Jewish professors are fleeing America for Canada.

Wait, let me start over.

Three American professors are departing one elite North American university (Yale) for another (University of Toronto). Two—historians Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore—are a married couple, and while both are esteemed profs, if we’re talking about the rule of three-makes-a-trend, given the linkage in two of the three cases, I’m not sure this counts as such. They’re also a half-Jewish and half-not-Jewish couple who are on leave from Yale, which is to say, they have not in fact quit their jobs in the States, and retain their current Yale affiliation. If they decide to go back, presumably the door remains open. (This is what “on leave” means.) It sounds less momentous in those terms, even if “long-term” is how long Shore and Snyder say they will stay, having recently survived an entire winter in Toronto.

The third is Jason Stanley, a name I was familiar with because he is also a prolific and at times mildly controversial social media poster, but he is also, I now know, a philosophy professor so A-list that it has made headlines whenever he’s changed jobs, even when geo-politics didn’t enter into it. Stanley, it appears, has left Yale more definitively, but the same Chronicle of Higher Education interview I just linked to gives the impression that Shore and Snyder also jumped ship. (Stanley tells Vanity Fair their entire families are best friends.)

People change jobs all the time without this making the news. And academics move from the U.S. to Canada—and vice versa—to take jobs all the time as well, something I should know, having spouse-trailed from the U.S. to Toronto in 2015, when my husband took an assistant professor job in the sciences at the University of Toronto. (It’s a huge university, so I have no personal connections to disclose.) But it is not 2015 (yes, intentional) and these professors are—as much as any professors are—household names. It’s in the news because it’s news.

***

The significance of the three-prof brain-drain requires explanation. First, these are not just professors but important professors. This means that they have more job-market options than your typical would-be prof, who’d have been struggling even before the current wave of defundings (not all of which can be pinned on Donald Trump, who has yet to control York University).

But their big-shot-ness also means that whichever jobs they take, it’s not for lack of options. They’re not representative of academia, but they’re useful in illustrating the choices others might make if they could. It says something about where things are at in the States if American academia is prepared to hemorrhage its major talents.

Second: these are all experts in totalitarianism. Snyder and Shore are historians of the Holocaust and modern European Jewish history. Snyder wrote, among........

© Canadian Jewish News