholars share an experience of “dislocation and estrangement,” she said. A community can ease those feelings.
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Decades after World War II, as academics are persecuted by other oppressive regimes, Mack hopes the New School’s history can repeat itself.
Suffering a ‘Civic Death’
When Marisa Quinn began working with endangered professors, she assumed removing them from harm’s way was the main objective. But the consortium goes further, she said. The whole idea, said Quinn, chief of staff to the provost at Brown, is to ensure they can immerse themselves in their scholarship and contribute to their field.
For two and a half years, Cem Özatalay’s scholarship was hamstrung because of the political pressures he faced. Özatalay, a professor of sociology at Galatasaray University, in Istanbul, was one of more than 1,000 academics who denounced Turkey’s mass violence against Kurdish people in a signed petition.
After it went public, in January 2016, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan mobilized his regime against the signatories. More than 400 academics were banned from public service, Özatalay wrote in a digital message. Some were jailed, he said, while others were given a deferred sentence. In October 2017, Özatalay received a court summons. Meanwhile, at his university, he and his colleagues weren’t allowed to attend conferences or conduct research. In essence, he said, they suffered a “civic death.”
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He and his wife decided to leave Turkey so Özatalay could become a visiting scholar at the New School. As a University in Exile academic, Özatalay said he would have the freedom to return to his studies. But he also worries about a brain drain in his homeland, which feeds what he calls the “mediocritization” of the Turkish academy.
The University in Exile might temporarily contribute to brain drain, but that’s not the goal, said Maxmillian Angerholzer III, executive vice president of the Institute of International Education. The institute oversees the Scholar Rescue Fund, a program that offers fellowships to imperiled professors, researchers, and public intellectuals. Since 2002 the fund has helped more than 750 people from more than 50 countries, Angerholzer said. The “vast majority” of them want to return home some day, he said, and a majority of them eventually do.
At first, when Elzbieta Matynia arrived in the United States, all she wanted was to return to Poland. Matynia, a professor of sociology and liberal studies at the New School, was awarded a scholarship and traveled to America in 1981, during a brief window in Communist rule when that was allowed. Months after her arrival, the window slammed shut.
While in academic limbo, Matynia extended her scholarship and called home when she could. During those calls, a robotic voice would pipe up every minute or so, reminding her and her loved ones that the conversation was being monitored. The experience was hard on her mind and her body, Matynia said. But eventually she mastered English. She fell in love, married, and had a child. Though she stayed in the United States even after the fall of Communism, she returns to Poland frequently.
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The new University in Exile is meant to mitigate that sharp, strange isolation, said Matynia, who is on the project’s steering committee. However, that initial break with home is “still going to be miserable,” she said, “because you are not going to be who you were.”
More than a year after Binalakshmi (Bina) Nepram fled India, the pain of leaving is still fresh. Nepram, an exiled scholar at Connecticut College, is a women’s and human-rights activist who lived near the border of India and Myanmar, sandwiched between rebel and military forces. Both sides threatened Nepram and her colleagues for years, she said. She ignored them until May 2017, when armed security forces arrived at her door to arrest her. Nepram was forced to leave everything and everyone behind, including her now 8-year-old daughter.
These days, Nepram parents from afar. She reads books about female astronauts and scientists to her daughter over the phone. While in America, Nepram is working on a book that will describe, in part, the “little joys” she’s discovered, like the New York Public Library system. That expanse of knowledge is a luxury, she said. Still, despite the pleasure of living on a picturesque campus, Nepram said she longs to return home.
“Even if I’m physically here,” she said, “my mind, my heart, my consciousness continues to reach out” to India.
‘All the More Urgent’
The revived University in Exile was dreamed up before Donald J. Trump was elected president, before he issued a travel ban, and before he drastically reduced the number of refugees who can resettle in the United States.
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The ban, upheld in June by the Supreme Court, restricts travel from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. Scholars in some of those countries, especially Syria, are in the direst need of rescue, according to academic aid groups. Right now, many Syrians are finding refuge in Western Europe instead, Angerholzer said, though travel to America is not impossible.
The landscape looks pretty grim at the moment.
Because of Trump’s policies, the new University in Exile is “all the more urgent,” Mack said. She wants the consortium to grow as more colleges recognize the need. As for Syrian scholars, she said, “When the case arises, we hope to try to work to change that. But there’s no magic wand. The landscape looks pretty grim at the moment.”
The exiled scholar Mohammad Alahmad spends much of his time worrying about that grim landscape for his fellow Syrians. Alahmad, now a visiting lecturer at Georgetown, was a faculty member at Al-Furat University, in Deir ez-Zor, and a vice dean for academic affairs on the university’s Raqqa campus. In Raqqa, Alahmad and his family watched as Islamic State extremists overran the city and proclaimed it their capital.
In 2015, Alahmad and his wife paid smugglers to help them enter Turkey. They crossed the border at night, carrying their two young children while trudging through muddy water. It was dangerous, Alahmad said, but necessary.
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Months later, they flew to Washington, D.C. Alahmad’s first impression of the city is seared into his memory. While in a cab, he saw a long line of people outside, so he asked what the fuss was about. The cab driver told him that people were gathered in front of a cupcake shop.
All this line for a cupcake! People in Syria have no bread to eat.
“All this line for a cupcake! People in Syria have no bread to eat,” Alahmad said, laughing. “When you feel sad,” he added, “you try to laugh at everything.”
In the United States, Alahmad’s wife, an Arabic teacher, gave birth to their third child — their “American girl,” Alahmad said with a smile. When they left Syria, they left behind his parents, and they’ve now gone four years without seeing his mother, who desperately wants to dote on her grandchildren.
Meanwhile, in Syria, the conflict rages on, with the government of Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russia and Iran, currently winning. Alahmad’s house and his parents’ house were destroyed. He has watched as his country became an international talking point. Many people say they care about Syria, he said, but “nobody cares about Syrians themselves.”
Even so, Alahmad pictures a world in which the Assad regime is ousted and gives way to peaceful democracy. When he peers into a future that feels incredibly unstable, he allows himself to imagine his family in Syria once again, living among the people they love.
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“I have no home now, no house now,” Alahmad said. “But I have hope.”
EmmaPettit is a senior reporter at The Chronicle who covers the ways people within higher ed work and live — whether strange, funny, harmful, or hopeful. She’s also interested in political interference on campus, as well as overlooked crevices of academe, such as a scrappy puppetry program at an R1 university and a charmed football team at a Kansas community college. Follow her on Twitter at @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.