Where is the Higher Education Gold Rush?
With a major holiday in the US only two days away, this column will be uncharacteristically brief (slightly more than half the usual length of one of my columns here). I encourage Dorf on Law's readers to use the time saved to gather the ingredients for a cruelty-free Thanksgiving.
In any event, the question posed by today's headline -- "Where is the Higher Education Gold Rush?" -- reflects my observation about something that mostly has not happened. Earlier this year, when the chaos of Donald Trump's return to the White House was becoming almost unbearable, it seemed that the rest of the world would quickly seize on an (unearned) opportunity for a "brain gain," hiring American academics who were horrified by what was happening -- not just to their country in general but to US higher education specifically.
After all, the Trumpists' early shots at Columbia University and Harvard were truly unprecedented, and things looked to become even worse. And in most ways, they have. The "settlements" that some universities have reached with the Administration have been pathetic, which is why I placed scare-quotes around a word that is not properly used to describe papered-over (at best) capitulation by one side to an agreement.
Again, the situation has not improved as time has gone along. What are called settlements are in fact nothing more than cessations of right-wing attacks in exchange for once-unthinkable concessions, where everyone knows that such cessations will quite possibly end up being only short pauses in the long siege from Trump world. What will, say, Columbia do if its leaders suddenly receive demands to make even more internal policy changes and to pay even larger "fines" as punishment for their supposed transgressions?
The two most recent high-profile settlements involved the University of Virginia and Cornell. (Because this blog's proprietor is a professor at the latter university, I want to be very clear that I am writing here only on my behalf and have not conferred with anyone about any of what I am publishing here. All opinions and any errors are my own.) In a hard-hitting Opinion column in The Guardian this past weekend, "The University of Virginia and Cornell deals with Trump set a dangerous precedent," UPenn law professors Serena Mayeri and Amanda Shanor make some devastating points, including these regarding the Cornell agreement:
The agreement’s fine print contains additional perils. For example, Cornell agrees to disclose a range of student information and recognizes the government’s prerogative to share that data with law enforcement, an ominous nod to potential immigration consequences. A reference to the “prevention of terrorist financing” may relate to foreign funding – but in light of Trump’s recent executive orders targeting those the federal government considers to promote “extremist” views about race, gender and migration as “domestic terrorists”, this provision may prove more menacing to free expression.
Along the lines of my point above regarding the one-way nature of these agreements, Mayeri and Shanor note that "[f]ar from extricating the university from government oversight, the agreement subjects UVA to federal monitoring and the risk of draconian financial penalties if the federal government decides, at its sole discretion, that the university has not complied," later adding that this will all add up to a huge chilling effect:
But if universities can be subject to drastic financial penalties anytime the federal government decides “in its sole discretion” that the university is not complying, it is difficult to believe there will not be strong incentives for administrators, faculty and students to avoid any speech or conduct that might attract negative attention from the Trump administration.
No, it is not getting better. And that makes one wonder why there has to date been nothing like a gold rush of universities around the globe building up their faculties and student bodies at the US's expense.
There were some early signs that other countries would jump on the opportunity to improve their own university systems, most prominently when the University of Toronto picked off three elite scholars from Yale who study fascism and democratic backsliding. The fact is, however, that U of T was already super-elite -- 21st in the most recent Times Higher Education rankings, behind Yale's #10 slot but still ahead of two members of the Ivy League as well as Michigan, Duke, and NYU, among many other heavyweights. U of T is always in the conversation about who is the world's best. The lesser-ranked places have gone missing, and more generally, this is not looking like a trend.
I am in a unique position to observe what is happening, only partly because I have lived abroad for the past two and a half years as a visiting scholar at various universities, which gives me some up-close opportunities to observe what is happening. But more to the point, I am also different in that I am not looking to be one of the people that a non-US university could pick off. Although my decision to take emeritus status from my last job came earlier than I had anticipated, I have discovered that I quite like being an unencumbered free agent and will not mind if I never teach a regular university course again. All of which means that I am not reporting on my own experiences in the international job market, because I have none.
In any case, what I have observed is that the gold rush is not happening. As an economist, this puzzles me, because one would think that a sudden change in "tastes" (the catchall term in Econ 101 to describe non-quantifiable psychological factors driving people's decisions) should significantly increase the movement of scholars who now have good reason to want to flee the US. Why is that not happening (to any significant extent)?
One possibility is that foreign leaders -- both within universities and in political office -- are squandering the opportunity of a lifetime. Whereas the French government did move early to create a few more jobs for non-French professors, that is simply not happening in most places (and not much of it is happening even in France). But even without any special initiatives being created in 2025, should this shift in labour supply not have resulted in a significant amount of scholarly expatriation? (For the econo-geeks out there, I am saying that (1) the demand curve for foreign scholarly labour is not being shifted upward by policy choices in other countries, and (2) that demand curve seems to be essentially vertical nearly everywhere.)
Why the lack of response? Two possibilities come to mind. First, politicians and university leaders in other countries are shockingly parochial and do not see this situation as a reason to make changes of any kind, much less of the sort that would rock any boats. I have to admit that I have personally noticed this attitude in spades in many places that one might hope would be more ambitious and forward-looking.
Second, the terms of employment in non-US universities might be so much worse than at US universities that even a large shift in American scholars' willingness to think about relocating is quickly met with the stark reality that other countries' universities are not competitive. On that score, I know of one scholar from an Ivy League law school who received a feeler from one of the UK's most respected universities, only to discover that the teaching load was more than twice as heavy while the salary was less than one-third of what she was being paid in the US. The conversation ended quickly.
But that was in 2018, not 2025. Why is there not now a big move by at least the best universities elsewhere to reshape the global map of higher education, given everything that has happened this year? As I suggested above, my very unsatisfying answer, based both on the overall evidence and personal observation, is that people are comfortably insular. Why make waves merely because things might improve? That seems like a lot of work.
- Neil H. Buchanan