Only two months into Trump’s reign, and three prominent Yale professors depart for a Canadian university. These professors started planning to leave the country back in November, which is amazing — they negotiated salaries and startup and facilities, and the University of Toronto cleared everything and made room and got them positions in only two months? That’s moving at light speed for a university.
Unfortunately the part of the story that won’t make the news is all the faculty who want to get out but can’t. Someone like me, who has a good reputation as a teacher, is a dime-a-dozen nobody; Canada has swarms of people who are excellent teachers, and plenty of people who are great researchers, so most of the professors in the US aren’t going to be able to emigrate (I’m also near the end of my career, so there’d be no point to hiring me.) A lucky few are going to be able to escape, and they’re going to have to move fast, before the pipeline is clogged.
And yeah, if I were 20 years younger I’d be putting an application package together, and mailing them off to every college in Canada. Does the Northwest Territories have any openings? I’d take it. A shack on King William Island, with a population of auks needing biology training? Sign me up.
Irland is an English-language country. And it is part of EU and the Schengen region, so trade and travel over Europe is easy.
The Commonwealth countries beyond Canada are also English-language. Belize and former British Guyana are on your continent, along with plenty of Islands.
-BTW there are people who are worse off than you: Mano Singham has the links.
“Israeli snipers targeting Palestinian children?”
.https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2025/03/27/israeli-snipers-targeting-palestinian-children/#comments
-This below is from 2020.
Israrli snipers have a long history of targeting civilians
“Israeli snipers brag about deliberately crippling Gaza protesters”
.https://www.newarab.com/news/israeli-snipers-brag-about-deliberately-crippling-gaza-protesters
In the 1970s, Canada significantly expanded its university system, enabled in no small part by the availability of American academics leaving over the Vietnam war. We could be well-positioned to take advantage of this again — not only recruiting Americans but academics from other countries who might otherwise go to the US.
Unfortunately, Canada’s leaders are now largely averse to the kind of public investment necessary to seize this opportunity.
Looking back on the 50 years of educational decline, spurred by the all-too American values of capitalist greed and anti-intellectualism, I’m surprised they didn’t start leaving sooner.
I’m still waiting for an exodus of Canadians working in the US medical sectors. We’re probably past due for some Canadian doctor with a green card being harassed or arrested because they advocate for vaccination, or are a gynecologist, or just say something not boldly supportive of Trump to the wrong colleague.
@ 2
Neoliberalism marches on.
@1 birgerjohansson
Actually Ireland is not part of Schengen. In part because the UK wasn’t Schengen, and they didn’t want to have border controls at the Northern Irish border.
Mate, you’ll love it. They not only have spiders, rhey have trans rights spiders.
https://www.tarantulacanada.ca/gal/1/Typhochlaena/seladonia/4569
X-D
Any person under 60, with professional qualifications in any field — academia, medicine, the building trades, even hair-dressing or tailoring for pete’s sake — should be looking for opportunities to emigrate. Here’s a good place to start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_where_English_is_an_official_language
The world is wide and a whole lot of it speaks English. If you are fluent in another language, the list is even longer.
Sorry, PZ and my other fellow olds — we’re stuck. Nobody wants us.
nigeria is on the list but given you can still get prison time for being gay there, I don’t expect that to be an improvement on our trans rights situation – especially since no country is a vacuum and the success of fascists here will embolden them there. i heard even new zealand took a huge step backward on prime minister recently.
Bébé Mélange @9:
Seems to have had the opposite effect in Canada.
75% of Scientists in Nature Poll Weigh Leaving US
@8 Just an Organic Regular Expression
What about telephone sanitizers, management consultants and marketing executives‽
The telephone sanitizers might belong to the core MAGA demographic and be unwilling to leave.
Rob Grigjanis@10:
It was having a similar effect in Canada until Trump and crew started with their ’51st state’ rhetoric and made it personal. The polls were definitely showing a likelihood of the Conservative Party of Canada, led by a guy who was palling around with the anti-mask (and largely U.S.-backed) trucker convoy that shut down a good chunk of Ottawa, was highly likely to win due to dissatisfaction with our previous Prime Minister.
But after this, and especially after enormously petty things like Kristi Noem doing a stupid ’51st state’ stunt at a library that explicitly crosses the border and closing down Canadian access to the main entrance with completely unsubstantiated claims that the library was a major hub for drug trafficking… well, Trump et al have done the previously near-impossible and united Canada in a way that hasn’t been true for at least forty years. He’s actually got Alberta and Quebec standing together in agreement.
There’s nothing that gets a fractious family to stand together faster than an outsider openly threatening the family.
Not yet mentioned here is that the academics leaving are prominent scholars of the history of facism and totalitarianism.
Hasn’t Canada also been having some issues with an increase in reactionary politics? IIRC some of it has been lessened because of Trump’s tariffs, but the conservative party in Canada is still fairly solid and has a decent chance of winning the next election.
Canada has benefited from this in the past. I was a professor in an oceanography department largely founded by refugees from Yale and other American institutions.
The speaker at my convocation was Anatol Rapoport, who moved here in the Vietnam era.
As it says at the border: “Give us your wise, your educated, your ethical citizens – if you’ve no use for them, of course.”.
I would love to find somewhere to live that wasn’t full of, or controlled by, fascist xtian terrorist rtwingnuts. But, all countries are subject to infestation by them. I’ve been reading a lot about expat experiences, including this article. However, there are recent articles that warn: if you get soc. sec. payments in another country, that makes you a target for the ‘doge cockroaches’ to stop your payments.
Yes, I know I’ve written it a lot. But, it keeps being reinforced as true. Martha & the Vandellas: ‘nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide’.
nihilloligasan @16: Since Trudeau resigned and Trump went apeshit anti-Canada, the polls have done what I think is an unprecedented turn-around. From a projected Conservative majority to a likely Liberal majority, in a few weeks.
@18 shermanj
There are plenty of countries where that isn’t the case.
williamhyde @17: One of my favourite profs at the U of Toronto (undergrad and grad) was Nathan Isgur, who came to Canada as a so-called ‘draft dodger’ (aka ‘decent person who objected to the horror and found a way out’).
A brilliant guy, and a first-rate human being, taken from us far too early. More like him, please.
OT but related.
Latest headline.
Is this dumb or what?
Those 25% tariffs on steel, aluminum, and auto parts from Canada and Mexico have to make most US car prices go up.
There is no way that the auto makers will pay those tariffs without raising prices. If they don’t, they will be making selling cars and pickups at a loss. This isn’t a long term business strategy.
This is magical thinking and it is simply delusional.
(A minor point here but this isn’t libertarian free market capitalism either. Since when does the president set the prices for autos?)
Something I’ve noticed a lot and it bothers me is just how delusional and magical Trump’s thinking has been lately.
.1. He’s also been talking for months now about limiting the personal income tax. That revenue will be replaced by…tariffs on imports.
The math doesn’t add up.
The tariffs will bring in ca. $120 billion.
The personal income taxes for the US budget are $2.4 trillion plus another $1.2 trillion for Social Security.
So how is $120 billion in tariffs going to replace $2.4 trillion in personal income taxes?
He is off by a factor of 20 X here. It is impossible.
This is delusional magic thinking again.
.2. I mentioned the tariffs and auto prices above.
I don’t believe Trump is showing as much age related dementia as many people have claimed. He seems oriented to person, place, and time.
He can recognize and interact with a large number of people.
But some of his key policies don’t make any sense and are just impossible.
Maybe it is just me but wrecking a nation of 346 million people on the basis of the delusional and magical thinking of a 78 year man just doesn’t seem worth it.
Science is an English-language country! It is quite shaming to attend conferences or other academic events across Europe, and find (even in France!) that everything is in English. A couple of decades ago I applied for a job (I didn’t get it) at one of the Max Planck Institutes, in Berlin. The working language was English. At lunch, I asked the server for “Klein, bitte” of some vegetable, and the person showing me around said “That’s more German than half the researchers here know!”. France at least is already openly recruiting American scientists. I’ve no doubt other European countries are or will be doing so. Most American academic refugees will be unlikely to get American salaries, but they are still quite liveable and there are other advantages.
@24 KG
Dahlem or Mitte?
If you wanted to say, what I think you wanted to say, then “wenig” would have been more correct.
lasius@25,
Dahlem.
Thanks – if I find myself in the same situation again, I’ll use “wenig”. Those two words are a significant proportion of my German. I wanted to show willing, speaking to someone who couldn’t be assumed to understand English; and the words were understood.
Further to #24: When the physicists need burner phones, that’s when you know America’s changed. Belgian as well as French universities are already recruiting American scientists. UK: not so far. I wouldn’t be all that surprised if UK government warnings not to do so have been sent to vice-chancellors and from them to heads of department: Starmer is still trying to slime his way into Trump’s imperial favour.
@23, It’s not like the republicans have ever been good at math (trickle down theory, less votes wins elections, cutting services leads to better services, etc.).
@24 & @26 KG and @25 lasius, wrote: “Klein, bitte” and “wenig”
I reply: neither are optimal expressions. I would suggest “ein bischen” (literally, just a bite of and sometimes written “bisschen”)
And, regarding relocation, we are so old, we need a mild, temperate climate and becoming an expat causes massive complications on getting your retirement funds, soc. sec. payments, getting your income taxes done as well as the logistics of moving all the personal property including significant large archives of old books, data and equipment. It seems more and more impractical. We hope to just keep a low profile, while trying to work to improve things without attracting the attention of the rtwingnut jackbooted thugs
@ ^ I’ll use swear words bcoz they seem most apt ’bout now..
Sure fucking wish they weren’t.
@30 StevoR wrote: @ ^ I’ll use swear words bcoz they seem most apt ’bout now..
I inquire: StevoR I’m unclear who you were referring to with the @ ^. My comment was directly above yours and I certainly didn’t remark about any swear words. I understand, and don’t have a problem with swear words in the context of our desperate, decaying society, damn it! /sarcasimus maximus
Nein, never pass up the opportunity to play with your words. Bitte ein Bit is perfectly correct German for “Please, a bit.”, and a well known slogan from Bitburger brewery.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitburger_Brewery
Wenig is “a few” which doesn’t really make sense in the context of being asked if you want to be served a particular dish.
Sure it does. When telling the server that you only want a small amount of vegetables for example. Don’t argue with native speakers.
That slogan is not a pun on English “a bit” though, and only refers to this specific beer. If you would use that to ask for a small portion size, you would not be understood.
Nobody said it’s a pun on English ant man. It’s a German pun on the Bitburger beer, which obviously is perfectly acceptable German. Wenig does not make sense as ‘a small amount’ unless the food item in question is something like a cookie. Nobody asks for a few servings of salad. Bisschen sounds pretty much like bitzen in English, and I’ve heard that word my entire life. (A taste, a tiny bite) Next up, Barbarenbar und barbarian rhubarb.
In German, it does. For all kinds of food. Again, you are talking to a native speaker.
Not in English, but in German you do. Don’t translate literally. “Wenig” can also be translated as “small amount”.
It doesn’t really sound anything like blitzen. But yes, “Bisschen” can also be used in this context.
Blitzen? That’s not the same word, though it does rhyme with bisschen. It would be very shocking to ask for ‘wenig blitzen’ and get served some lightning bolts.
No. “Blitzen” rhymes with “ritzen” and “Bisschen” rhymes with “Risschen”.
Nice pun. But it doesn’t work in German, as “blitzen” is a verb, not a noun, and people would not associate it with “Bisschen”.
Donder und Blitzen are nouns when referring to flying reindeer. Glad you enjoyed the pun, and seem to finally understand that I am making jokes in German, not correcting your Hochdeutsch.
I hear a tsch sound in bisschen, despite the spelling.
Wir können alles. Außer Hochdeutsch.
Bitte, wir brauchen kein mehr wort spiel.