University of Toronto Snags Yale Professors as Canada Raids American Brain Trust | Hacker News Reader

University of Toronto Snags Yale Professors as Canada Raids American Brain Trust

deanblundell.substack.com

79 pointsnewaccountlol52 comments

I find this generally a narrative that is easy to buy into but I wonder how many will actually make the jump. I’m unsure about salaries in Canada but I’ve heard some American academics talking about moving to Europe to find academic jobs there.

i think the salary would kill the idea for most americans who would want to move. according to this chart:

https://oira.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/297/2024/05/Fa...

the average assistant professor makes around 100k usd a year.

the salary range in Norway which typically has some of the highest salaries in Europe for university of Oslo assistant professor would be around rank 73-75 (you are not typically eligible to be hired above 78 and in practice above 75) on this chart which is around 69-70k usd:

https://www.uio.no/english/for-employees/employment/payments...

Norway has some of the highest salaries in europe outside of switzerland (although its debatable since cost of living in switzerland is so high). how many people would be willing to take a 25-30% salary reduction to move across the world? and that is the minimum salary decrease as the percentage only increases when you go to other countries where salaries are lower.

Not to mention they will need to learn a new language to be a professor since they need to teach. And also the academic system is different in that most places have more hierarchy than USA whether it is implicit or explicit. So they have to learn to navigate that too.

I think people will find Canada a much more attractive target destination than elsewhere for these reasons. But I also think most won’t actually move they will just discuss it. Happy to be wrong though.

I think it remains to be seen what happens with this, but so far I think there's been more noise than fundamental shifts. I don't mean this as a criticism — I sympathized with the essay and agree with a lot of the points it makes — I'm just saying when I've looked at things more closely and discussed things with colleagues migrations are harder than they seem for reasons on both sides of the Atlantic, Pacific, or northern border.

You're right about the salaries but a bigger issue is that academics is financially in trouble everywhere, not just in the US. In some places I know of the political factors behind this trend kind of echo in a weak way some of the problems in the US, like decreased immigration, in some cases brought on by legislative decisions and whatnot. There just isn't a huge pool of money for academics anywhere. Maybe the EU, Canada, or Australia or NZ can step up to the plate, but pretty much everyone I've talked to in those areas have been in financial crises of their own.

I just don't see a huge upswing in funding so far with these things.

Some of the hiring initiatives that have been touted in the media, for example, in Europe, have been laser focused on areas that have been targeted by Trump, such as climate, vaccines, and sexual and gender minority researchers, and even there the funds are pretty limited.

Similarly, this piece points out these Yale professors were being recruited for two years before making this decision. They cite Trump in their decision to move, which I don't doubt played a role, but I also can't help but wonder how much after the fact rationalization is going on or in similar cases whether it's more the feather that broke the camel's back. It just looks like something that had a good chance of happening anyway.

I guess what I'm saying is so far what I've seen looks a lot like academic recruitment always looks, with a couple of very minor exceptions. I'm not hearing about a lot about efforts to do something that might not have otherwise happened, or to leverage "moneyball" tactics in hiring Americans.

Housing in Toronto and Vancouver is very expensive, while pay is lower relative to the US. On a purely financial basis it would be hard for many people to move, and then of course there are many other factors. I would guess the bigger impact is how the current situation changes the less visible decisions as academics choose where to apply for positions and how they weight the options they do get. Any researcher facing a significant chance of the grant funding their research getting cut suddenly, or being detained on routine work or family travel, could rationally decide to lean towards a safer and more stable option. Compound that over the next decade and it will have a big effect that reaches far beyond academia.

Edit: Just looking at big tech CEOs, Microsoft, Google, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, all are run by people who came to the US for school.

“There just isn't a huge pool of money for academics anywhere. Maybe the EU, Canada, or Australia or NZ can step up to the plate, but pretty much everyone I've talked to in those areas have been in financial crises of their own.”

This is congruent with what I’ve heard from my colleagues about this topic, as well as from my own research.

If our worst fears are realized in America, who else is capable of absorbing all of the scholars in America who want to continue pursuing scholarly work?

Even before MAGA’s freezing of NIH and NSF funds, I was already disillusioned with the funding milieu, which is one of the reasons why I am a tenure-track instructor at a community college (100% teaching and service) instead of aiming for a professorship at a university where fundraising is often vital for tenure.

Industry, where I used to work as a researcher before changing careers to teaching, is not a panacea for those who want to do long-term research that is not dictated by short- and medium-term business needs. The days of places like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs ended roughly 30 years ago, and since then industry research has been increasingly focused on the short- and medium-term.

Between the high-debt fiscal situations that the governments of many developing nations face and the unwillingness for industry and the wealthy these days to fund long-term research projects that are not tied to any specific gains, I don’t see the situation improving for academics soon.

One way out of this is to convince millionaires and billionaires that academic pursuits are worth funding. We need more places like the Institute for Advanced Study, more grants like the MacArthur Fellowship.

>how many people would be willing to take a 25-30% salary reduction to move across the world?

the wild card variable here is the value of dollar. The actions like protectionist tariffs and isolating of the economy with resulting inflation would be significant factors weakening the currency globally and domestically. So, it isn't the situation when there are countries better than US, it is just US is on track to become much worse than it has been so far, and it may fall close to the other developed countries, and in that case other considerations may become important too.

That is a really good point that I didn't consider in my post. I agree with you. If the dollar tanks, it becomes easy to go find a similar salary.

Mind, salaries often tend to be indexed to the local cost of living. So you could have a pretty decent standard of living even if your nominal salary is a bit lower.

Canada (in my case, specifically UBC) has piss low grad student stipends, even relative to local CoL. I was making full time minimum wage as an undergrad researcher, and my PI told me that he was still paying me more than his PhD students (2500/mo for me vs. 2000/mo). I dunno how someone could live in Vancouver on that salary without savings or additional scholarships

Canada is an exception to this trend, unfortunately.

Canada’s COL is an exception.

Wages are about half of the US yet in places like Toronto the COL is super high.

These profs likely negotiated a fat payday. It happens all the time - profs move from Harvard, Stanford, Yale to less prestigious schools because they’ll get something they otherwise can’t get - tenure, head of a school, more money, whatever.

Considering this move would have taken months to negotiate it likely has nothing to do with politics at all.

From the article:

"Of course our American catastrophe played a role in our final decision."

"My decision was entirely because of the political climate in the United States."

"Both Toronto and the Munk School were and are very attractive places unto themselves... bracketing the American descent into fascism."

https://www.tvo.org/video/could-americans-brain-drain-be-can...

Simple: raise academic salaries in Europe and seize the opportunity to drain the brains of the US to Europe.

That might be true, but also consider this. These people are watching their peers, as well as their students being persecuted and in some cases removed from campus. A lower salary (if applicable) is more appealing than no salary, or in some cases being harassed by the current administration.

EDIT: Salaries also do not equate to quality of living. While Canada might not be the best example with housing prices being as high as they are, they do have other benefits, such as the average American paying more for wealth care. And in the case of the EU, there's other things to consider, such as their cities vs American cities (walkable vs drivable), individuals might also be interested in experiencing foreign countries with long history, unique cultures, etc... especially considering these are academic people.

There's all sorts of reasons one could take a lower salary for that occurs to me, and I'm sure many more that don't. Of course more money IS always welcome.

You are right but this requires Americans to stop thinking their country is perfect. Any deep introspection and the whole facade breaks down...

Anyone who does not want to worship Jesus or Trump is welcome to check out the Netherlands.

It is difficult not to think your country is perfect when you can't make good money anywhere else in the world...

But you are just proving WeylandYutani’s point. You can make good money outside the US (ex. Switzerland, Singapore, etc) but because your preconceived notion you don’t even look at the evidence. I won’t be arguing on the definition of ‘perfect’ which is highly subjective.

Salaries in the rest of the world look great when you realize that in Europe you're not one medical incident while unemployed from utter bankruptcy

Almost nobody in the US is in that state either. Yes, the system has a lot of problems, but coverage is generally quite good and the quality of care is better than many places in Europe (the UK for sure, but that's a bad example).

This is not true. 2/3 of bankrupt filings in the US are due to medical costs - a number which does not capture the high levels of medical debt carried by people who do not declare bankruptcy.

https://www.ilr.cornell.edu/scheinman-institute/blog/john-au...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6366487/

Culturally you've been brought up with the idea that more money is the only measure of quality of life, through that lens I do understand your thinking but I believe you might need to reconsider if that even makes sense.

Making good money is necessary in the USA for one to feel free, without it you don't have freedom since almost everything in the USA revolves around money. When you experience freedom even from the need of making good money while still having a decent life you'll know true freedom.

Other parts of the developed world can deliver that, consuming is not the point after a certain level of comfort, more and bigger doesn't translate to a better life, it's just that in the USA it does.

You can live a very fulfilling life without having to worry about making more money to buy another car, to save for your kids' education, to save for medical emergencies, to access cultural experiences, etc. It's just a very different way of living, unfortunately Americans have been turned into hyperconsumers, your whole economy is designed around that idea and so the thought that life is more than purchases feels alien.

Europeans overestimate how bad the US healthcare system is, number 1.

Number 2, Americans have the most spending money on average compared to any other country in the world.

Number 3, the most important technology and cultural advancements come out of the US; the US is where its happening—in a city like New York you can get the best of anything in the world, and then some.

So no, Americans who make a lot of money live the best lives, and never want to leave. It takes some cahunas and some wits to make it in the US, not everyone can cut it.

You are just repeating yourself, and confirming what I said: you have a cultural bias and only see things through that lens.

> Number 3, the most important technology and cultural advancements come out of the US; the US is where its happening—in a city like New York you can get the best of anything in the world, and then some.

This is simply untrue, and reeks of very heavy ignorant American exceptionalism. I've been to NYC multiple times, there are many other cities around the world that provide the same experience.

You should travel more.

I have traveled extensively and no city I've been to offers so many opportunities for rapid movement of diverse labor and commerce like New York. London pales in comparison.

Perhaps Shanghai is beginning to overwhelm NYC in terms of sheer industrial activity, but what comes out of the fight between Trumpism and Xi-ism is yet to be seen.

In any case, it is easy enough for wealthy Americans who own private jets and multiple homes to purchase EU citizenship; and yet America still abounds in billionaires...it is not an accident.

A playground for the rich does not make a country perfect, again you are conflating being wealthy with being good for living. I never said the USA isn't wealthy, it's more that it's rather bad for living a normal life despite being the wealthiest country in history.

It's great to be rich in the USA, life isn't about being rich though, as much as your culture has ingrained that in your head to the point where, clearly on this comment thread, you don't even notice it.

Its not a playground for the rich, its a playground for the upper-middle class and above. No other country besides the US provides such well-paying wage labor. You can't make seven figures a year as a salary, as a worker practically anywhere else.

Life isn't about being rich, its just that if you work hard its not difficult to do well in the US and have anything you'd want at the best quality anywhere in the world. Anyone making $100,000+ a year (and that is ALOT of Americans) has a great time in the US. Yeah a lot of people don't make it but thats how it is. Without risk there's nothing interesting in life; I don't want a mediocre, boring life with a million social safety nets, I want something chaotic and crazy and constantly active, and you can't get that anywhere else.

You act like this will be a choice. Right now it is a choice. The fear many of us have is that in the not-distant future it won't be. And by the time the music stops, there won't be any chairs left.

The salary for an academic who insists on teaching and publishing the truth may be 0 in the US in a few years given its current trajectory.

How does that compare to academic jobs in Europe?

The brain drain out of Canada has been massive, and for decades. It's going to take more than some random Yale prof to reverse that.

No better time to start than today

Exactly, this is cherry picking one counter-example.

Reversing the brain drain will certainly be difficult, but stemming the flow of graduates is perhaps a different story.

For Canadians considering working in the US, the recent politically-motivated detentions and deportations against green card holders - a group that has significantly stronger rights of abode than TN visa holders under USMCA - certainly factors into the calculus of whether a US job is worth it.

Further, the appeal of the American political environment is inversely correlated with the distance between one's personal characteristics and the feature vector of able-bodied, white, male, cisgender, and heterosexual. This is nothing new, but the importance of these characteristics, especially the last three or four, have dramatically increased with the rightward shift of the US over the past few years - and there are also more individuals in Canadian STEM (i.e. TN-eligible) degrees than ever before who don't have these characteristics.

Just to put some HN-relevant ballpark numbers to it, the University of Waterloo, a notorious Silicon Valley hiring pool, is reporting 38.6% women [0] in their 2024 engineering admissions. This was 21.2% in 2014 [1], the earliest year with statistics available.

I don't think it is much of a stretch to say the 2014 first years were more likely to aspire to intern at, say, Tesla or Meta than the 2024 first years (who will be entering their first co-op internships in a month's time). That is a function of both the American tech companies having cozied up to the political right, and an increased proportion of the students being both more directly affected [2] and morally repulsed [3] by this state of affairs.

Add an additional nationalism multiplier for Canadians being turned off by the annexation rhetoric coming out of the US, and I think we may see a change in this trend towards Canada retaining more of its local talent.

[0] https://uwaterloo.ca/engineering/about/faculty-engineering-s...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140804070109/https://uwaterloo...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/27/roe-wa...

[3] https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12...

The opportunity cost of moving to Canada is too great for professionals in STEM, medicine, economics, or law. However, that opportunity cost seems to be less significant for professionals in the humanities. Ironically, the Project 2025 writers are probably salivating at the idea that the US sees an exodus of liberal academics in the humanities.

Given the choice, I would move also. No reason for any of the US top intellectuals to stay here.

I am not a prof, I had a similar opportunity 40 years ago, but it was a different time back then. Now, I would have jumped.

> No reason for any of the US top intellectuals to stay here.

Depending on who you ask, the US is still the only country to have freedom of speech and the right to bear arms against a tyrannical government, which might be appealing for some of the top intellectuals (mostly Y Combinator founders, I think?)

>Depending on who you ask, the US is still the only country to have freedom of speech and the right to bear arms against a tyrannical government, (...)

I question the intellectual capacity of anyone who actually buys into this mythology.

Especially given the number of countries - presumably without freedom of speech or a right to bear arms - which have been far more successful at dealing with tyrannical governments than the US.

Were they supplied arms by the USA or USSR?

Just take South Korea for an example. The president tried to enforce martial law, and got his ass handed back to him. Can you imagine anything similar to that happening to Trump?

To be fair, I suspect the top military officers take their commitment to protecting the constitution a lot more seriously than the current batch of cabinet level officials. Even back when there was the 'contested' election results the military basically told Trump to go pound sand.

Sure, they can spend the next few years filling the top ranks with loyalists but that doesn't mean anyone will follow their unlawful orders because in the military it is a crime to follow an order you know to be unlawful.

I don't know. It does turn out that one can find guns if one needs them, legally or not, and revolution doesn't require a Constitutionally mandated right to keep and bear arms. Not that a tyrannical government would respect such a right anyway, unless they had the gun owners on their side. The only things guaranteed by the Second Amendment are a market for guns and some irreducible amount of societal gun violence.

Even in Japan, where the gun laws are so onerous even the Yakuza supposedly avoid dealing with them, that guy managed to build his own and shoot Abe Shinzo.

Meanwhile in the US that tree of liberty they love to go on about is getting real thirsty.

Having you been paying attention to the news? People are being disappeared today for exercising their free speech.

I'm not saying I personally agree with the statement, but to be chartiable there is definitely a non-zero amount of commenters here who believe that the US is the only "real" democracy in the world.

A non-zero amount of delusional people believing something ridiculous doesn't make it true.

I guess hey better start getting those arms out then.

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country.

Summer and sunshine anyone ain't gonna go to Canada, though. :)

One of Germany's biggest mistakes in WWII was pushing out scientists / intellectuals and I fear the US is headed down the same road. Between anti-intellectualism in general, political censorship, and the new Gestapo rounding up student immigrants there's less and less reason for smart people to come to the US or stay and put up with it.

The administration has been totally against facts and science from the first term itself but this time around they started the full descent into idiocracy. The people picked to run agencies, full frontal proclamations by the director of the fbi to go after media entities, catering to the lowest common denominators in their base by making a mockery of the law. All of them are just distractions, the fact that the richest and most powerful corporations, universities and previously reputable news organizations are keeling over, these are canaries in the coal mine. All of this will have a lasting impact on the valley and the U.S. in general, if we are honest about it.

As a person in tech, this time around the tech community gave up on innovation and independence, they are the first to pander to the administration. I cannot imagine the same thing happening a decade or two ago. Something fundamentally changed here in the Valley. I take it as a signal that the powers be don’t believe in AI revolution and that they just want to make a quick buck while they can

Re: same thing not being able to happen a decade ago, perhaps so, but I'd argue that the signs were clear that it was about to happen. Some of the most powerful people in SV have been visibly showing hard right attitudes for at least that long. Not generally on social issues, but more of a muddy libertarianism. The social issues of SV just turned this into a pressure cooker; people who absolutely knew that they were brilliant revolutionaries, standing far above the masses, simultaneously had to put up with people telling them that the closest city had to be a haven for people on the lowest rung and that rich white men were essentially flawed and bad.

But I think whether that pressure cooker creating the most extreme examples had existed or not, the "Do no evil", utopian phase of tech was always destined to be a blip, caused by a sudden, massive influx of cash to people who hadn't been inculcated in the culture of how to defend and grow such a cash hoard. They learned. No surprise at all to see, for example, Zuckerberg tossing the president a $20 million "legal settlement" bribe a few days after he was voted in; he has his priorities in order for his role.

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