Photo courtesy the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy/LinkedIn

In late March, three professors at Yale University—scholars Marci Shore and “fascism experts” Jason Stanley and Timothy Snyder—announced that they were leaving the United States to teach at the University of Toronto. They made the decision in the face of Donald Trump’s intensifying attacks on higher education, a deeply alarming trend that has seen agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) abduct student activists off the streets with the aim of forcibly deporting them. Stanley and Snyder cite the complicity of the Columbia University administration in Trump’s assault on student activism as a major reason for moving to Canada.

Stanley and Snyder (as well as Shore, who is leaving the US for similar reasons) are not wrong that Trump’s punitive blitz against the national student body is horrifying, but their rosy-eyed view of Canadian academia shows a misunderstanding of political and economic realities here.

It is true, however, that Trump is going much further than the Biden administration in persecuting student activists and other members of the anti-war movement (for his part, Stanely has spoken out repeatedly in defence of pro-Palestinian encampments at Yale and elsewhere). On March 7, the White House threatened to withhold $400 million in funding from Columbia unless the university implemented a suite of policies designed to suppress student activism and punish criticism of Israel. Its demands included:

The Columbia administration agreed with Trump’s proposals and has begun implementing them; not because of “capitulation,” as anthropologist Steven Striffler explains, but because the administration shares Trump’s interest in suppressing student activism.

The Yale professors’ decision to leave the US has received extensive media coverage, and outlets including Vanity Fair have described the professors as “fleeing” Trump’s America for the comparative political and academic freedoms of Canada (“the Ukraine of North America,” in Stanley’s words). While much ink has been spilled over these professors’ “flight” from Trump’s authoritarianism, less attention has been paid to their destination: the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

The Munk School was founded in 2000 with money from Peter Munk, one of Canada’s most infamous oligarchs, whose company Barrick Gold has been linked to massive human rights violations around the world. Munk, who died in 2018, was one of Canada’s most powerful right-wing........

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