Community Engagement

Over the last few years, my service has shifted from academic organizations, journals and university administration to helping refugee students at my university as well as refugees in my community, in New York State and further afield. I have primarily focused on helping refugees pursue higher education and build careers that use their education but have also helped with other matters, such as acquiring legal services and preparing for naturalization exams. In 2017, I helped organize a meeting at the SUNY Global Center of a group of university officials, faculty and NGOs that would subsequently become the University Alliance for Refugees and At-Risk Migrants (UARRM). Many international students and immigrants routinely enroll in my courses, and several have, over the years, asked me for help when it became dangerous for them to return home. In August 2021, an Afghan Fulbright Scholar came to me after the fall of Kabul. I helped him as well as a dozen other Afghan Fulbright Scholars in New York State find free legal assistance in support of their asylum applications, primarily through a special Cornell University Law School Asylum Clinic. Subsequently, efforts to mobilize UAlbany leadership and staff to help this Afghan student and another Afghan Fulbrighter at UAlbany expanded into discussions of how UAlbany and other universities could and should help refugees, as articulated in "Universities should play greater role in supporting refugees," a June 2022 Albany Times Union OpEd that I co-authored with UAlbany President Havidán Rodríguez. In August 2022, President Rodriguez formalized these efforts by establishing the 16-member UAlbany Advisory Committee on Refugees, comprised of senior university leadership, key staff, myself and another faculty representative. In 2023, I led a committee subgroup to form the UAlbany Private Sponsorship Group that applied to the US State Department's Welcome Corps on Campus program administered by the Community Sponsorship Hub, a consortium of non-profit organizations, that resettled academically qualified refugee students through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP). Our UAlbany group raised sufficient grants and donation funding to support a refugee student and UAlbany became one of 17 US colleges and universities that sponsored one of the 30 refugee students who began their studies in Fall 2024 as members of the inaugural cohort of the Welcome Corps on Campus program. After Welcome Corps on Campus was suspended in January 2025, the Community Sponsorship Hub developed the "Higher Education Access Program for Students of Refugee Background" for "connecting universities and colleges with qualified students of refugee background in their state who meet their admissions criteria" and UAlbany partnered on this new program as well.