Canadian universities are poaching American academics who could use a more hospitable work and research environment. Here’s McGill’s brag on its bags, one of which is my good friend Ethan Zuckerman, who will be leaving his beloved job at U.Mass Amherst to take a new and promising position at McGill, in Montréal. He explains,
Canada is offering me and my lab sufficient funding to support a core team of students for 8 to 12 years. That’s a level at which I’ve never been able to even dream, never mind plan…
Meanwhile,
The Canadian government saw an opportunity to recruit academics at the precise moment when the US government is making life difficult for universities in two big ways. Cuts to NSF, NIH and other grantmaking agencies are making it hard to build research teams in the US. Most of the support for my work has come from generous private foundations. that funding, which has always been highly competitive, has become exponentially more so as federal support has evaporated.
Second, the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants have made coming to a US university a risky proposition for international students. At schools like UMass, international students are both an important part of our community and of our economic picture. As we lose students who cannot get visas to the US – or choose not to study in a country that appears actively hostile to them – our enrollment shrinks, and we’re left with another set of financial pressures.
The hostility to international students also creates a moral risk: can I feel good about inviting students to study with me, knowing that we take on controversial topics and methods, and that I cannot guarantee that their work won’t have consequences for their immigration status?
This mirrors what some colleagues are saying at Indiana University, where I currently hang. Here’s one story. Another. Another. Another. Another. Another.
I wish Ethan and other northbound academic migrants well. And I wish stateside universities luck.
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