Inside Higher Ed: Patterns in Academic Persecution
The Scholar Rescue Fund drew applications from oppressed academics in 101 different countries in its first five years of operations, suggesting “at least a low level of scholar persecution in a surprisingly wide range of countries and regions” — although it’s most prevalent in the Middle East/North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Scholars from the two regions accounted for 61 percent of all applicants from 2002-7 and 73 percent of grantees.
“Scholar Rescue in the Modern World,” a report being released today by the Institute of International Education (home of the Scholar Rescue Fund), identifies such trends in reported persecution across 847 grant applications. The Scholar Rescue Fund awards fellowships for scholars to hold temporary academic posts abroad on the basis of the urgency of threats they face at home and the quality of their academic work. The report’s authors acknowledge the limitations of a small data set and of the fund’s reach — North Korea, for instance, is not represented in the application pool — but also assert the importance of gleaning what trends one can.
The Chronicle: For ‘Rescued’ Scholars, Persecution Came in Many Forms and Many Lands
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.
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