Watch Open Mind Interview with IIE’s Allan Goodman and Mark Angelson

Allan Goodman, IIE President, and Mark Angelson, IIE Treasurer and Scholar Rescue Fund Chairman, were recently interviewed by Richard Heffner as the featured guests for the half-hour weekly PBS television talk show, Open Mind.  In the interview, Goodman and Angelson discuss the history of the Institute and the work of the IIE Scholar Rescue Fund.

The IIE Scholar Rescue Fund connection was especially significant for the host, because he worked with renowned broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, who was IIE’s first Assistant Director in the 1930’s.

In 1932, at age 24, Murrow was hired as Assistant Director by IIE's founder and Director, Dr. Stephen P. Duggan. Murrow's main assignment at IIE was to identify European scholars who were at risk in their home countries and arrange for them to lecture and teach at U.S. colleges and universities. This early forerunner of IIE's Scholar Rescue Fund was first called the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars, and later expanded to help other "Displaced Foreign Scholars" fleeing Nazi repression throughout Europe. 

Hundreds of European scholars were successfully relocated to America, including Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, Thomas Mann, Jacques Maritain, Herbert Marcuse, Felix Bloch, Kurt Lewin, Otto Nathan, and Hans Morgenthau, with support from the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations and generous hosting by American campuses. Murrow worked with the Emergency Committee until early 1937, overlapping the first year of his long career at CBS News.