Thanks to support from Academic Affairs and the Library, Wesleyan is now participating in the New University in Exile Consortium’s Stranded Scholar Library Access Initiative. In brief, this means that we can provide digital library access to scholars at risk who are unable to carry on their research because they have been cut off from library access in their home countries. Scholars will apply through the New School (which is the home bases of the NUEC) and we and other consortial members will provide the access.

Wesleyan joined the New University in Exile Consortium this past year, and have begun actively working with like-minded schools on supporting scholars at risk around the world. The Consortium is an expanding group of 21 universities and colleges publicly committed to the belief that the academic community has both the responsibility and capacity to assist persecuted and endangered scholars everywhere and to protect the intellectual capital that is jeopardized when universities and scholars are under assault. The Consortium builds upon The New School’s legacy as the original University in Exile.

The primary mission of the Consortium is to nurture academics who have been persecuted and uprooted by creating a sense of intellectual community among exiled scholars. The idea is to lessen the profound loss of identity and dislocation from which they suffer and which impacts their intellectual and personal lives. It is the condition of exile we hope to alleviate through our activities, which is something not currently done by other organizations in the United States assisting scholars at risk.