Most Syrian refugees fight for sanctuary at Europe’s borders – but Reem Doukmak found it on Google. So is the story of the PhD student who swapped Homs for Warwick an example of elitism, or a model that could help build a better future?

Walking though the calm, leafy campus at Warwick university, which is currently showing off its stunning autumn colours, Reem Doukmak says: “I think I’ve maybe even started to take things for granted, just like the people here. For instance, taking the bus – you never think that it’s not going to come – or that there is food, electricity, heating. At some point, you start to think that life is easy.”

None of these things are a given for this 33-year-old Syrian academic who, not so long ago, was teaching English as a foreign language at the al-Baath university in Homs. There, one of the most embattled cities in Syria’s terrible war, the buses to work often didn’t come, because of fighting on the roads, or checkpoints that blocked and lengthened journeys. Classes were routinely curtailed because students could hear shooting and couldn’t concentrate – they could only think of getting back home before things got worse.

Walking through the huge al-Baath campus, Doukmak would hear gunfire, but not know where it was coming from, or where to take cover, or she would feel rockets shaking the earth. “People wake up every day and make some sort of risk assessment for the day,” she says. “You know something bad might happen, but you do it anyway, because you want to live your life in the space that’s left.”

Now having been in the UK for two years, Doukmak – who did her masters at Warwick in 2007 through a highly competitive British-Syrian scholarship – remembers reaching a point when, constantly sick from the stress, she couldn’t handle Homs anymore. “Syria was a peaceful place. We used to hear about fighting and bombing in Iraq, in Palestine, but we never experienced it in Syria in my generation. That’s why I found it really hard to cope, to accept this as part of life.”

Doukmak started to seek alternatives, and looked for grants, overseas programmes or scholarships. “And that’s how I found Cara, by accident,” she says. “What you find on Google, you don’t know that it will change your life.”

Cara – the Council for At Risk Academics – is a UK charity set up in 1933 which helped academics expelled from Germany’s universities, and those facing internment by the UK, including neuroscientist Marthe Vogt and molecular biologist Max Perutz. Since then, it has been helping academics from all over the world, propelled by the humanitarian desire to relieve suffering, but also by the need to defend learning, to safeguard a nation’s intelligence wealth in the understanding that it will be needed to help rebuild countries once wars have ended. Currently, Cara works with 110 universities around the UK and has assisted 140 people, plus 200 dependents. The academics it helps these days – by matching them to a sponsor university, by contributing to living costs and by facilitating laborious visa applications – are predominantly from Syria.

Academics coming to the UK through Cara might be working on a PhD – as is the case for Doukmak – or engaged in postdoctoral research, but in all cases they are here because a British university has waived its academic fees and often helped with living costs, too. At a time when universities might be more focused on the potential income streams provided by international students, when many higher education institutions are reliant on such fees to function, this kind of work with Cara seems to be bucking the trend – and perhaps finding a way round the questions about refugee numbers that have recently become so vexed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Austrian-born molecular biologist Max Perutz was one of the first beneficiaries of the Cara charity, which was set up in 1933 to provide refuge for academics fleeing Nazi Germany.

“They understand that they are helping people much like themselves,” says Stephen Wordsworth, Cara’s executive director, who adds that the pairing of academic to university is always premised on a mutually beneficial collaborative fit, in research terms. “Higher education is a global business, so people recognise that they have some responsibility when things go wrong.” And, he adds, there is an impetus to preserve global intellectual capital. “If one country’s intellectuals and academics are killed or scattered to the four corners of the world and end up working as taxi drivers, then we are all losing something – those people have something in their heads that is useful not just to their own countries, but more widely.”

Applicants to this scheme have to satisfy the UK’s stringent entry requirements – some are initially rejected but then succeed on appeal – and Cara, which is helping five or six people each week, says it hasn’t yet hit a wall. But clearly, in the current climate of hostility and panic about migrants, and with the Conservative government clamping down on entry routes, this can’t be an easy thing to navigate. Speaking at the Conservative party conference in Manchester earlier this month, home secretary Theresa May hardened her anti-migrant rhetoric and restated her determination to limit student visas – the current restrictions on which are already, critics say, adversely affecting universities trying to attract international students.

Michael Barer, professor at Leicester university’s college of medicine, biological sciences and psychology, is closely involved alongside Cara with the process of sponsoring academics. “It’s a lot of work to get these things to come home, so the system as I’ve experienced it isn’t particularly comfortable with this,” he says. “Every case is taken as new, so you’re always starting from scratch.” In his experience, there is a lot of willingness at the university end, but, he adds: “I’ve no doubt [the government] have made life a lot more difficult. I’d love it to be a lot simpler, so that we can find space for bright and able people who have a real academic contribution to make.”

Now working with two sponsored Syrian researchers, Barer has in the past engaged with an Iraqi colleague who specialised in a groundbreaking diagnostic system for tuberculosis, with whom he is still in regular contact. He describes working alongside such academics as “a breath of fresh air, genuinely building capacity in intellectual life over shared intellectual aspirations”.

Of course, the reality of the entry system to the UK is that not everyone is assisted. “If a Syrian academic gets sponsored through a British university, it is breaking the norm – which is that it is very, very difficult indeed [to get] visas,” says Chris Doyle at the Council for Arab-British Understanding (Caabu), a London-based advocacy group. “It’s almost a lockdown for Syrians coming here,” he adds. “I’ve spoken to a lot of Syrians who have despaired, even for relatives trying to just come and visit them here.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Homs has been hit by fierce fighting between rebels and forces loyal to Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. Photograph: Reuters

Inevitably, this raises the issue of cherrypicking: whether it is only a certain kind of Syrian that the UK will help, and whether a charity such as Cara is reinforcing this sort of elitism. But, says Doyle, there is a wider appreciation of this approach, a realisation that “it is an investment ultimately in the future of Syria”.

Academics from that country are here on the understanding that, when safe to do so, they want to return; they are committed to rebuilding Syria. “Getting the education system back up and running is going to be vital,” says Doyle, of an academic infrastructure that has been pummelled: many universities, outside of Damascus, are not currently functioning, and one in five schools have been rendered unusable by Syria’s war. Moreover, Doyle adds, all sorts of academic research is going to be critical to efforts to rebuild Syria: “There’s a raft of issues, including the psychological impact, agricultural research, environmental damage, legal and transitional justice issues – these are just examples. At some point, there’s going to be a proper of assessment of what the academic and research needs will be.”

The project, though, is premised on there being a postwar period that enables such rebuilding efforts – sadly, the experience of working with Iraqi academics, many of whom returned to that country when the fighting formally ended, has shown that is not always the case. When Islamic State took over Mosul last year, they shut down its acclaimed university and lecturers were sacked, arrested and tortured. Just last month, three academics from the university were executed by Isis. And in August, the group beheaded the 82-year-old, world-renowned antiques scholar Khaled al-Assad, hanging his body in the main square of the ancient city of Palmyra, after he refused to reveal where precious artefacts had been stored for safekeeping.

Some international organisations – for example, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters without Borders – have meanwhile been engaged in helping Syrian media workers who are trying to flee the war. And the Asfari Foundation is a notable example of a charity providing masters-degree grants in the UK for many young Syrians.

But while in the UK, academics from war-ravaged countries in the Middle East live an in-between existence, dedicated to their work in this country, but longing to go back home, to be with friends and family, to re-engage with their own academic networks, research, colleagues and students.

Now a student herself – her PhD is on drama as an aid to teaching English to refugee children, and she has been on research field trips to Syrian refugee camps in Turkey – Doukmak instantly smiles when she recalls her former students at Homs university. “I miss the teaching, going home tired after classes,” she says. “There is a relationship that grows with the students – you had fun, they learned things, you see them develop skills and grow. You miss their laughter and their noise.”

'We want to be part of the solution': universities reach out to refugees Read more

For her, being on campus, even in another country, is soothing in its familiarity – the classrooms, the lecture halls, the continuity of sorts within an academic environment. Walking around the campus or the nearby fields, she says, always makes her feel better. She spends her spare time volunteering at a Coventry community centre, or involved in awareness- and fund-raising for Syrian refugees.

Stopping for tea at the university’s arts centre, Doukmak says she feels supported and encouraged, but also helpless, wanting to do more for other Syrians. You get the sense that, glad of her current opportunities, Doukmak would not allow herself to complain, but also that, constitutionally, she isn’t really the carping type. She says that she finds the British obsession with timekeeping is a little curious, especially over mealtimes. “I see people so dedicated to lunchtime, to that hour of lunch, like they have a timer on their stomach,” she says. “What if you are not hungry? It’s good to be punctual but …”

And on the subject of eating, well, there’s the matter of the food here itself – how, she says, so much of it is ready-made and cold: sandwiches instead of hot, home-cooked meals. What does she most miss? “Molokhia,” she replies without pause, referring to a hit Middle Eastern dish made from the gluey, green leafy vegetable that perhaps isn’t widely available in Coventry (although if that’s wrong, she’d love to know about it). “Mom gave me some when I was in Syria, but I finished it. Now, if I know someone is going to that part of the world, I ask them to bring me some.”

Scheduled to finish her PhD by the end of next year, the question of what she will do next is the only one she can’t answer. She tries not to think about it until there comes a time when she is forced to decide. Of course, she wants to return to Syria. “England is a really nice place to live,” she says. “But nothing is better than home.”

• This article was amended on 28 October 2015. An earlier version said Cara was set up to provide refuge for academics then fleeing Nazi Germany from Marthe Vogt to Max Perutz. Neither Vogt nor Pertuz, who was Austrian, were helped out Nazi Germany, but Cara provided help when they were faced with internment by the UK.