BY HANK REICHMAN
Amidst all the bashing of professors as left-wing ideological thugs (but also sensitive “snowflakes”) who seek only to indoctrinate vulnerable students, the reality that the great majority of faculty members go out of their way to advise, mentor, and assist their students, regardless of politics or personal characteristics, frequently without remuneration for such tasks, is too often ignored. But, in case you missed it, one professor at Lund University in Sweden went well beyond the call of duty: she dispatched a team of mercenaries into an Islamic State war zone to free one of her doctoral students and his family!
Here’s the story, condensed from coverage on the Swedish website “The Local:”
Charlotta Turner, professor in Analytical Chemistry, received a text message from her student Firas Jumaah in 2014 telling her to to assume he would not finish his thesis if he had not returned within a week.
He and his family were, he told her, hiding out in a disused bleach factory, with the sounds of gunshots from ISIS warriors roaming the town reverberating around them. Jumaah, who is from Iraq, is a member of the ethno-religious group Yazidi hated by Isis.
“I had no hope then at all,” Jumaah told Lund’s University Magazine LUM. “I was desperate. I just wanted to tell my supervisor what was happening. I had no idea that a professor would be able to do anything for us.” . . .
But Turner was not willing to leave her student to die without trying to do something.
“What was happening was completely unacceptable,” she told LUM. “I got so angry that IS was pushing itself into our world, exposing my doctoral student and his family to this, and disrupting the research.”
She contacted the university’s then security chief Per Gustafson. . . .
Over a few days of intense activity, Gustafson hired a security company which then arranged the rescue operation.
A few days later two Landcruisers carrying four heavily-armed mercenaries roared into the area where Jumaah was hiding, and sped him away to Erbil Airport together with his wife and two small children.
Jumahh has completed his Ph.D and is now employed by a pharmaceuticals company in Malmo.
Now that’s mentoring! And how dare a group like ISIS “disrupt the research!”
Firas Jumahh and Charlotta Turner
