Coming Home

Had Lech Walesa actually showed up to speak at Commencement, the Solidarity leader would have upheld more than one distinguished tradition. He would also have briefly joined the ranks of political dissident scholars who find a refuge, temporary or permanent, at Harvard, leaving Europe, Asia and Africa to seek the academic and social freedom of the Harvard community.

Several Harvard programs, notably the Center for International Affairs (CFIA) and the Nieman Foundation, have been instrumental over the years in bringing refugees to Cambridge for temporary appointments. But notes CFIA Executive Officer Chester Haskell. "We don't see ourselves as a halfway house for political refugees." Haskell says fellowships are awarded not on the basis of scholars political beliefs or situation, but strictly according to whether our selection committee believes they will contribute in a research area. I've never noticed any policy that takes a person's politics into account. And his statements mirror those of other Harvard officials who say Harvard seeks dissident scholars purely because of their academic accomplishment or potential.

The announcement this spring that exiled South Korean scholar Kim Dae Jung, a former South Korean presidential candidate, would come to Harvard as a visiting scholar next year has refocused attention on the University's relationship with its frequent dissident visitors. Kim, who has had a standing invitation to the CFIA since 1973, says he chose Harvard over an invitation from Georgetown University because "Harvard is the great symbol of American democracy." Although some of his supporters fear for his safety while here--he was kidnapped from Japan by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency in 1973 and sentenced to death in 1980 by the Chun Doo Hwan government--Kim says he "does not foresee any difficulties" during his time here. His invitation, though, is temporary, and his future plans "totally depend" on the situation in Korea.

"I am anxious to help our people, and if our people need me, in time I must go back," adds Kim, who was unable to leave Korea until late last year. But he adds that "an invitation from Harvard is the greatest in the country, and that is why I am interested in studying there."

While there is no official Harvard policy regarding academic refugees, most dissidents currently at Harvard credit individual departments or professors with smoothing their path to Cambridge. In the case of Polish poet Stanislaw Baranczak--now an associate professor of Slavic Languages--Professor Donald Fanger, then chairman of the Slavic department, contacted Baranczak directly in Poland in 1978 to recruit him as a replacement for a retiring professor. Baranczak immediately encountered difficulty in obtaining his exit visa, but he kept in contact with the department for three years and through six unsuccessful visa applications.

"Harvard was very loyal," Baranczak says now, adding that the University even found him and his family an apartment to live in for the first month after he finally arrived in 1981.

The department recruited Baranczak on the basis of his published work, but not all refugees have had that assistance. Sixty-eight-year-old Soviet writer and dissident Kirill Uspensky, now working at the Russian Research Center with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), says he wrote to universities "all over the world" to find a place to finish his project, the compilation of a dictionary of unconventional Russian words. Once Harvard had invited him, it provided him with office space and supplies for his work, and colleagues at the University helped him prepared documents for his NEH grant application. "In that lottery," he says of Harvard's response, "I drew the lucky ticket."

A professional writer since the 1940's, Uspensky was a member of the Soviet Union's prestigious Writer's Union. In 1960, he says, he was arrested for "so-called anti-Soviet activities." Sentenced to prison for four and a half years, Uspensky conceived of the idea for his dictionary while listening to the language of his fellow inmates.

Uspensky said that in the spring of 1978 he was attacked by "three hoodlums pretending to be drunk," who shouted "Lousy Kike" and "Damned anti-Soviet"--an attack he believes was instigated by the KGB, the Soviet secret police, who had harassed him since his release from prison. Although not Jewish, he pretended to be a Jew in order to obtain his exit visa more easily.

By contrast, Joseph Bernstein and David Kazhdan, two Jewish Soviet mathematicians now tenured here, were invited and heavily recruited. The department recruited both professors "because they were the best people around," Mathematics Department Chairman David Mumford says. Bernstein, who was sought by several other universities, chose Harvard this spring because of his friendship with Kazhdan, who had come to the University in 1975.

Though anti-Semitism and other political considerations kept both Kazhdan and Bernstein from any status higher than researcher in the Soviet Union--Kazhdan says he "didn't even try" to become a professor in a Russian university--both had already achieved international academic recognition through their publications. Attaining such recognition may be easier for mathematicians than for scholars is other fields, Kazhdan speculates, because mathematics "depends less than any other on language and technology." About 100 Soviet refugees are affiliated with math departments in various American universities, he notes.

The linguistic and cultural gap does cause problems in other areas, however Kazhdan notes, for example, that despite the substantial Soviet population at Harvard, the area lacks a strong refugee community. Mark Kuchnent, a Russian Jew who is currently a researcher in Soviet science and policy at the Russian Research Center, concurs that "there is no organized Soviet community of immigrants." Harvard does, however, have a comparatively large foreign community because dissidents tend to emigrate to large cities such as New York or Boston, although "there's no rhyme or reason to which university gets people," according to Jonathan Sanders, assistant director of Columbia University's Harriman Institute for Russian Research.

The cultural distance may also contribute to another problem many refugees cite--the difficulties they face in finding academic positions in America. Ta Wan Tai, a research associate at the Law School who came from Vietnam in 1975, says the only way a foreign scholar can get a permanent appointment is through the regular tenure route. At "a university of the highest prestige" like Harvard, he adds, "one scholar cannot easily carve out a niche."

Tai, who is 44, has spent his eight years here as a researcher on Vietnamese law at the Law School's East Asian Legal Studies program and plans to begin studying for a master's degree at the Law School next fall. They would never think of appointing someone from this background" to an academic position, he says, adding, "A scholar must fend for himself and find a position elsewhere."

Baranczak, who will be up for tenure in 1986, blames the tight academic job market for the difficulties foreign scholars have in getting employment. With all academics feeling the pinch, "It is understandable that a university would favor American citizens to reduce the tensions of the job market," he says, adding that "American natives have certain advantages in getting tenure more quickly than scholars from Eastern Europe, for example." At some universities, American-born Slavic scholars have been preferred for tenure over Polish refugees with weak English skills. In matters of tenure, "There shouldn't be an exception for people from other countries," Baranczak says. Tai agrees: When you think of someone for an academic position, he says, "you think of his qualities, not his biography."