The University of Chicago recently founded the Scholars at Risk Network to help persecuted academicians around the world by rescuing them from possible imprisonment, torture or even death and offering them temporary teaching jobs at U.S. universities.

The network is working to rescue its first group of persecuted foreign intellectuals, the university reports.

Robert Quinn, an attorney well-versed in international human rights law, heads the program. Quinn hopes Scholars at Risk will have its first educators working in the U.S. by next spring. There are now 12 scholars being considered as emigration candidates, but Quinn declines to identify them for security reasons.

"The content of a scholar's work has been known to cause persecution," Quinn said. "In one case in Central Asia, a professor's work has to do with ethnic issues, and the powers that be are not supportive of the study of this ethnic group." There are countless examples of intellectuals being persecuted worldwide. In Columbia, scholars expressing political views find themselves as possible targets of both left- and right-wing paramilitary groups. The Burmese government has had every university in the country closed down for the last 10 years. And in Serbia, the Milosevic regime requires by law every university professor to sign a loyalty oath.

The Scholars at Risk Network was originally funded by a $250,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, but Quinn is now donating much of his time for fundraising. The network has been named a university-sponsored charity, meaning school employees can donate to the organization via electronic deposit.

The Scholars at Risk Network now has six member schools: Chicago, Albion College, the Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Illinois Wesleyan University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Michigan.

To further promote its efforts, the network also has launched the Academic Freedom Institute, which will feature electronic publishing of news about attacks on students and educators around the word, publication of works about academic freedom and online discussions.

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