TORONTO - U.S. President Donald Trump’s reelection has spurred several high-profile Yale professors to leave New Haven for jobs at the University of Toronto.
Bestselling author Timothy Snyder and historian Marci Shore are on leave from Yale and joined UofT earlier this year.
Snyder and Shore, who are married, will begin teaching courses at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy this fall.
Shore told TorontoToday they plan to stay at UofT “for the long-term.”
Snyder is the New York Times bestselling author of On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom, and an outspoken critic of the Trump administration.
UofT began recruiting her and Snyder two years ago, Shore said, “and we were seriously considering the offers long before the November 2024 presidential elections.”
“Both Toronto and the Munk School were and are very attractive places unto themselves, even bracketing the American descent into fascism,” she said in an email.
“All that said, yes, of course our American catastrophe played a role in our final decision.”
Fascism scholar says he took UofT job after Trump targeted universities
Meanwhile, Jason Stanley, the bestselling author of How Fascism Works, is also taking a position at the Munk School and UofT’s philosophy department, citing the Trump administration’s recent targeting of post-secondary institutions.
Stanley told Daily Nous, a news publication about the philosophy profession, his “decision was entirely because of the political climate in the United States.”
The academic told the outlet he accepted UofT’s job offer last Friday after Columbia University, an Ivy League school like Yale, capitulated to Trump administration demands by agreeing to hire campus police officers with arrest powers; institute tougher rules about protesting on campus, including banning masks; and review its Middle Eastern studies programs.
Earlier this month, the White House cancelled $400 million in federal grants to Columbia for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students on its campus during pro-Palestine protests.
Trump’s team did not reverse course after the school made concessions.
Stanley told Daily Nous he was “very happy at Yale, with the department and the university” but he wants to raise his kids “in a country that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship.”
The professor has authored several books on propaganda and fascism, including 2024’s Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. Earlier this month, he penned an op-ed in The Guardian warning that “Trump is setting the U.S. on a path to educational authoritarianism.”
The University of Toronto confirmed the three professors have been hired but could not provide a statement by publication time. The school expects Stanley to be on campus by fall.
'It's better to get out sooner rather than later'
Shore said she and Snyder seriously considered leaving the United States after Trump was elected in 2016 but “but ultimately felt a moral obligation to stay, to help mobilize the resistance, to support the students as they tried to understand what was happening around them.”
“But this time I knew it would be much worse — the checks and balances have been dismantled, and despite the grassroots resistance, and despite the fact that there are genuinely good people in Washington resisting every day, I could feel that the country was about to go into freefall,” she said by email.
“I fear there's going to be a civil war.”
“I'm both a Jew and a historian of the 1930s, so the neurotic catastrophism is perhaps overdetermined: it's always been clear to me that the lesson of 1933 is that it's better to get out sooner rather than later,” Shore told TorontoToday.
“It's all wrenching and heartbreaking. That said, I feel tremendously fortunate to have landed in a wonderfully vibrant city and a wonderfully vibrant university,” she added. “The Munk School is a place specifically crafted to support interdisciplinary, engagé scholarship, and that feels like just the right place.”
In a statement, Yale University said it is “proud of its global faculty community which includes faculty who may no longer work at the institution, or whose contributions to academia may continue at a different home institution.”
“Faculty members make decisions about their careers for a variety of reasons and the university respects all such decisions,” Yale said.
Stanley did not respond to a request for comment.
Snyder, who was personally attacked by Yale alumnus Vice President JD Vance in January, now holds the Munk School’s chair in Modern European History. Shore is the chair in European Intellectual History. Both positions are supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies.