An unexpected loophole presented itself: in the form of university temporary refuge. In 2018, Ariane Mack, a professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research in New York, founded the New Universities in Exile Consortium, a group of about 60 universities around the world to host scholars displaced from those countries. Agreed where his life is. were in danger. The goal, Mack explained to me, was to create a sense of community for persecuted academics so that their exile would not become “another exile on campus.” After the Taliban returned to power, Mack was contacted by someone from a member university who had heard of Ahmed’s Afghan women and wanted to know if the union could help put them in schools. The status of AUW women exposed a gap in the system: women were too old to be placed in public schools, but too young to be considered scholars or professors, the kind of data the New University in Exile Consortium focused on. . , “It was the first time we got into business, so to speak, to the rescue,” Mack says. “So, we expanded our mission.”
Shortly after the women arrived at Fort McCoy, the consortium approached two associate provosts at Brown University, Jay Rowan and Asabe Poloma: Will the Browns be able to pick up some women this fall? “We didn’t know all that much about the Asian University for Women at the time,” Poloma, Brown’s associate provost for Global Engagement, told me, “but the philosophy behind the liberal arts curriculum really resonated for us.” Similar conversations were going on elsewhere, with different schools interested in different qualifications. For example, Cornell preferred students who could work in various laboratories in both the hard sciences and other subjects, and became “adapted to life in America before entering Cornell”, Nishi Dhupa, Cornell As Associate Vice Provost of International Affairs, put it. The University of North Texas had a special English-training program for young women who were still becoming fluent in English. Brown was interested in students who demonstrated a strong academic record and intellectual curiosity. Ahmed asked his three-person administrative staff at AUW to put together a portfolio for each woman, which included brief biographies and transcripts of them.
Whenever a school verbally agreed to admit one of the women, Charles Holb, a lawyer and founder of the Washington advisory firm Barrington Global, which was providing free aid, worked out memorandums of understanding. , which stated that the woman would be hosted as a degree—a student earning a bachelor’s degree for the duration of the bachelor’s degree, or in some cases a bachelor’s degree—a condition to which some schools would agree. Some universities, such as Arizona State, immediately signed on; Others, like Brown, were reluctant to do anything compulsive. “The priority was to make sure these girls had the best humanly possible shot at being successful,” Halab told me. “At the very least, the MoU created a moral obligation for them to commit.”
At Fort McCoy, Hashimi had heard rumors that he and his peers would transfer to American universities, but he doubted that would happen. “I was worried that schools would not trust Afghan girls,” she says. (Some women refused to continue their studies, opting instead to find jobs.) But, in fact, 10 universities were interested in taking them: Arizona State, Brown, Cornell, Delaware, DePaul, Georgia State, North Texas, Suffolk, Wisconsin-Milwaukee and West Virginia. Some of them offered immediate approval, while others required more extensive applications. In November, Hashimi, to her surprise, received an email from Brown requesting that she write separate essays about her personal story, her academic interests, and her goals and dreams. He didn’t have a computer, so he prepared his essays on his cellphone. After that, she says, she checked her email “every second.”
Acceptance for AUW women arrived by December. Fourteen women finished in Brown; nine at Cornell; 67 in the state of Arizona; at the University of Delaware 15. They will all be on full scholarship, covered by donations raised by universities; AUW estimated the total need to be $32 million. Each school had a different system: at Arizona State University, women were invited to enroll for eight semesters; Some who already had credit from AUW got admission as juniors or seniors. 10 of DePaul’s students were invited to stay until they completed their bachelor’s degrees, until they interrupted their studies and completed their degrees in five years.
Other schools offered more precarious arrangements: at Cornell, women were let in as “visiting interns” for the school year; At Brown, 14 women were considered “non-specialty special students for the 2021-2022 academic year”. No one was sure what would happen after May.