Remarks at the British Academy
Inaugural Meeting of the CARA/SAR UK Universities Network

London, 15 March 2006

By Dr. Allan E. Goodman
President and CEO, Institute of International Education

Scholar rescue has been a part of the Institute's work since its founding.  Then, scholars were caught in the crossfire of the Bolshevik Revolution.  Today they are prime targets of terrorists and regimes who would press into service those who have the knowledge to build weapons of mass destruction.  Over the years, we have probably helped some 10,000 scholars to get out of harm’s way and continue their work in a safe place.

I am haunted by one particular period and one list.  The period is the early 1930s, when Edward R. Murrow was the Institute's assistant director and in charge of the Emergency Committee for Displaced German Scholars. He managed to save some 400.  The list included four Nobel Prize winners in science, the author Thomas Mann, the composer Bela Bartok, and the philosophers Paul Tillich and Martin Buber.

The list that haunts me is not that one, however.  It is the 6,000 names of those who had applied or came to Murrow's attention.  Many, like Albert Einstein, were helped by other sources,   but so many perished in the holocaust.  Think of the kind of books, consequently, that did not get written.  Or ask yourself this question: Among those lost, were there discoveries of the cures for diseases that still plague us today?  We will never know.

But we have a chance in this century to make sure that no conflict, genocide, or terrorist can succeed in destroying knowledge.

The Scholar Rescue Fund is about saving lives, ideas, and maybe even ourselves.  Thank you for your interest in our work and for what this Network enables us to do together.