To totalitarian governments, ideas are as threatening as bullets and free-thinking academics as dangerous as any young rebel wielding a Molotov cocktail.
Accordingly, repressive regimes--from Nazi Germany to the former Soviet Union--have historically hounded scholars, academicians and independent thinkers with a ferocity normally reserved for the most menacing subversives.
It was this realization that prompted a handful of University of Chicago professors early last year to organize a formal effort to help persecuted colleagues abroad.
"Each of the professors could rattle off the names of fellow scholars elsewhere in the world who were at risk because of government persecution or harassment," said Robert Quinn, director of the newly formed Scholars at Risk Network, which is kicking off its efforts with a reception Monday night at the university's downtown center and conferences Tuesday and Wednesday at the Hyde Park campus.The network plans to enlist other universities in identifying persecuted scholars worldwide and offering them temporary teaching or research posts in this country. The program likely will extend to other countries besides the U.S., beginning with Canada and Mexico.
A $250,000, three-year grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation will cover the initial grants, but individual universities will bear most of the costs of sponsoring the visiting academicians.
"The Scholars at Risk Network is a new approach to a long-standing problem," Quinn explained. "Past efforts have been either on an ad hoc, emergency basis or have tended to focus on a particular field of discipline."
During World War II, the U. of C. welcomed into its ranks numerous scholars fleeing Nazi persecution. Many of them--psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, political philosopher Leo Straus and political scientists Hans Morgenthau and Hanna Arendt, among others--became part of the university's formidable stable of scholars.
At this week's conference, several more recently exiled scholars will recount their experiences.
Probably the best known is Yuri Orlov, who was deported from the Soviet Union in 1986, halfway through a 5-year sentence to exile in Siberia.
An eminent physicist, Orlov in 1972 joined a dissident group and later co-founded the Moscow chapter of Amnesty International. He also wrote a letter to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in support of fellow physicist and political dissident Andrei Sakharov and to argue in favor of an opening of the political and economic system.
His efforts got Orlov fired, and in 1977 he was arrested by the KGB and imprisoned for a year. A pro forma trial later sentenced him to 7 years of hard labor and 5 years of exile in Siberia. Ultimately he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and deported to the U.S.
Since 1987, Orlov has been a scientist at Cornell University.
While Orlov might be considered a poster boy for persecuted scholars, his case is hardly unique.
According to Quinn, similar cases are surfacing now mostly in Africa and Central Asia. In Africa, the plight of scholars is aggravated by the near collapse of most countries' university systems.
Kosovo is the most recent example of a coordinated campaign of state terrorism directed at academicians, Quinn said. A so-called "new university system" was instituted, and all professors had to take a loyalty oath and promote the government's philosophy in their classes.
Sometimes it's not even the government that does the persecution. In today's chaotic Colombia, scholars often come under attack by unofficial paramilitary groups for supposedly being too sympathetic to the "wrong" faction in that country's civil war.
The Scholars at Risk group envisions a two-tier screening process. A selection committee is expected to draw up eligibility standards and then circulate the credentials of potential candidates among participating universities and colleges.
The individual institutions will pay all the costs, though there is talk of developing a fund to subsidize the participation of smaller colleges and offer special services such as language training.
For information, call 773-834-4408.