19 April 2025

Why Authoritarians Attack Universities First

John Haltiwanger

One of the leading U.S. experts on fascism is so unsettled by the political climate under President Donald Trump that he’s packing up and leaving the country. Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor at Yale University and the author of books including How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, has accepted a position at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy that will begin in the fall.

Stanley is not the only prominent Yale professor leaving the Ivy League university amid Trump 2.0. He’ll be joined at Munk by two colleagues, historians Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore, in one of many signs that the United States is in the midst of a Trump-induced brain drain as the new administration threatens university funding, among many other unfriendly steps toward the world of academia.


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