It’s Time for Canada’s Brain Gain
In 2008, my wife and I moved from Toronto to upstate New York to pursue our Ph.D.s at Cornell University (in linguistics and math, respectively). We were in our mid-twenties and totally enamoured of the intellectual stimulation of academic life—studying abroad at an elite institution seemed like a wonderful opportunity. The move wasn’t intended to be permanent: we thought it might improve our odds of landing faculty jobs back home in Canada after graduating. It wasn’t meant to be. When we entered the academic job market a few years later, prospects at Canadian universities were hard to come by, and the sheer number of opportunities in the U.S. dwarfed those in Canada. We would have been thrilled to return to the University of Toronto, where we’d done our undergrads, or any of the great Canadian institutions that might hire in our subfields. But academic hiring is slow, and newly minted Ph.D.s often fail to find faculty positions at all, let alone in their ideal location. We were lucky: I received an offer to join Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, as an assistant professor. My wife was hired there as an adjunct lecturer.
Pittsburgh has been our home for over 10 years now. Our lives are good. I have tenure, and my wife is on a permanent teaching track. Our children are growing up here, and we have a lovely community and many good friends. Of course there’s still a cultural disconnect. I’ve always found the reflexive self-praise that permeates American political discourse grating, to say the least—that it’s the best, the freest, the greatest country on Earth.
And yet I have to concede that in the arena of higher education, the U.S. really does come out on top, with a huge concentration of the world’s top universities. This is due to generous financial investment through agencies like the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and countless private foundations. Faculty in the U.S. have access to extraordinary resources to assemble big labs, host conferences and fill their programs with brilliant postdocs and graduate students. It all feeds into a self-reinforcing cycle: generous support draws talent, which produces important research and qualified graduates, fuelling innovation in academia and industry alike. It’s this practice, implemented over decades, that has truly made America great.
And now it’s ending. Donald Trump—quite correctly—views universities as rife with his enemies and detractors. In 2021, his now-VP, JD Vance, said, “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” The administration has made good on that threat with a sweeping offensive on the funding infrastructure that has made American academia the envy of the world. In February, the White House imposed a policy to drastically reduce NIH research grants, effectively cutting billions of dollars’ in funding. A court recently blocked that move, temporarily, while a group of universities and medical associations sue the government. But the threat lingers—and that’s just the beginning. Later the same month, over 10 per cent of the NSF workforce was unceremoniously fired. An executive order was later issued calling for a review of many contracts and grants made by the federal government, with priority given to those involving educational institutions. This month, the government cut $400 million in funding from Columbia University over allegations of antisemitism on campus, and it’s investigating many more schools. The NIH has also begun terminating research grants related in any way to LGBTQ+ and DEI subjects.
The immediate consequences have been devastating: hiring freezes, cancelled research projects and reduced enrolment. The long-term consequences will be even worse. My colleagues’ shock and disbelief has given way to deep anxiety about the future of American research and higher education. They’re watching summer programs quietly shut down without funding. They’re hearing from colleagues who review grant proposals that they’ve been told to go home, their services unneeded. They’re trying to salvage what they can from years of work after already-committed funding has been clawed back. My own university is scaling back its grad student admissions for the upcoming academic year, narrowing our pipeline of future scientists and researchers. Our neighbouring institution, the University of Pittsburgh, stands to lose more than $100 million a year under new NIH funding rules. That’s $100 million of medical research and innovation, gone.
But the harm will go beyond cancelled hires, shuttered research programs and reduced student admissions. A fundamental trust has been broken: that the U.S. is the best place (or even a place) to find support for science, innovation and intellectual inquiry. After witnessing the chaotic attacks of the last two months, we can only guess at how much further the situation will degenerate in the next year, or the next four. The mood is tense, nerves are taut and the outlook is dire. Parallel to what is happening on the diplomatic stage, the damage to the reputation of the United States is already enormous, perhaps irreparable.
But the United States’ swift and dramatic self-sabotage could be Canada’s gain—and the gain of any nation with the ideals and resources to position themselves as beacons of science, humanism and free inquiry. It’s simple supply and demand: the U.S. is letting its supply of these commodities dry up. The world’s best and brightest will think twice about establishing their lives and careers amid such uncertainty, and a significant portion of top minds already in the U.S. will look for a change of scenery.
These are not idle musings: again and again in personal discussions, email threads and online forums, I’m hearing about academics thinking about leaving the country. A colleague and mentor told me directly he and his wife are discussing a move to South America. A good friend of mine, working in Canada at the intersection of medicine and teaching, recently cancelled her plans to move to the U.S., forgoing a much higher salary. And another friend of mine from college, now working in academia with a green card, privately confessed to me she’s afraid to so much as join a protest here, worried it might put her immigration status at risk. I wonder whether publishing this article might put a target on my back.
This is the moment for Canada to send a clear message to scientists, researchers and other scholars around the world, reaffirming and reinforcing Canada as a haven for research and higher education. Of course, this must be backed up by clear policies and tangible investments. One obvious start: more funding for federal agencies like the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. These are the pillars of Canadian research funding, the scaffolding from which our country’s intellectual architecture hangs.
Another critical investment would be to renew and expand the Canada 150 Research Chairs Program. This was launched in 2017 as a tool to attract international scholars and researchers by deploying a host of targeted fellowships. Ideally, the government will empower universities to make strategic cluster hires to expand existing research programs and to establish new ones. That would allow Canadian researchers themselves—the experts in their fields, after all—to reach across the border directly and solicit colleagues in the U.S., picking out teams of experts to fuel the next Canadian research boom. It would also give more Canadian academics a chance to return home.
If Canadian leaders in business and industry could be called upon and inspired to help bankroll some of these efforts alongside the government, so much the better for our country. If new paths to permanent residency or citizenship could be opened for those brilliant people we hope to welcome, wonderful. And if university leaders were provided the resources and the mandate to accelerate the slow, conservative process of faculty hiring—a process based largely on replacing retirements, rather than true expansion—that would have a profound impact at this moment, when so many talented individuals are primed to consider new options.
Let’s be bold. Let’s show the world that Canada—its government, its citizenry, its industry leaders—will stand behind our universities and the ideals of research and education. Even as—in fact especially as—the U.S. fails to do so.
My wife and I took jobs in the U.S. because the prospects were bright for our research specialties, and we have been happy with this choice: our colleagues are lovely and thoughtful people, our students are smart and industrious, and CMU is a generous and supportive institution and a fantastic place to work. We’re not quite at the point of packing our bags and driving north, but the possibility is more real and pressing for us than ever before.
There have been points in history when it was the U.S. that graciously welcomed talented individuals displaced by intolerant, anti-intellectual, or dangerous regimes, and reaped the social, technological and economic rewards. I do not think it hyperbolic to say that this flow is now in the throes of reversal. An investment on this front made by Canada today will be a signal heard around the world and pay off richly in the years and decades to come.
Adam Bjorndahl is an associate professor in the department of philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. The views expressed are those of the author, not of his employer.
