What distinguishes the New University in Exile Consortium from other initiatives aiding endangered scholars?
The primary mission of the New UIE Consortium is to publicly defend academic freedom, the core value of all our member institutions, and to nurture academics who have been persecuted and uprooted by creating a sense of intellectual community among exiled scholars. Our mission is to lessen the profound loss of identity and dislocation from which they may suffer and which impacts their intellectual and personal lives.
To quote from Edward Said’s, Reflections on Exile: “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift, forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home…” It is this condition we hope to alleviate through our activities, which is something not currently done by other organizations in the United States assisting scholars at risk.