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.”
The number of countries from which scholars applied—including two from Canada, neither of whom was awarded a grant—was large, but clear geographic trends emerged. A preponderance of the world’s threatened scholars apparently are based in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and East Asia.
Similar Traits
Countries with high levels of academic oppression tend to have other characteristics in common, Dr. Jarecki said, including low gross domestic products, high levels of political instability and violence, small academic populations, and high ratings on indexes of failed states, like one produced in 2007 by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine.
The fund vets applicants as thoroughly as it can, Dr. Jarecki said, to ensure that they are genuine victims of academic oppression and not merely seeking to leave their countries for better opportunities abroad. “I don’t think it’s something you can discount as a possibility,” he said in an interview. “If a country is in a mess and very poor besides, and is a failed state with political violence—well, if you and I were there, we would want to escape.”
In many countries, threatened scholars are the victims of government oppression, but that is not always the case. Dr. Jarecki related the example of a Spanish scholar who had sought refuge from the violence of the Basque separatist group ETA, which he had criticized. The Spanish government asked the fund to help the academic find refuge abroad.
Iraq, Iran, and Ethiopia have the highest concentration of grant recipients, yet some countries are notable for their absence from the report. There have been no applicants from North Korea, Allan E. Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education, pointed out. Their absence, he said, is hardly evidence of a rosy prognosis for academic freedom in that repressive communist dictatorship, where endangered scholars are likely to put themselves at even more risk by applying for foreign fellowships than by simply staying put. “We’re wrestling with the problem of how to reach out to scholars there,” Mr. Goodman said.
Continuing Threat
The fund needs an endowment of $50-million to ensure that there will always be a place where endangered scholars can turn, Dr. Jarecki said, and academic oppression remains a pressing global problem. “In Iraq we hear a lot that things are much better and that we don’t need to rescue any more,” he said. He added, however, that just two weeks ago, on the same day that those assurances were being made, a scholar was assassinated in Mosul.
Even with the threat to academics in Iraq apparently subsiding, other crises loom. “We need to prepare for the next big emergency,” Dr. Jarecki said. He cited Iran, Pakistan, and Palestine, all of which have begun to produce an uptick in oppressed-scholar applications, as possible academic danger zones.
Several scholars who have been aided by the fund attended Tuesday’s event, but most were reluctant to give their names, fearful of continuing reprisal against them or their relatives back home in places like Gaza and Sudan. Some 20 or 30 of the scholars aided by the fund have returned to their home countries, Dr. Jarecki said in an interview, and many say they would eventually like to return to academic careers at home.
Wang Tiancheng, a former law lecturer at Peking University who was put on trial in 1994 for pro-democratic activity, had no such reluctance. He spent five years in jail, from 1992 to 1997, and knows full well what perils befall outspoken scholars. “I’m not afraid,” he said, insisting that he wanted his name used. “A dead pig is not afraid of hot water.” Mr. Wang is now a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Human Rights.
Another scholar, a 35-year-old microbiologist who fled Sudan and is now doing postdoctoral work in Maryland, said in an interview that she would love to return to her home country. “Home is home,” she said. “But I would want to go back in a situation where I can lead the life that I want, at least academically, freely.”
