The Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA), which supports persecuted academics worldwide, celebrates its 80th anniversary this year. Today, as never before, intellectual leaders in every country need the freedom to teach, research and publish the global solutions on which future generations will depend.

Speaking in October 1933 on behalf of CARA, then known as the Academic Assistance Council, Albert Einstein urged a packed audience at London's Royal Albert Hall to “resist the powers which threaten to suppress intellectual and individual freedom”. This was the first major UK fund-raising event to support German academics, many of them Jewish, to whom Adolf Hitler had begun to close German universities.

Among the many helped by CARA during the ensuing years was the German neurosurgeon Ludwig Guttmann. He set up the Stoke Mandeville Spinal Injuries Unit near Aylesbury, UK, where he revolutionized the treatment of people with spinal-cord injuries, for whom palliative care had previously been the only option. In 1948 he founded the Stoke Mandeville Games, which were retrospectively adopted by the International Olympic Committee as the Paralympic Games in 1984.

Today, CARA runs regional programmes focusing on Iraq, Syria and Zimbabwe. In parallel with its core rescue efforts to provide sanctuary to academics at risk, CARA works to sustain those who choose to remain in crisis-affected countries.

Recent achievements include establishing a virtual lecture hall at the University of Zimbabwe in Harare in 2012 to revive the teaching of health and veterinary sciences. Our work is supported by the CARA Scholars at Risk UK Universities Network, now incorporating 95 universities.

To mark our anniversary, we have established an annual 'Einstein Lecture' to explore the link between science and civilization in a modern context (see www.cara1933.org).