Fellowship To Offer Scholars Protection

A newly created Faculty committee is currently accepting nominations for a new fellowship that will bring scholars to campus who are at-risk of being persecuted in their native countries for their beliefs or scholarship.

The one-year award, named the Scholars-at-Risk Fellowship Program, will bring one “at-risk” scholar annually to Harvard and will be administered locally by the University Committee on Human Rights Studies (UCHRS). The fellowship will also be part of a larger national initiative to promote academic freedom and defend human rights.

“It’s a very important program, especially for the Harvard community given the situation internationally where violations of human rights are rampant,” said Afreen Alam, a UCHRS coordinator.

A Faculty Committee of nine members, including committee chair and Cogan University Professor Stephen J. Greenblatt, has been created to select the fellow.

The committee is currently accepting nominations for next year’s position, which are due on April 9. A final decision will be made by May 10.

According to an e-mail University President Lawrence H. Summers sent last week to Faculty members, the selection criteria may include the risk of persecution the scholar faces for academic work, as well as ethnic and religious persecution.

Selection may also be based on persecution of political opinion and include non-traditional scholars such as artists and poets, Summers said.

Scholars will not be required to teach once they are selected to come and will be hosted by an appropriate academic department.

In fact, depending on the level of risk the chosen scholar may face, the committee may never publicly release the name of the chosen scholar if the committee deems it a security risk. At the end of their fellowship, the scholars will return to their home countries.

With the new program, Harvard is joining a national network of more than 700 universities and colleges who are part of the Scholars-at-Risk program, which is headquartered at the University of Chicago. Institutions that are join the partnership are required to provide their own funding.

The proposal for a Harvard-based program began last fall and was finally approved in January by Summers.

His office will provide all the money required to bring the scholar to Harvard for the first year of the program in the 2002-2003 academic year—approximately $100,000—according to John H. Coatsworth, director of the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and a member of the selection committee.

Summers has also agreed to provide half of money required for future years. The remainder will come from UCHRS, the Rockefeller Center, the Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the School of Public Health and the Law School’s Human Rights Program.

According to Stephen Marks, director of the Bagnoud Center, each of these groups would have to contribute between $10,000 and $15,000—money that Coatsworth said will be very well spent.

“In competition for those fellowships we would happily contribute to the support of the scholars, and possibly more than one meeting the terms. There is definitely potential for full coverage,” Coatsworth said.

The Scholars-at-Risk fellowship is not unprecedented in University history. During the 1930s and 1940s, Harvard hosted 13 refugee scholars who fled Nazism and fascism.