For Immediate Release                                              Contact:    Deborah Gardner

                                                                                                       Halstead Communications

                                                                                                       212-734-2190

SUNY PURCHASE AWARDS HONORARY DOCTORAL DEGREE

TO IIE PRESIDENT ALLAN GOODMAN IN RECOGNITION OF HIS WORK IN RESCUING THREATENED SCHOLARS

NEWYORK, May 19 --At its 34th Annual Commencement today, Purchase College awarded Allan E. Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education, an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from The State University of New York, to recognize his work in rescuing threatened scholars. IIE’s Scholar Rescue Fund assists scholars from any country who suffer violence or threats because of their work, prominence, or exercise of their basic rights.

In bestowing the degree, Purchase College president Thomas J. Schwarz, said, “We are proud to honor you on behalf of all those threatened scholars whom you have saved and those yet to be brought to freedom. Your promotion of the Scholar Rescue Fund helps to save lives and creates opportunities for greater international understanding.  Through it you are helping Purchase College widen our international focus.”

This year, a prominent rescued scholar, is teaching and living at Purchase this year as a visiting professor, with the help of IIE’s Scholar Rescue Fund.  The anonymous scholar is an author and the former department chair and professor of English Language and Applied Linguistics at a university in Pakistan.   In March, she gave a public lecture on "Islamic State, Heresy and Freedom of Speech," in which she discussed freedom of expression issues and reflected on challenges facing intellectuals, women and others in Islamic societies.  

Dr. Goodman told the assembled SUNY Purchase faculty and degree candidates, “With the help of this college the very brave woman who is my host today was rescued.   With your continued help, we have a chance in this century to make sure that no conflict, genocide, terrorist can destroy knowledge.”

“Scholar rescue has been a part of the Institute’s work since its founding,” Goodman explained.  “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 more than 10,000 scholars to continue their work in safety.”

“Does this make a difference?  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 Felix Bloch, the nobel prize winning scientist who discovered the process that led to the MRI, and other names well known to this faculty; the author Thomas Mann, the composer Bela Bartok, the philosophers Paul Tillich and Martin Buber, and the political  scientist Hans Morgenthau.

“The list that haunts me is not that one, however.  It is the 6,000 names that came to Murrow’s attention.  Many - like Albert Einstein – were helped by other sources. But so many perished in holocaust.  Think of the kind of books, consequently, that did not get written. Or ask yourself this question: Among those lost, was there the scientist who could have discovered why cells mutate into cancer?  Or the philosopher who could have caused communism to end in Russia years before it did? We will never know.”

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The Institute of International Education, a world leader in the international exchange of people and ideas, was founded in 1919 as an independent, nonprofit organization. Based in New York with 18 offices worldwide, IIE administers over 250 international education and training programs, including the Fulbright Program, the U.S. Government's premier public diplomacy initiative.  (www.iie.org)

IIE’s Scholar Rescue Fund provides life- and career-saving support to scholars who are persecuted in their home countries. The Fund offers grants for these scholars to continue their work at institutions in the US and other safe locales. The Fund has awarded grants to support more than 90 threatened scholars from 36 different countries. (www.iie.org/SRF)

Purchase College, in Westchester County, New York, was founded by Governor Nelson Rockefeller in 1967 as the cultural gem of the State University of New York system.  Today, Purchase College today enjoys a world-class reputation for its arts programs and high rankings for its liberal arts and sciences programs.   (www.purchase.edu)