The Art of Resistance: Defending Academic Freedom since 1933 | Page 4

foreword Anne Lonsdale cbe, CARA Chair

Since May 1933, when Hitler closed the universities of Germany to
Jews, the demands on CARA have not stopped. The invasion of Iraq
in 2003 precipitated attacks on the universities and the
professions in that unfortunate country, which continue to this
day; the restrictions under the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe
threaten the work of higher education institutions and the lives of
their faculty; now we are witnessing an escalation of the Syrian
conflict. The need goes on.
It may be, however, that amongst the thousands helped over the
last 80 years, CARA’s support for those from the ‘Arts’ – fine art,
music, literature, performing arts – is less obvious and less visible
to the outside world; that the terminology CARA has tended to
use, such as ‘scientist’, ‘scholar’, ‘academic’ and ‘university’, has
obscured its support of this significant group.
In 1933, CARA (then the Academic Assistance Council) and The
Courtauld Institute of Art joined forces with others to help rescue
and relocate the Warburg Library and members of its staff to
safety in London. The Art Historians, Ernst Gombrich and Nikolaus
Pevsner, and the Austrian ethnomusicologist, Dr Erich Moritz von
Hornbostel (credited with forming the Berlin School of Music) were
also amongst those helped in the 1930s, as was a very young Lucian
Freud, who accompanied Sigmund and other family members to
safety in England in 1938. More recently, Hanaa Mallalah, an Iraqi
artist and CARA Fellow – who I am delighted to see has contributed
work to the auction – was supported at SOAS, and CARA is
currently supporting two young Syrian Fellows from the fields of
musicology and drama.
In this our 80th anniversary year, with the emergence of a
powerful art resistance movement in the Middle East, CARA
launched The Art of Resistance: Defending Academic Freedom, an
art competition rolled out across UK art colleges and university
art departments, with Maggi Hambling, Jane McAdam-Freud and
Debby Swallow as judges. Through the competition and this

auction, both important awareness-raising and fundraising
initiatives, CARA has sought to make its support of those under
attack within the Arts more visible, and the response from the
Arts Community has been phenomenal.
CARA will always have work to do in the UK for those forced to
seek asylum or a period of sanctuary when it has become
impossible for them to continue their work at home in safety. But,
increasingly, it is collaborating with partners to help those who
have sought safety in neighbouring countries or those who, despite
the risks, continue their work and teaching to help keep their
institutions open at home.
Created in the 1930s by British universities with a common aim,
CARA still depends on its strong partnerships with the CARA
Scholars at Risk UK Universities Network, to which it hopes to
enlist many more Arts institutions. UK academics understand the
damage done when a Lecturer realises that self-censorship has
become a necessity, now that a secret policeman is a regular part
of the audience. Is it better to give your students at least the ‘safe’
half of the lecture and keep your job? Or risk everything and
continue to speak out? Or to leave? In both the latter cases, your
students lose and a generation grows up with a faulty and
inadequate understanding.
If the work of higher education institutions is corrupted or
silenced, where will the truth come from? And how will it be
preserved and communicated to the future? Our common
intellectual house will be built on sand. The threat posed by
dangerous or tyrannical regimes is a personal tragedy and a matter
of deep concern to all of us in the higher education sector. But it
is also a profound threat to society as a whole. That is why CARA’s
work matters today and why we continue to need your support.
The moving stories shared by our contributing artists in this
publication bear witness to Theresa Bayer’s prescient words…
‘Artists are the proverbial canaries in the coalmine. When we stop
singing, it’s a sure sign of repressive times ahead.’