Recent decades have seen a startling increase in the number of scholars displaced by conflict or political repression, leading to a crisis unprecedented since the exodus of artists and scholars from Nazi-dominated Europe in the 1930s, among them figures such as Adorno, Arendt, Auerbach, Horkheimer, Spitzer, and many more, whose work stills set the terms of discussions across the disciplines today. Numerous U.S. campuses, committees, and foundations, famously including the Rockefeller Foundation, the New School, the International Institute for Education - Scholar Rescue Fund (IIE SRF), and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, worked to help this earlier generation of refugee scholars escape the conditions of precarity they faced. Universities and colleges, organizations and initiatives around the world, such as the international Scholars at Risk (SAR) network (https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/) and the German Academy in Exile (https://www.academy-in-exile.eu/), have stepped up more recently to offer refuge to threatened colleagues as institutions of higher education continue to be targeted globally by authoritarian regimes.

And yet, now, some 100 years after its modern inception, scholar-rescue efforts continue to encounter the same “moral, practical, and scholarly challenges” that the international academy in general and U.S. higher education in particular were confronted with when they faced the “decimation of Europe’s academic elite” in the early to mid-twentieth century, when often deadly hierarchical choices about who was “worth saving” (Leff, 2019, 2-3), insufficient funds to assist all at-risk scholars in need of assistance in a sustained way, and the difficulty of finding a good fit for scholars trained in other systems persist; Akhlaq and Babo (2025) describe the perilous positions that at-risk scholars occupy when they arrive in the allegedly ‘safe spaces’ into which they are so often welcomed as equally as risky as the situations they fled. No longer only a question of integrating “mobile” international at-risk scholar-colleagues into the only notionally superior-because-safer “settled” domestic academic economies (Babo and Fábos, 2024), in other words, the targeting of higher education now in allegedly democratic societies has meant that even as insiders ‘here’, the settled scholars are often also not at all safe if and when they express opposition to evolving authoritarian norms. As a result, the mobile scholars traditionally understood as coming from ‘elsewhere’, or ‘over there’, are often better informants about how to survive conditions of precarity than an all-too-self-assured academy implicated in narratives of security that may no longer obtain.

Thus, rather, then, than merely updating what Laurel Leff already described in 2019 as the “triumphal symphony” (Leff, 2019, 6) that so often characterizes accounts of earlier scholar rescue in the United States with information about contemporary efforts, our session will offer

• first, a short history of scholar rescue for colleagues interested in, but new to the subject, including information about working with SAR and the IIE SRF (Fogu) (15 minutes)
• second, descriptions of successful existing international and domestic models of scholar hosting and advocacy work (Damrosch and McCall) (15 minutes each),
• third, an account of the challenges faced by at-risk scholars as they enter a new system (Kusi) (15 minutes), and
• fourth, a response describing a new model of scholar hosting and support called “Sharing the Platform” (https://www.sharetheplatform.org/) designed to respond more nimbly to the conditions for academe within both recently emerging and established, but now ever-more-confident authoritarian states and regimes around the world, which require practitioners of scholar rescue to redefine the geographies of risk and infrastructures of rescue that have shaped the terms with which they have worked for so long (Newman) (10 minutes).

A 20-minute final Q & A session will give audience participants the opportunity to ask questions of a practical nature of each of the panelists, including, but not limited to how to get involved with any of the existing organizations that support scholar rescue, the details of campus-based scholar hosting and student advocacy work, and how the build civil society partnerships in the defense of endangered scholars both domestically and abroad.

References:

Babo, A. and Akhlaq, S. H. (eds.) (2025) Exiled Scholars in Western Academia: Refugees or Intellectuals. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Babo, A. and Fábos, A. (2024) ‘Share the Platform: Collaborative Strategies for Refugee Integration in Academia’ [Recorded webinar], The Integration and Belonging Hub. Clark University. 9 May. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_64eFpCKGk (17 February, 2026).

Leff, L. (2019) Well Worth Saving: American Universities’ Life-and-death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Share the Platform (2021) Share the Platform. Available at https://www.sharetheplatform.org/ (17 February, 2026).