Last spring, three professors from Yale University made headlines when they announced that they would be leaving the United States and relocating to Canada to avoid the Trump administration’s threats to higher education.

The professors — Marci Shore, her husband Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley — will be continuing their work as professors at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.

In a June interview with The New York Times, the professors explained that their reasoning for leaving the US is based on their knowledge of fascist regimes: “The lesson of 1933 is that you get out sooner rather than later,” said history professor Shore.

Philosophy professor Stanley said in the interview that he decided to leave the US “because I want to do my work without the fear that I will be punished for my words.”

To some, this sounded excessive — Shore recalled her own colleagues stressing that the existence of “checks and balances” meant that they would be safe. “And I thought ‘my God we’re like the people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink,’ ” Shore told the Times, “and what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”

Leaving the States

In an email to The Varsity, Professor Shore wrote about her decision to leave the US and what brought her to U of T.

Shore revealed that her family’s interest in Toronto began around three years ago, when the Munk School started recruiting her and her husband, Professor Snyder. In August 2024, Shore and her family moved to Toronto during a sabbatical year from Yale. “We were already living here during the November elections,” Shore wrote, saying that they “most likely would have stayed in Toronto and accepted the Munk offers even if Kamala Harris had won.” 

Still, the election results did have an impact on Shore’s decision: “When I learned the results of the elections I was in a dazed state of despair—and I was certain I did not want to bring my children back into what was to come in the United States.”

The prevalence of gun violence in the US factored heavily into Shore’s decision: “I’ve long wanted to raise my children in a place where there was not so much gun violence— even in politically much better times, the amount of gun violence in the United States is horrific.”

Coming to Munk 

The prospect of continuing her work at the U of T — and the Munk School in particular — also made the move an attractive option for Shore, who “loved both the city and the university” when she studied at U of T in the 1990s. “There’s a fantastic group of scholars at Munk; and the director, Janice Stein — with her balance of sharp acumen, emotional intelligence and moral grounding — has been an inspiration to me.” 

“Munk is designed to promote and support interdisciplinary scholarship that is both academic- and public-facing,” Shore wrote, adding that, “engaging in a way that can reach a broader public has always been important to me… It’s not a moment when I feel I can or should retreat into an ivory tower.” 

Since the start of Trump’s second term, his administration has increasingly targeted higher education, threatening universities with billions in budget cuts to gain control of decision-making at the institutions.

When asked if Canadian universities are safe from similar attacks on higher education, Shore wrote, “No one—and no country—possesses some kind of magical immunity. Universities are places that are designed to teach people to think. And the aim of totalitarian regimes is to prevent thinking as such.”

Shore, Snyder, and Stanley will each begin teaching in winter 2025, including EUR301H1 — Modernity and Its Discontents, MUN180H1 — Hitler and Stalin Today, and MUN200H1 — Understanding Global Controversies, respectively.