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A safe haven for international researchers fleeing from war and persecution
The Initiative grants funding to German universities and research institutions which they can use to finance such foreign academics for two years. The Humboldt Foundation launched the programme together with the Federal Foreign Office. Universities that apply for sponsorship under the Philipp Schwartz Initiative must submit, amongst other things, a strategy explaining how they will treat threatened researchers and integrate them academically.
“The Humboldt Foundation has been committed to helping researchers at risk and promoting freedom of science in concrete ways for years now,” emphasises Robert Schlögl, the President of the Humboldt Foundation. “This involvement is very important to me because excellence must go hand-in-hand with humanitarianism.”
| Fellows | Country |
|---|---|
| 41,9 % | Turkey |
| 22,7 % | Ukraine |
| 14,0 % | Syria |
| 21,4 % | 23 others * |
| Fellows | Field |
|---|---|
| 41,0% | Natural sciences |
| 24,0% | Social sciences |
| 23,0% | Humanities |
| 12,0% | Engineering sciences |
Network and model for other safe haven projects
As well as sponsoring individuals, the initiative also seeks to provide a platform for information sharing on the situation of threatened researchers. In this context, the Humboldt Foundation cooperates with international partner organisations such as the Scholars at Risk Network, the Scholar Rescue Fund and the Council for At-Risk Academics. Until March 2022, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation is also hosting the secretariat of the German Section of the Scholars at Risk Network, founded in 2016.
The Initiative has become a blueprint for other programmes in Europe. The Collège de France, for instance, has established PAUSE, its own aid programme for threatened researchers that is modelled on the Philipp Schwartz Initiative. PAUSE is, moreover, one of the Humboldt Foundation’s partners in the EU project InSPIREurope in which ten organisations from nine European countries have got together to campaign for the interests of threatened researchers under the leadership of the newly established European office of Scholars at Risk.
The pathologist Philipp Schwartz (*19 / 07 / 1894) became a professor of pathology at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1927. Being from a Jewish family, he was summarily dismissed from the university in 1933 when the National Socialists seized power. He fled to Switzerland where he founded the “Notgemeinschaft deutscher Wissenschaftler im Ausland” (Emergency Society of German Scholars Abroad) in the same year. Its aim was to find employment abroad for persecuted academics. The organisation interceded on behalf of several hundred refugee researchers. Most of them went to Turkey, where Kemal Atatürk was in the process of reforming the higher education system based on the Western European model. Schwartz personally negotiated with representatives of the Turkish government and immediately managed to secure places there for 30 researchers who had been dismissed from posts in Germany. The Emergency Society also cooperated with the Academic Assistance Council, the predecessor of the Council for At-Risk Academics. In 1934, Schwartz himself accepted a chair at the newly established Istanbul University, becoming director of the Institute of Pathology. After the Second World War, his desired return to Frankfurt University as a professor was denied him. He emigrated to the United States in the early 1950s and continued to work as a pathologist at Warren State Hospital in Pennsylvania, where he headed a geriatric research institute from 1967 onwards. Schwartz died in the United States in 1977.
