Canada’s Trump-Fueled Brain Gain
The University of Toronto has attracted several U.S. professors amid turmoil between American higher-education institutions and the Trump administration.
Brian Rathbun and Nina Srinivasan Rathbun are international relations professors at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Before moving to Toronto last year, they worked at the University of Southern California.Credit...Ian Willms for The New York Times
By Matina Stevis-Gridneff
Reporting from Toronto
June 28, 2025
A year ago, when Timothy Snyder and his wife, Marci Shore, both prominent Yale historians, moved to Canada after being recruited to the University of Toronto, they thought it would be a fun adventure.
“I was trying to have a positive midlife crisis,” Professor Snyder said in an interview.
By the time they had settled into their new home, the mood in the progressive academic circles that feted them back in New Haven, Conn., was rapidly darkening after the election of Donald J. Trump in November.
The Trump administration has put U.S. colleges in its cross hairs, accusing some of cradling haters of America. It has launched policies that threaten to expel international students and jeopardize funding and academic freedoms.
Professors Snyder and Shore, along with Jason Stanley, a Yale philosophy professor who also moved to Toronto, have in recent months become outspoken about the Trump administration.
They published a widely shared New York Times video opinion piece titled, “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S.”
At the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, they joined Brian Rathbun and Nina Srinivasan Rathbun, international relations professors who made a similar move last year from the University of Southern California.
These hirings offer early signs that at least some academic talent is moving away from American schools, with Canada emerging as a notable destination.
“In this last year, several scholars from the States have joined us because they are deeply concerned about the assault on universities, the threat to academic freedom and the attack on rights more generally,” said Janice Stein, the founding director of the Munk School and the force behind the recruitment of U.S. academics.
“At the Munk School, we are totally committed to freedom of inquiry, to the independent pursuit of scholarship and to academic freedom,” she added. “For some coming from the United States now, those core values are of paramount importance.”
Students, too, could follow. This past week, the University of Toronto agreed to take in Harvard graduate students who are unable to complete their studies in the United States because of visa restrictions threatened by the Trump administration on foreigners.
Professor Snyder's departure is probably the most high profile, given his fame outside of academia as a best-selling author and sought-after speaker. A celebrated 20th-century Eastern Europe historian, he specializes in the study of Nazism and Stalinism and is an authority on Ukraine.
He predicted a continuing exodus of academics from the United States.
“If you let a horrible authoritarian who destroys institutions come to power, people are going to leave,” he said.
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Prof. Timothy Snyder, a prominent Yale historian, moved to Canada after being recruited by the University of Toronto.Credit...Ian Willms for The New York Times
But, he added, his move to Canada was not only about U.S. politics; it was also about Toronto.
“I came to Toronto a year ago because of the city and because of the university, because I wanted to teach more students,” he said, sitting on the stage of the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall, a grand, 1,700-person-capacity auditorium.
That is where he will teach his signature first-year history course starting in January, titled, “Hitler and Stalin Today.”
It will be his, and the university’s, largest class to date. More than 1,000 students have signed up for the course. The formal venue, normally reserved for major events like graduations, is the only place on campus that can accommodate the demand.
The University of Toronto is one of the largest higher-education institutions in North America, with more than 100,000 students — more than five times the size of Yale’s student population.
International students make up a third of the University of Toronto’s student body, while Canada and Toronto itself are heavily diverse: About half of Torontonians were born outside Canada.
The university is also affordable for many Canadians, with fees about 6,200 Canadian dollars ($4,500) per year for domestic students. By comparison, tuition at Yale for American students is nearly 15 times that amount.
The socioeconomic makeup of the university and the city were also singled out by Professor Rathbun, who holds the Munk Chair in Global Affairs, as key draws.
“Over the last 30 years in the United States, we have built these bubbles for ourselves that are socioeconomic and now also highly tied to our political leanings,” he said. “And Toronto doesn’t feel like that.”
To be sure, Ivy League schools hold unique prestige and score higher in rankings than the University of Toronto, which is the world’s 21st-best institution for higher education, according to the widely cited Times Higher Education ranking. McGill University in Quebec is another top Canadian institution.
U.S. colleges, especially private ones, often have more resources because they charge much higher fees than their Canadian counterparts, that heavily depend on provincial funding.
Toronto, too, has its own share of big-city problems — an affordability crisis and slow public transport, among others. And the University of Toronto, like other Canadian schools, has not been immune to the controversies and clashes that have roiled campuses across Western countries over the Israel-Gaza war.
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Janice Stein, the founding director of the Munk School, on Thursday in Toronto.Credit...Ian Willms for The New York Times
But the American professors who have recently arrived in the city say they believe that it offers the conditions for academic excellence.
“There’s an opportunity to build the public study of democracy or authoritarianism, which would be simpler here than in the U.S., because, I’m sad to say, even very elite universities in the U.S. are thinking twice about having seminars on democracy and things like that in the U.S.,” Professor Snyder said.
The Trump administration’s attacks on higher-education institutions as part of what Mr. Trump has said is an effort to make them more patriotic and less left-wing, along with his deportation push, have had cascading effects on Professor Snyder’s colleagues, he said.
“In a cafe in New Haven, when colleagues sit down to converse, the conversation could be, ‘I just lost that Turkish grad student,’” he said. “Or, you know, ‘What’s the federal government about to do to us?’”
Canada has long played something of a special role in the minds of progressive Americans, stretching back to the Vietnam War, when people dodging draft notices fled north.
But Professor Snyder said that viewing Canada just as an expatriate base for American Trump resisters would not do justice to the country’s own unique role.
“We have to first respect the Canadians, because Canada itself has done much more to resist Trump than anything in the United States thus far,” he said.
Since Mr. Trump’s re-election and his menacing of America’s northern neighbor and ally through tariffs and sovereignty threats, Canadians have rallied around their flag.
In a crucial federal election in April, voters shifted 30 percentage points in just weeks to elect a new prime minister, Mark Carney, the leader of the Liberal Party and a political neophyte. It was a remarkable electoral U-turn interpreted as a rejection of the Conservative candidate for being too close to Mr. Trump.
Professor Srinivasan Rathbun, who, like her husband taught international relations at U.S.C. before moving to Toronto, said there was a clear drive at the Munk School to keep young Canadians at home for college and to lure Canadian academics back from the United States.
She sees this as part of a bigger movement to boost Canadian achievements at a time when the country seeks to redefine and assert its identity.
Professor Srinivasan Rathbun has been put in charge of undergraduate programs at the Munk School, as well as a new scholarship for top undergraduates.
“It is centered on trying to help Canadian students see that their futures can be here,” she said. “That goes along with all the effort to keep tech entrepreneurs in Canada and to create a framework where the best minds of Canada don’t have to go to the United States.”
“There’s so much commitment to building the Canadian future; it is so incredibly optimistic here,” she added, “and I didn’t feel a lot of that in the United States.”
A correction was made on
June 28, 2025
: An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the relative size of the University of Toronto, as ranked by student population. It is one of the largest higher-education institutions in North America, not the largest.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com. Learn more
Matina Stevis-Gridneff is the Canada bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the country.
A version of this article appears in print on June 29, 2025, Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Some Professors Leave U.S., Seeing Canada as More Congenial. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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