Trump’s Crackdown on Higher Education Prompts Three Yale Professors, Including a Fascism Scholar, To Leave for Canada

Will President Trump’s efforts to make higher education “great again” run disgruntled academics out of their posts in America? 

That’s the question being raised in light of the decision by three professors at Yale University to leave the New Haven Ivy and take up teaching roles in Canada. 

A distinguished philosophy professor, Jason Stanley, who is also a facism scholar, decided to leave Yale after 12 years “entirely because of the political climate in the United States,” he told DailyNous. 

Though he says he has been “very happy at Yale,” he wanted to raise his children “in a country that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship.” Mr. Stanley, a fervent critic of the 47th president, has written several books on facism, including “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them” and “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.”

Mr. Stanley says that he made up his mind after witnessing Columbia University “collapse” to the demands of the Trump administration — or what he describes as “an authoritarian regime.” 

Last week, Columbia university agreed to implement a list of reforms proposed by the Trump administration as a “precondition” to receiving financial funding from the federal government. Earlier this month, the department of education revoked $400 in federal grants and contracts from Columbia over its “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

Mr. Stanley described the move as “just humiliating,” CNN reported. The Trump administration, he added, is “humiliating the universities” though “I don’t see the universities standing up to it.”

Mr. Stanley will be leaving the prestigious New Haven-based university to teach at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. He will be joined by fellow Yale professors Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore, who are married. 

Ms. Shore, who is slated to be the Munk School Chairwoman in European Intellectual History at the University of Toronto, says that she and her husband decided to go north after Mr. Trump was elected to a second term. 

“I sensed that this time, this second Trump election, would be still much worse than the first — the checks and balances have been dismantled,” she told Inside Higher Ed. “I can feel that the country is going into free fall. I fear there’s going to be a civil war. And I don’t want to bring my kids back into that. I also don’t feel confident that Yale or other American universities will manage to protect either their students or their faculty.”

Her husband, Mr. Snyder, drew ire from the Trump administration after he condemned the nomination of Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, writing on X that “a Christian Reconstructionist war on Americans led from the Department of Defense is likely to break the United States.”

Vice President Vance reposted the professor’s comment, adding the rebuke: “That this person is a professor at Yale is actually an embarrassment.” Mr. Shore said it was not lost on her that Yale University failed to publicly defend her husband amid the controversy. 

Both Mr. Snyder and Ms. Shore are professors of Eastern European history and have been vocal in their support of Ukraine amid the ongoing war with Russia. 

Yale responded to the departures by reiterating that “Yale University has been and continues to be home to world-class faculty members who are dedicated to excellence in scholarship and teaching.” The school voiced its pride even for faculty members who “may no longer work at the institution, or whose contributions to academia may continue at a different home institution.”

The move has sparked concerns that professors may similarly flee American universities over the administration’ controversial tactics.

In an op-ed for the Daily Princetonian, one student condemned the Yale professors’ decisions, arguing, “Their departure misleadingly signals that universities are no longer safe for scholars who reject Trumpian orthodoxy. But the drastic nature of this action makes this a self-fulfilling prophecy.” 

“In essence,” the student warns, “Snyder, Shore, and Stanley — the very ‘enemy’ professors that the Trump administration wants to purge — obeyed in advance.”