Scholarly Exiles

On a trip to Vienna to plan an international research project on the history of wages and prices in April 1933, William Beveridge, economist, social reformer and intellectual architect of the British welfare state, was inspired to set up the Academic Assistance Council - later the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning and since 1998 the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA) (hereafter CARA). Shortly before Beveridge met with Viennese colleagues for dinner, many German academics had received official notification of their dismissal by the newly-elected Nazi regime - a move which spotlighted the urgent predicament of leftist and Jewish academics in Germany.¹ Refugees from Nazism received aid from a number of British organizations, including the Jewish Refugee Committee, the Central British Fund for German Jewry and the Society of Friends German Emergency Committee.² CARA played a specialized role in this aid provision, focusing on placements for threatened scientists and researchers.³ Some of the leading lights of twentieth-century thought, including physicist Max Born and sociologist Karl Mannheim, received assistance from CARA and subsequently re-established themselves in British universities.

The twentieth century's reputation as the 'century of the refugee' was hard-earned. It was marked by unprecedented waves of forced migration and displacement, and by new forms of international recognition and protection like the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention. Academic refugees persecuted for their intellectual and political commitments, or for their religious and ethnic affiliations, are an important part of this history. Beveridge's Council was initially created to provide practical and professional support for academics forced out of their universities, but in 1935 it renamed itself the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, reflecting its adoption of a more politicized stance against fascism. After the war, it continued raising funds to support refugee academics, providing assistance first to academics fleeing communist regimes and then to scholars escaping dictatorships in Latin America and Africa.

The volume reviewed here, based on papers presented at a 2008 conference in honour of CARA's 75th anniversary, demonstrates this broadening of its mission from supporting prominent scholars to promoting academic freedom in general. The book's contents divide between portraits of individuals responsible for shaping CARA during its founding years - including Esther Simpson, the organization's secretary for forty years, and the scientists Leo Szilard, A.V. Hill, and Max Perutz - and more wide-ranging studies documenting academic refugee experience in the twentieth century. Paul Weindling's chapter on Hill, who received the Nobel Prize in 1922 for his work in physiology, emphasizes Hill's role in making academic freedom a core value of CARA, extending its mission beyond charity work on behalf of displaced scholars. Other chapters highlight the important part played by ancillary institutions like the British Federation of University Women (BFUW), which worked with CARA to support women refugee academics. Susan Cohen's chapter on the BFUW shows UK aid organizations assisting refugee networks to help exiled academics regain their lost professional status. Cohen cites the example of Rose Rand, a Viennese psychiatrist, who came to England in 1939 and was able to revive her prewar research in 1950 through the refugee scholar Karl Popper's support for her fellowship at Oxford.⁴ A further tranche of chapters explores academic migration from Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, South Africa, and Chile - together providing a broad picture of the experiences and contributions of academic refugees in Britain and the United States up to the 1980s.

Overall, In Defence of Learning tells a complicated, multi-faceted story. What emerges from it are two distinct perspectives on CARA's history. Thus while some contributors stress the stellar accomplishments of assisted refugees like Max Born, who won the Nobel Prize in 1954 for his research in quantum mechanics,⁵ others - including Shula Marks, one of the book's editors - emphasize the broad reach of the organization, which assisted many scholars without established...