The UCSB Scholars at Risk (SAR) Hosting Committee and the UCSB Faculty Association invite you to contribute to a crowdfunding campaign to cover travel and accommodation costs for current and future international scholars at risk hosted by UCSB.

Please contribute by June 15

Anything you can afford will be helpful!

Background

Following a unanimous vote of the UCSB Academic Senate in January 2017, UCSB joined the Scholars at Risk (SAR) Network, with support from Chancellor Henry Yang and EVC David Marshall. SAR is an international organization founded in 2000. Along with its sister organization, the Scholars Rescue Fund (SRF), SAR seeks to identify and help scholars whose academic freedom, livelihood and/or life are under threat in their country of residence. Their core mission is to arrange temporary academic positions for scholars under threat at member universities until conditions improve and they can return to their home countries. UCSB hosted its first scholar at risk in 2018-19, thanks to a partnership among several departments in the humanities. The pandemic made further hosting impossible, but it surely did not diminish the need for international solidarity in defense of academic freedom. The Afghani crisis in the summer of 2021 made abundantly clear that American Universities seeking to uphold the value of academic freedom worldwide had to fund long-term programs for scholars at risk. UCSB rose to the occasion by establishing a SAR Hosting Committee and committing $50,000 per scholar at risk, per year, to the initiative.

The SAR Hosting Committee selected

Professor Elizabeth Ayuk-Etang, IIE-SRF Fellow

2022-23 UCSB Scholar at Risk

Professor Ayuk-Etang is fleeing, with her family, the civil war in Cameroon after having had her life threatened and her husband kidnapped twice. A scholar of African and American Literatures, at UCSB she has been working with Professor Kum-Kum Bhavnani over the past year. She will be based in the Department of Sociology, where she will research and teach cross-listed courses in society, literature and feminism-environmentalism in a pan-African context. She will also work with faculty in the Department of English. In addition to the classes she will teach, Professor Ayuk-Etang will offer public talks on the situation in Cameroon and on Cameroonian poetry. She will arrive in Santa Barbara on April 28, along with her husband (an architect) and 10-year-old triplets.

Although Prof. Ayuk-Etang has been awarded a grant of $25,000 from the SRF, the costs of travel and housing in Santa Barbara for a family of five will exceed the $75,000 currently available for her.

We, therefore, call on all UCSB faculty to contribute towards our final goal of raising $50,000 (in private and institutional donations) to assist this scholar and her family, as well as future scholars at risk

$30,000 of the monies raised will go towards paying for the cost of travel to Santa Barbara for Prof. Ayuk-Etang and her family, sustaining her living expenses before she receives her first check on June 1, and helping defray the cost of renting a home from May 2022 through June 2023. The remaining $20,000 will be retained in the International Visiting Scholars at Risk Fund for future use.

Support Scholars at Risk Hosting at UCSB!

By SAR Hosting Committee

Support Scholars at Risk Hosting at UCSB!

A Campaign to Support Current and Future Scholars at Risk Hosted by UCSB