Jewish professors are fleeing America for Canada.
Wait, let me start over.
Three American professors are departing one elite North American university (Yale) for another (University of Toronto). Two—historians Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore—are a married couple, and while both are esteemed profs, if we’re talking about the rule of three-makes-a-trend, given the linkage in two of the three cases, I’m not sure this counts as such. They’re also a half-Jewish and half-not-Jewish couple who are on leave from Yale, which is to say, they have not in fact quit their jobs in the States, and retain their current Yale affiliation. If they decide to go back, presumably the door remains open. (This is what “on leave” means.) It sounds less momentous in those terms, even if “long-term” is how long Shore and Snyder say they will stay, having recently survived an entire winter in Toronto.
The third is Jason Stanley, a name I was familiar with because he is also a prolific and at times mildly controversial social media poster, but he is also, I now know, a philosophy professor so A-list that it has made headlines whenever he’s changed jobs, even when geopolitics didn’t enter into it. Stanley, it appears, has left Yale more definitively, but the same Chronicle of Higher Education interview I just linked to gives the impression that Shore and Snyder also jumped ship. (Stanley tells Vanity Fair their entire families are best friends.)
People change jobs all the time without this making the news. And academics move from the U.S. to Canada—and vice versa—to take jobs all the time as well, something I should know, having spouse-trailed from the U.S. to Toronto in 2015, when my husband took an assistant professor job in the sciences at the University of Toronto. (It’s a huge university, so I have no personal connections to disclose.) But it is not 2015 (yes, intentional) and these professors are—as much as any professors are—household names. It’s in the news because it’s news.
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The significance of the three-prof brain-drain requires explanation. First, these are not just professors but important professors. This means that they have more job-market options than your typical would-be prof, who’d have been struggling even before the current wave of defundings (not all of which can be pinned on Donald Trump, who has yet to control York University).
But their big-shot-ness also means that whichever jobs they take, it’s not for lack of options. They’re not representative of academia, but they’re useful in illustrating the choices others might make if they could. It says something about where things are at in the States if American academia is prepared to hemorrhage its major talents.
Second: these are all experts in totalitarianism. Snyder and Shore are historians of the Holocaust and modern European Jewish history. Snyder wrote, among others, On Tyranny, and was recently described at Maclean’s as “America’s most famous (living) historian.” Stanley, author of books including How Fascism Works, is one of the go-to authorities on, uh, how fascism works. If he thinks it’s gotten too fascistic in the United States, this is saying something. What it’s saying is not definitive—either he knows fascism when he sees it, or this is a case of, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail—but a generous and I think sensible interpretation is, he knows when there’s a reason to be alarmed, and alarmed he most certainly is. So a piece of this story is, people who know what’s what on the ‘the time has come’ front are getting out while they can.
Third: the Jewish angle. Stanley has spelled out that his study of fascism is informed by his own Jewish background. And Shore, when interviewed on her move by TorontoToday had this to say: “I’m both a Jew and a historian of the 1930s, so the neurotic catastrophism is perhaps overdetermined: it’s always been clear to me that the lesson of 1933 is that it’s better to get out sooner rather than late.” Snyder, well, he has a Jewish wife. They have kids. One thinks about the future.
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But we are not looking at 1930s Germany here. The Trump administration is complicated (and, in my view, suboptimal) for the Jews, but Jews are not the people it’s rounding up. The typical American tenured professor is not moving to Canada, even if you just limit yourself to the ones who are Jewish.
Tufts political science professor Daniel Drezner wrote a piece headlined “Why I Am Not Going Anywhere,” explaining why he, personally, is not moving to Canada or otherwise away from the U.S., like his famous fellow professors.
What prompted this announcement? The newsletter does not make clear whether non-U.S. universities are trying to recruit Drezner. While discretion in such matters is understandable, this does seem relevant to the question of why one is staying in one’s current job. The framing of the newsletter hints that there are universities abroad desperate to take him on, and maybe there are!
The subtext—or not even subtext, as it’s much of the newsletter—is that Tufts just so happens to be the university where Rumeysa Ozturk is a graduate student. Ozturk, a.k.a. the young woman whose broad-daylight government abduction in Massachusetts was the latest but perhaps most viscerally jarring wakeup call regarding speech suppression under the Trump administration. Ozturk’s ‘crime’ appears to be that she co-authored a pro-Palestinian student newspaper op-ed, and had the audacity to do so as an international student.
Here, I could digress on the trouble with right-wing authoritarianism done in the name of helping Jews, but I will limit myself to one anecdote: an American Jewish acquaintance with a background and political bent not dissimilar to my own posted to social media that they of all people were attending a pro-Palestine rally because this was the only place where Ozturk’s imprisonment was being protested. I got where they were coming from. But we’re talking about American academics fleeing to Canada, so let this be a topic for another time.
Anyway, Tufts, in particular, doesn’t come off great. Not good publicity. So I could see why, if you’re a critic of the Trump administration and a professor at Tufts, you might feel as if you owed the world an explanation. Even if no one had asked.
The reasons Drezner gives for staying are that he has been named a dean (unclear why a promotion would preclude emigrating if you thought emigration was necessary, but doubtless a factor in decision-making) and a principled belief that he owes it to America, and its educational system, to stay where he is. I don’t doubt his principles, but also think it’s important to be real about the academic job market, and the likelihood that ‘plum job abroad’ awaits… well, virtually anyone apart from the three above-mentioned academics. Even if he has dozens such offers and is too modest to say, it’s also the case that whether we’re academics or not, the path of least resistance tends to win out.
I could issue a statement about how I plan on staying in Canada, but this would be less about my criticisms of the Trump administration (which are uh plentiful) and more about the fact that I am a middle-aged individual who lives and works in Canada.
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There’s a line from one of Jason Stanley’s numerous statements about his decision to switch from Yale to UofT that I keep thinking about. It’s in the publication where he explains that “the decision was entirely because of the political climate in the United States.”
Does anyone change jobs “entirely” for one reason? If he had an offer from the University of Toronto—if he’d been mulling an offer from Toronto “for a number of years,” wouldn’t he have had to have applied, or at least gestured at being open to such things, prior to the current political moment? The Q&A in The Chronicle of Higher Education also includes a quote from Stanley, “It’s tragic for me to leave Yale,” so he may be prone to speaking hyperbolically.
But if the “entirely” is accurate, then it reads as sort of insulting to the university Stanley is moving to, and, perhaps, to Canada more generally. It makes Canada seem like a last resort escape hatch. Maybe he realized it sounded like that, and that’s why in the Chronicle interview he speaks of his full-time move to the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy as “an enormous opportunity.” A generous interpretation is that “entirely” was a way of speaking out against Trump while sparing Yale’s feelings.
If the ‘that’s it I’m moving to Canada!’ discourse from Americans grates, it’s partly that everyone knows that most Americans are doing nothing of the kind. But it’s also that it treats Canada like a second-rate U.S., with a nice house (perhaps throw in a cottage as well) and dream job waiting for any
As pointed out by Toronto Life writer Steve Kupferman in 2016, Canada does not put out a great big enthusiastic welcome mat for American emigrants like himself, and me:
“In the popular imagination, there’s a persistent notion that the border between America and Canada isn’t a real thing. Americans are used to the idea that Canadians are their friends—and friends don’t treat friends like potential risks to national security, right? So imagine my surprise when I learned that getting permanent residency (the equivalent of an American green card) wasn’t just a matter of filing some paperwork and waiting for my documents to come in the mail.”
Moreover, academia specifically is grim on the jobs front wherever you go. I can get behind the idea that Canada should ramp up its academic hiring. But seeing as it has not done so—and as there’s preference for Canadian applicants—it does not look like this is imminent.
I have seen grumblings along the lines of, Canada shouldn’t be investing in fancy profs from America at a time when so many Canadian academics are struggling, and in particular at a time when the whole point is to reject American domination. A part of me is like, fair point. Another part of me remembers learning about how Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany would face discrimination in North America or Britain… not (just) as Jews, but as Germans. As in, people thought they were Nazis.
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Because I’m not viewing the world from the vantage point of 2030, I don’t know exactly how to interpret these moves. Are these three profs a harbinger of a wave of emigration akin to the one that brought Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein to the States? It doesn’t seem implausible that nixing due process for non-citizens in the U.S. legally will be a first step towards violating the rights of citizens. Stranger things have happened.
Or is this all a nothingburger, and the profs on leave from Yale will return to the land of the Ivy League and Target and free next-day shipping in 2028 or five minutes from when I type this?
I don’t think there is a clear-cut answer to whether it is the right thing to do to stay or leave. Such decisions, however rationalized, are the result of push-pull factors beyond what’s knowable to outsiders, or even to the person making the decision.
It’s easy to snark (and I have snarked) about the self-importance of academics issuing statements about their career decisions, but at the end of the day I think any academic—any American!—speaking out against Trump under their real name at this point in time is doing something courageous.
My prediction is not that Americans will leave American academia en masse. There, the defunding of academia will just mean seeking jobs outside academia. (Maybe finding jobs, maybe not! Trump seems remarkably blasé about the grumblings of a horde of the newly-unemployed-thanks-to-his-administration across many sectors.) And while Jewish Americans by and large vote Democrat and have specific reasons to be unnerved by authoritarian tendencies, there’s an American exceptionalism woven into the American Jewish experience that makes Jewish life anywhere other than the U.S. or Israel seem suspect.
But students, researchers and professors—Jewish and otherwise—who aren’t U.S. citizens but were considering the States or giving it a try may think twice. And who could blame them? Getting abducted by the government for writing an op-ed while not a citizen seems like bad stuff.
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The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
