" To help one person is to save the whole community."

"Academic freedom is critical, the exchange of ideas, but academic freedom in an unfree world cannot exist."

- from Wednesday's symposium on academic freedom

On Wednesday, Columbia hosted a panel on the state academic freedom throughout the world. The event was sponsored by the International Institute of Education. It was a very interesting, though unfortunately not so well run, event. It started late, ran late and had a far too long introduction (consisting mostly of expressions of gratitude as Prezbo and the boardmembers of the Institute for International Education praised Columbia for our passionate study of human rights). The topic of discussion: the persecution of foreign scholars in their homeland for researching topics or voicing political views unsupportive of their governments. The panel consisted of five scholars from Sudan, Iraq, Belarus, China and Ethiopia, who were currently benefitting from the aid of the Scholar Rescue Fund.

To my great surprise, for most of the questions, they all had similar answers. One would have surely expected a wide spectrum of responses seeing the geographic diversity. However, of great interest were the responses of the Belarusian sociologist and the Ethiopian economist. The Belarusian scholar answered questions with political theories befitting his experiences and knowledge opposed to giving a first person account. For example, in response to a question regarding how the arrest of professors at universities for their outspokeness or controversial research findings or topics affected students, he responded that there were three types of students:

1, The kind that rebelled and sought to go against the flow and "fight back" (2-3%)

2. The kind that tried to do whatever they could to get an opportunity to leave the country and pursue their research elsewhere (20-30%)

3. The kind that start to follow what the government wants them to do or not do and later becomes the next generation of the regime. (majority)

In addition, both he and the Ethiopian scholar were quite witty. However, the same cannot be said of the rest of the panel. The Chinese scholar and the Iraqi scholar lacked clear English language skills and were not only difficult to understand but also misunderstood the question a few times.

This event deserves a B; could've been better organized and the questions asked of the panelists could've been projected (they were each a paragraph long) for the audience and panelists to understand, but it was a very interesting topic nonetheless.