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(CNN) — Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley, who is leaving the prestigious Ivy League university for Toronto as the Trump administration’s battle with higher education in the US continues, said mid-phone interview with CNN while walking the campus, “Hold on one second.”
A group of worried students approached the scholar as he walked the grounds of Yale Thursday in New Haven, Connecticut. Was he really leaving?, they wanted to know.
“I love Yale,” Stanley, who has taught at the university for 12 years, reassured the students. “But Marci, Tim and I, we’re gonna go defend democracy somewhere else,” he said, referring to the Yale colleagues joining him in Canada.
Stanley set off a firestorm at the highest levels of American academia last Friday, when he decided to leave Yale and the United States largely, he said, because of the direction of the country under the Trump administration.
“Suddenly if you’re not a citizen of the United States, you can’t comment on politics if you’re a professor?” said Stanley, who has written books such as “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them” and “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.”
“That’s crazy,” said Stanley, whose academic background is in social and political philosophy and epistemology. “That’s not a free society.”
The final straw for Stanley came after Columbia University made sweeping policy changes in an attempt to prevent the Trump administration from pulling hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding from the Ivy League institution.
Amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration and pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses, Columbia was the first to experience funding cuts as President Donald Trump threatened to halt federal money going to colleges accused of tolerating antisemitism amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war that started in October 2023.
“It’s just humiliating,” Stanley told CNN. “They’re humiliating the universities and I don’t see the universities standing up to it.”
Now Stanley, along with Yale history professors Marci Shore and her husband Timothy Snyder, are taking their teaching to the University of Toronto to advocate for democracy, speak out against fascism and teach without fear of academic capitulation to the White House, they say.
“The thing about being a historian is that it’s not that you know what will happen, but you know what can happen,” Shore, who teaches modern European intellectual history, explained in an interview with CNN.
Shore said she and Snyder, who teaches history and global affairs, decided to leave after the 2024 presidential election, and the administration’s threats against higher education during President Trump’s first 100 days in office reinforced their decision.
“It’s not that I think everyone has put their head down and gotten in line,” Shore said.
“(But) I think a lot of people have, and I fear that university administrations will, because institutions naturally have an incentive to act in the interest of self-preservation,” she said.
While Yale has not directly seen ire from the Trump administration, recent events unfolding between the administration and other Ivy League schools provide cautionary tales.
In early March, the Trump administration announced it was pausing $400 million of federal funding to Columbia University, citing the school’s failure to “protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment.”
Columbia responded by starting to make changes demanded by the administration, such as banning face coverings during protests, boosting disciplinary policies and reviewing curriculums in subject areas like the Middle East.
During his second week in office, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at combating antisemitism in schools and on college campuses, and last month announced a multiagency task force would “root out anti-Semitic harassment” on campuses.
Yale and Columbia were among 60 universities that received warnings from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights earlier this month regarding “possible consequences” if they fail to take adequate steps to protect Jewish students.
The office said it sent letters to universities under investigation for alleged violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act “relating to antisemitic harassment and discrimination.”
Last week, a White House official told CNN the administration paused $175 million in federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania, claiming it has violated an executive order barring transgender women from competing in women’s sports.
While Penn said as of this week it hadn’t received official word of the paused funding, the school maintains it has always been in compliance with federal guidelines.
“There’s a tremendous amount of money on the line,” explained Keith Whittington, a Yale professor and cofounder of the Academic Freedom Alliance, which defends the speech of professors and higher education faculty across the country.
“I mean really these are practically existential threats to universities,” he said.
But he noted if more elite educators decide to leave for similar reasons as the Yale professors, the universities will be weakened as well.
“I think from an overall American leadership position and sort of scientific research, that’s a real threat,” Whittington argued.
“If you lose your best people who decide to go to other countries, that’s going to have long-term consequences.”
In a statement provided to CNN, a spokesperson for Yale University wrote, “Yale University has been and continues to be home to world-class faculty members who are dedicated to excellence in scholarship and teaching. These faculty members conduct groundbreaking research, train aspiring leaders who will serve all sectors of society, and offer insights that can help improve the world, and the university is committed to supporting them in these endeavors.
“Yale 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,” the statement continued.
“It’s not fear, I’m not afraid,” reiterated Stanley regarding his decision to leave for Canada.
Stanley said he’d rather just spend his energy fighting for democracy and against the administration’s policies, rather than fighting the universities he loves.
“I’ll be in a much better position to fight bullies,” he said.
CNN’s Karina Tsui, Elizabeth Wolfe, Emma Tucker and Michelle Watson contributed to this report.
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