In a piece for The Conversation Canada, my Kwantlen Polytechnic University colleague Jeffrey Meyers writes about Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder, two eminent American scholars who fled Yale University and the United States, taking positions at the University of Toronto, to escape the authoritarian impulses Trump’s administration has brought to American universities.
Stanley’s father, a German Jew who fled Germany for America in 1939, carries the remembrance of fascism. Both Stanley and Snyder explore the similarities between what is occurring in Trump’s America, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China and, equally chillingly, between Trump’s America and Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Even prior to the first Trump presidency, Stanley already asked in his 2015 book, How Propoganda Works, whether the U.S., “the world’s oldest liberal democracy,” might already have become a liberal democracy “in name only?” …
As a Canadian, I would like to say America’s loss is our gain, and I wish these scholars well. I am also aware that narratives of flight to Canada as refuge have historically bolstered national myths while obscuring Canadian inequities. My hope is that Canadians will not observe the arrival of U.S. scholars with smugness, but instead with shared concern.
Too much cynicism might prevent us from acknowledging the importance of these … scholars’ decisions to leave their country and come to ours at this particular time in history. However, my hope is also that we are also inspired by their considerable truth-telling skills to demand Canada also do better.
I agree with each of these points. I would add that while several nations seem to be courting scholars and professors who seek and/or need to leave the United States, Canada has yet to do so in any public way that I have seen.
