Academics, Don’t Abandon America

On election night in 2016, as Trump pulled ahead in Florida and Ohio, so many Americans visited Canada’s immigration website that they helped crash it. Celebrities including Lena Dunham, Bryan Cranston, and Ne-Yo had pledged to move to Canada if Trump won. (Dunham insisted that, unlike so many others making the threat, she “really will.”) Come inauguration, none did.

But if celebrities’ threats to decamp for Canada have been mostly bluff, academics mean it. In March 2025, historians Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore, alongside philosopher Jason Stanley, announced they’d each be leaving Yale for the University of Toronto. The decision, Stanley and Shore said, had to do with the American political climate.

More recently, former Harvard Kennedy School Arctic Initiative director Jennifer Spence announced that she, too, would be resettling in Canada. “A lot of the things that we were focused on” at the Arctic Initiative, she told The Crimson, “were either difficult to talk about in the U.S. context or sort of politically charged in the current context.”

These days, a professor might have good cause to leave the United States. For the second year in a row, the National Institutes of Health is on track to award fewer new grants than it did before Trump took office. And under rules the Trump administration proposed in May, political appointees at agencies like the NIH and National Science Foundation would review every discretionary grant before it is awarded, checking whether it advances the president’s policy priorities.

But emigrating from fear of criticizing the American government is another matter. However contentious certain areas of study have become in the political arena, that’s all the more reason to keep up the fight in America, not elsewhere. The job of a scholar, if it is to defend the truth, is to do that work in places where regard for it is shaky. The moral choice, then, is to stay.

Teaching politically charged subjects — let alone trying to shape public opinion and policy — is difficult. Spence is correct in asserting that the political climate is uniquely fraught under Trump. But regardless of whether scholars stay or go, America will remain the most influential country in the world. How that influence is wielded hinges still on how Americans choose to act.

Biologists who taught evolution in the 1920s, too, worked on subjects that were “politically charged” in their day. If subjects are hard to talk about, the answer is to keep pressing.

Our situation is not yet so dire that dissenting scholars have no choice but to emigrate. Stanley said he moved to Toronto to do his work “without the fear that I will be punished for my words.” But when the Trump administration has tried to punish universities and their members for their words, it has largely lost in court.

Last September, a federal judge ruled that the administration’s freeze on Harvard’s research funding amounted to unconstitutional retaliation for protected speech. Then, in January, another federal judge struck down the Trump administration policy of deporting noncitizen students and faculty over their pro-Palestinian advocacy, holding that it violated the First Amendment.

Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and Mohsen Mahdawi — three of the students detained by the Trump administration in 2025 in apparent retaliation for their political advocacy — are free.

Nor have ordinary Americans been cowed. In March, organizers estimated that more than 8 million people turned out for “No Kings” protests in all 50 states, in what they called the largest single day of demonstrations in American history.

Scholars are right to point out the chilled speech climate on campus and beyond under Trump. At Harvard, the dismantling of initiatives focused on Israel and Palestine has occurred under the long shadow (and often in line with the will) of the Trump administration.

But being able to speak at some professional cost is not the same as being unable to speak at all. As Mary T. Bassett, the pro-Palestinian scholar removed as director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights in December 2025, wrote in these pages, “I also have no legal barrier to the expression of my views.”

In 2017, shortly after Trump’s first inauguration, Snyder published the book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.” Its first lesson is “Do not obey in advance.” Snyder argued that authoritarian governments get much of their power from those who “think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.” Leaving the country to dodge supposedly imminent political consequences for one’s speech is a version of the same mistake.

The irony is that Snyder’s colleagues appear not to have taken his own advice.

Alex Bronzini-Vender ’28, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a History and Government concentrator in Lowell House. Benjamin Isaac ’27, an Associate Editorial Editor, is a Government and Economics concentrator in Quincy House.