By MARTY LEVINE
Helping scholars from troubled places around the world — particularly Afghans before the Taliban takeover and Ukrainians during the current war — has been “challenging, but certainly the most rewarding work I have ever done,” says Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs faculty member and one of this year’s Chancellor’s Distinguished Awardees for public service. “It sort of took over my life for four years.”
Murtazashvili, who is also a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, earned the Pitt honor for “making Pitt a place of refuge for at-risk scholars from Ukraine, Iran, Afghanistan and other countries.” This effort has included raising $2 million in their support, hosting a dozen of the scholars, and assembling and organizing student volunteers to provide emergency asylum assistance to 6,000 Afghan citizens. Much of the work has been done through the Center for Governance and Markets, where she is the founding director.
“It’s been amazing to raise these resources and get support from so many organizations and individuals” during this endeavor, Murtazashvili says.
It all began when she spoke with one Afghan scholar, Omar Sadr, about six months before the fall of Afghanistan’s government, only to find that he had been receiving bomb threats from the Taliban while the U.S. government was still maintaining it was a safe atmosphere.
“I just said, this is untenable,” she recalls. Sadr was the first scholar she brought here to Pitt (see January 2022 University Times article). “I thought that there was this huge need to do much more and that we had the ability to do much more as a University.”
Thus began an Afghan asylum program here, with the help of 10 GSPIA students who aided with the necessary visas. When that country’s collapse quickly came, Pitt’s volunteer group became de facto experts for a lot of other efforts to help. One student even set up a new nonprofit at the Center for Governance and Markets to handle the thousands of new requests, mobilizing many additional volunteers.
“It was wonderful to see this network that this brief time has given birth to,” Murtazashvili says, “Because of the work we are doing, we still get contacts. As long as we have the resources we will continue.”
Murtazashvili was also working in Ukraine for years before the war (see September 2022 UTimes article) in association with Tymofiy Mylovanov and his partners in Ukraine. Mylovanov, once her professor at Pitt, was soon to join the Ukrainian government.
When Russia invaded that country, she got calls to replicate the Afghanistan effort for Ukraine — although Ukrainians asked scholars be supported in their Ukrainian posts, both to avoid a brain drain and because they had the chance to fight for their country. Murtazashvili’s team has since raised money for these scholars and even included Ukrainian scholars in Pitt grant proposals.
Where possible, she says, the aim should be “to keep the academic structure intact” in each country. “I don’t like the term ‘rescue,’ or ‘at risk,’ or ‘threatened’” for these scholars, she adds. “We really want to treat them just like everybody else.” Any sense of normalcy “is really important for them,” and “once you stop doing academic work, it is very hard to get back to.”
“As a native Pittsburgher, I’m really proud to do this here, connecting with many local organizations that work with refugees” and having Pitt lead the effort, she says. In fact she would like to see the University build programs around what is now one of the largest Afghan scholar groups outside of Afghanistan.
“We’re really proud of how the University stepped up,” she continues, citing the work of the University Center for International Studies, the School of Law, the provost’s office and her dean, as well as Pitt’s Office of International Services, which helped to secure scholars’ visas.
She is now working on turning these programs into a Pitt project called the Heart of Asia, to best organize it and add new efforts. It will include a collaborative among the scholars who have come here “to really integrate them into the community of scholars” not just in Pittsburgh but in their fields more broadly.
“We’re not comfortable to study the world from behind our desks here in Pittsburgh,” she says. “That’s how we know things are happening in certain places before they are going to explode. We’re ready for the next crisis because of the way that we work. Learning from other people means the world to us.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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