Three Yale professors, all outspoken critics of U.S. President Donald Trump, have left the Ivy League university for positions in Canada amid the government’s attacks on higher education.
Yale Daily News announced Thursday that Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy, is moving on to a new role at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.
He will join former Yale history professors Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore. Snyder and Shore are married and left the U.S. during the November elections.
Stanley told the Daily Nous, a website for philosophy professionals, that despite being happy at Yale, he chose to leave as a result of the political climate in the U.S. and because he wants to raise his children in a country “that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship.”
His father and grandmother fled Berlin in 1939, Stanley told The Guardian.
In an interview with the British publication, he said recent happenings at Columbia University — including its decision to follow a government directive ordering a crackdown on student protests and to conduct an internal review of its Middle Eastern studies department to avoid $400 million losses in federal funding — played a significant role in his decision to head north of the border.
“When I saw Columbia completely capitulate, and I saw this vocabulary of, well, we’re going to work behind the scenes because we’re not going to get targeted — that whole way of thinking pre-supposes that some universities will get targeted, and you don’t want to be one of those universities, and that’s just a losing strategy,” he said.
His departure comes weeks after U.S. immigration authorities detained recent Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil at his home in New York City for the role he played in last spring’s pro-Palestinian campus protests.
Khalil is currently being held in a detention centre in Louisiana. He has permanent legal status in the U.S. At the time of his arrest, Khalil’s wife, an American citizen, was eight months pregnant.
“Columbia was just such a warning,” Stanley said, adding, “I see Yale trying not to be a target. And, as I said, that’s a losing strategy.” he continued.
Yale University has not commented directly on the loss of some of its faculty members or the actions at Columbia. However, in late January, Maurie McInnis, Yale’s president, told Yale News the school was “prioritizing working with legislators behind the scenes while limiting public statements.”
“I am not always certain that a lot of public pronouncements make a difference, and I would rather be focused on the work that does matter for Yale,” she told the publication, saying that the most impactful work is to “continue to advocate for the mission of higher education with lawmakers who are ultimately going to be setting policy and funding priorities,” she continued.
Yale has responded by building various task forces to decipher Trump’s executive orders and advocate for the interests of the university, Yale News reported.