Aryeh neier oral history — columbia center for oral history research

His nearly twenty years leading the organization saw Neier expand his focus on the protection of free speech, human rights, and justice within the post-Cold War global system. D'Souza: Aryeh Neier was and is a legend, as you know. Aryeh is a very commanding presence. I mean, there were problems. And then it became obvious that he was our champion.

I remember doing a tour in America to meet various donors and persuade them to continue funding us, and they did. I never felt that, even though we came to occupy in short order the biggest slice of the pie of the resources. I got to hire an assistant, and it was just her and me and a couple of projects that were ongoing that I inherited.

I had no budget or any promise of a budget. First thing I did was take everything I could learn about what had been talked about and turned it into a white paper manifesto that Soros and the board would sign off on that I could use as the basis to build the programs, which I did. Mutasah: I think the third phase that I saw in the evolution of OSF was when there was now, I think, a sense of, this is an organization, this is a world institution.

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But as you look at its future, what are some of the ways in which it should reimagine itself, in order to capture mandates that are more contemporary, and that are responsive to the reality of the world as it is evolving? But here was a recognition now that open society, as an ethos, could be seen as an ongoing struggle against monopolization of power, against repression, against organized forms of suppression of human rights from states, from nonstate actors, and so on, the role of corporates, the role of international institutions and international organizations.

A more complete strategic view, as it were, of the world and the way open society challenges played out in the world and therefore the way you needed to reconceptualize and reimagine an organization, such as OSF, to make sure that it was supporting all those that are engaged, as it were, in this ongoing struggle for open society.

Because here was a strategic thinker, here was a public intellectual who had contributed in the public domain, thinking right from questions of surveillance and so on, in his early writings, brought to where he is thinking about questions of free speech versus hate speech, in for instance, his take on the Skokie [National Socialist Party of America v.