The Art of Resistance: Defending Academic Freedom since 1933 | Page 12

forty years as Assistant Secretary and then Secretary, offered this to thousands of refugee scholars. In Lord Ashby’s words, she offered ‘immediate and evident empathy toward each individual refugee’. By the end of WWII, over 2,600 scholars from the heartlands of Europe had been assisted. However, the Society’s battle for academic freedom and assistance to refugee scholars did not end in May 1945. Contrary to expectation, a new era of oppression dawned during the Cold War. Civil war in Greece, the expansion of Soviet control in Eastern Europe and the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, all sparked fresh waves of those forced into exile. In the 1960s, academic refugees from beyond the bounds of Europe came to the UK in increasing numbers. Many young, anti-apartheid activists escaping persecution in South Africa did not have the same academic