Saving Iraq’s Scholars

from Inside Higher Ed

In an urgent effort to save a critical mass of scholars unlike any initiative undertaken since World War II, the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund is finalizing plans to rescue hundreds of Iraqi professors beginning in the coming months.

“We consider it to be the first large-scale effort of its kind since the 1930s, when IIE’s Emergency Rescue Committee rescued over 300 senior European scholars and brought them to safety in the United States,” said Jim Miller, director of strategic partnerships for the Scholar Rescue Fund (which also awards renewable, one-year fellowships to scholars from all over the world when they can’t safely stay in their home countries based on an application process).

IIE — which has a history of rescuing scholars that can be traced back to the Russian Revolution — is aiming to award two-year fellowships to 200 senior scholars, most of whom are professors, to teach and conduct research at institutions in Jordan and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Through the use of distance learning technologies, the professors will be able to connect with their students back in Iraq while working with students from the respective host countries and displaced Iraqis living throughout the region. The specific number of scholars to be assisted may change, as logistics are still being worked out. But the rescue effort, in focusing on a large group at once, represents a dramatic departure from IIE’s previous efforts to offer international fellowships to individual Iraqi scholars — 41 so far — on a case-by-case basis.

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