Yale Professors Leaving U.S. For Canada Over Trump: Reports

NEW HAVEN, CT — Three Yale University professors have decided to take jobs in Canada due to concerns about the United States’ future under President Donald Trump, according to multiple media reports.

According to the Yale Daily News, the professors include Jason Stanley, who teaches philosophy, and two married history professors, Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore. All three will start teaching at the University of Toronto in the fall, the news outlet reported.

Daily Nous reported that Stanley indicated his decision was due to the political climate in the U.S. and concerns over Columbia University’s compliance following demands by the Trump Administration. Stanley told the news outlet he wants to raise his kids “in a country that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship.”

According to Stanley’s Yale biography, he published a book in 2018 titled “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.” In 2024, he published “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.”

Stanley wrote a piece for The Guardian titled, “Trump is setting the US on a path to educational authoritarianism.”

Snyder is a scholar of history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust, and he has written 16 books, according to his Yale bio. He wrote about his departure in an April 4 piece for Yale Daily News. In it, he wrote, “I did not leave Yale because of Donald Trump, or because of Columbia, or because of threats to Yale — but that would be a reasonable thing to do and that is a decision that people will make.”

Shore teaches modern European intellectual history, and her Yale bio lists several writings on Ukraine, Russia and Germany. She spoke at length in a videotaped interview with the New Haven Independent about her decision to accept a role at the University of Toronto.

According to Shore, the couple had gotten the Toronto job offers a year and a half ago, but they decided to take them after the presidential election. She also cited prior concerns and ongoing worries about gun violence in the United States as factors, telling the news outlet she was “haunted” by the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings.

“I was so devastated after the election… I could feel we were about to descend into a reign of terror,” she said, in the interview with the New Haven Independent.

Snyder and Shore are on academic leave from Yale for the 2024-25 school year.

The three professors’ decision has made international headlines in recent days. Yale University and the professors did not respond to requests for comment this week.

Read more at Yale Daily News.
Read more at Daily Nous.
Read more at The Guardian.
Read more at the New Haven Independent.
Read more at Inside Higher Ed.

Read more at Patch:

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