An unexpected escape presented itself: the university as a temporary refuge. In 2018, Arien Mack, then a professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research in New York, founded the New University in Exile Consortium, a group of nearly 60 universities around the world that have agreed to host displaced scholars. countries where their lives were in danger. The goal, Mack explained to me, was to create a sense of community for persecuted scholars so that their exile would not become “a second exile on campus itself.” After the Taliban returned to power, Mack was contacted by someone at a member university who had heard of Ahmad’s Afghan women and wanted to know if the consortium could help place them in schools. The situation of the AUW women revealed a gap in the system: the women were too old to be placed in public schools, but they were too young to be considered academics or professors, the kind of figures on which the New University in Exile Consortium focused. . “It was the first time we got into the business of, so to speak, lifesaving,” Mack says. “So we expanded our mission.”
Shortly after the women arrived at Fort McCoy, the consortium contacted two associate provosts from Brown University, Jay Rowan and Asabe Poloma: Would Brown be able to take on some of the women this fall? “We didn’t know much at the time about Asian University for Women,” Poloma, Brown’s associate vice president for global engagement, told me, “but the philosophy behind the arts program liberals really resonated with us.” Similar conversations were going on elsewhere, with different schools interested in different abilities. Cornell, for example, preferred students who could work in various labs there, both in the hard sciences and in other disciplines, and adjust to life in the United States before applying for admission to Cornell,” as Nishi Dhupa, Cornell associate vice president for international affairs, say. The University of North Texas had a specialized English training program for young women who were still fluent in English. Brown was interested in students who demonstrated a strong academic record and intellectual curiosity. Ahmad asked his three-person administrative staff at AUW to put together portfolios for each of the women that included brief biographies and their transcripts.
Each time a school verbally agreed to admit one of the women, Charles Hallab, an attorney and founder of the Washington consultancy Barrington Global, which provided pro bono assistance, worked out memorandums of understanding stating that the woman would be housed as a graduate. earning students for the duration of an undergraduate degree or, in some cases, a graduate degree—a condition some schools would eventually agree to. A few universities, like Arizona State, signed on right away; others, like Brown, were reluctant to commit to anything binding. “The priority was making sure these girls had the best shot humanly possible to succeed,” Hallab told me. “At the very least, the MOU created a moral obligation to commit to them.”
At Fort McCoy, Hashimi had heard rumors that she and her cohort would transfer to American universities, but she was skeptical that would happen. “I was afraid that schools wouldn’t trust Afghan girls,” she says. (A few of the women declined to continue their studies, choosing instead to find a job.) But, in fact, 10 universities were interested in hosting them: Arizona State, Brown, Cornell, Delaware, DePaul, Georgia State, North Texas , Suffolk, Wisconsin-Milwaukee and West Virginia. Some of them offered immediate acceptance, while others required more extensive applications. In November, Hashimi, to his surprise, received an email from Brown asking him to write separate essays about his personal history, academic interests, and goals and dreams. She didn’t have a computer, so she wrote her essays on her cell phone. After that, she says, she checked her email “every second.”
Acceptances for AUW women arrived in December. Fourteen women ended up at Brown; nine at Cornell; 67 at Arizona State; 15 at the University of Delaware. All would benefit from full scholarships, covered by donations collected by the universities; AUW has estimated the total need to be $32 million. Each school had a different arrangement: at Arizona State University, women were welcome to enroll for up to eight semesters; some who already had AUW credits were able to enter as juniors or seniors. The 10 DePaul students were asked to stay until they had completed their undergraduate degrees, on the condition that they did not interrupt their studies and that they graduated in five years.
Other schools offered a more precarious arrangement: at Cornell, women were welcomed as “guest interns” for the school year; at Brown, the 14 women were considered “non-graduating special students for the 2021–22 academic year.” No one there was sure what would happen after May.