The Consortium’s work to assist Afghan undergraduate women featured in The New York Times Magazine

“She’s at Brown. Her Heart’s Still in Kabul. In their first year at U.S. universities, women who escaped the Taliban are struggling to adjust — and to reckon with what they left behind.”

August 9, 2022, By Maddy Crowell

Photo: Suhaila Hashimi at Brown. Credit…Sabiha Çimen/Magnum, for The New York Times

On August 9, 2022, The New York Times Magazine published an article detailing the harrowing journey of 148 young Afghan women evacuated to the United States in August 2021 after Kabul, Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. They were meant to be evacuated to Bangladesh where they would be enrolled at Asian University for Women (A.U.W.) to complete their undergraduate degrees, however, circumstances changed and they eventually landed at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin. 

When the New University in Exile Consortium learned about these women, we were determined to help. As the article describes, “The situation of the A.U.W. women exposed a gap in the system: The women were too old to be placed in public schools, but they were too young to be considered scholars or professors, the sorts of figures that the New University in Exile Consortium focused on. ‘This was the first time we got into the business, so to speak, of rescuing,’ Mack says. ‘So, we expanded our mission.'”

Though now enrolled in university, these young women continue to face daunting challenges. Read the full article, linked here.