Matthias Doepke has spent 30 years in the United States, most recently as a professor at Northwestern University. Doepke, a German-born economist, became a naturalized American citizen over a decade ago.
This week, he said, he resigned from Northwestern and sold his family’s house near the campus. “This no longer feels like the right place to raise a family and pursue a research career,” he wrote in a widely shared Bluesky thread. His wife is American, and his three children were born and raised here.
American research universities have for decades lured scholars like Doepke from around the world, thanks in large part to the government’s support for research and academic freedom. As an international graduate student, Doepke said in an interview Thursday, he felt right at home among a cohort that was virtually all foreign-born. “You really do feel welcome in America, and that’s a special thing,” he said.
But since President Trump took office in January, his administration has curbed federal research funding and scrutinized international students and staff, revoking visas and in some cases pursuing deportations. Many higher-ed advocates have sounded the alarm on the prospect of an American brain drain, concerned the country may no longer be able to attract and retain international talent.
Like any major life decision, Doepke’s departure is multifaceted. Part of it is personal, he says: The threat of gun violence in Chicago has been on his mind as he’s been raising his kids. He had already started to worry about the American academic climate during the first Trump presidency.
He’s also fortunate to have somewhere else to go. Since 2022, Doepke has simultaneously held faculty positions at Northwestern and at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His family moved to London. But they had kept their house in Evanston with the idea of potentially moving back.
Doepke talked to The Chronicle about why he joined the ranks of scholars heading abroad. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did you decide to leave the country?
In the first Trump administration, I would say little changed in the actual policies for universities, but it was still an administration that was kind of post-truth. What was true and what was not didn’t matter. Attacks on science became very common during the pandemic. I felt that the culture that was very much pro-discovery and pro-science, where the U.S. was world-leading for many decades, was changing.
I started to think maybe it would be better to try to contribute to making Europe stronger and build alternatives here, compared to staying in the United States. This was all a few years ago.
Now, it’s a whole different dimension, because last time, the administration was arguably still quite restrained. That’s no longer the case. It’s just an all-out attack on universities, but also on the rule of law. These random visa revocations that we have seen for various graduate students and researchers, those are very scary things.
In my job, the most important thing I do is train students, in particular Ph.D. students. I find it difficult to tell people, “You should come to America to study for your Ph.D.” if I can’t guarantee they’re not going to be thrown out if they post something on social media that the government doesn’t happen to like. So then I thought, “Maybe the moment has come to move on.”
You’re a naturalized citizen. How did you feel when you heard about people on visas and legal permanent residents getting detained by immigration enforcement?
I don’t think I personally felt unsafe. I have a passport, I have other citizenship, so I’m definitely in a very privileged position here.
It wasn’t an immediate concern for me, but these things could change. We wouldn’t have thought that green-card holders could be at any risk whatsoever until two months ago, and now we know even a green-card holder can be disappeared. So it’s completely possible that this could also come to us. Even now, I hear from students at Northwestern that they’re getting advice not to leave the country for the holidays. That has an effect on your whole research team and on conferences. Some wonder, “Do I want to go to the United States for a conference if there’s a risk that I will be detained at the border?”
The uncertainty is a huge deal. That you cannot guarantee anybody who is not a citizen that they can stay and do research. Again, if you’re a white German, maybe the risk is not that high. If you’re from a Muslim country, much higher.
The U.S. will lose some talents, because people will not be able to come over. But more importantly, do you want to be contributing to a system where that’s part of the game? That you have to play by certain political rules to be able to be safe?
How does it feel to go from being welcomed in the United States when you first arrived to now witnessing this changed political attitude towards international students?
It really feels that for students who arrive today, the country is not the same thing that it was for me in the past. Somebody who arrives now will not have the same opportunities.
The U.S. has many facets to it. But this aspect of giving people a chance to make a living wherever they come from, and support for refugees, has really stood out over the decades I was there. I do feel that slipping away.
Do you think American higher education can still represent those ideals? Or has the damage already been done?
I still think that the American people, on average as a nation, are very welcoming. Of course, there are many different Americans, but as a national character, that’s still there.
Since World War II, it has been the consensus that the United States is taking leadership. It stands up for freedom — in no way perfectly, but there was a basic consensus that this is what America is about. I don’t see, right now, the path to get back to two moderate parties fighting for the center. Without having that, I don’t know how you’re going to get that consensus back.
I’ve drawn to this comparison to 1930s Germany, which of course was a much darker time, but was also a moment where you had a country really leading in science and in research, in many fields. And really in a month, that ended. When Hitler came to power, all the Jewish researchers were fired. Many of them moved to America, and since then, America has been at the front.
The U.S. was ready to take over, because they had a system that was already growing and strong, that was able to take up the slack. So what is going to be the case now? China is making tremendous investments in research, in particular engineering and the sciences. They have the money. Of course, they don’t have the freedom, so I’m not convinced they will be completely successful, but certainly in some of the technical areas, that might be quite a threat.
The other question is whether the Western liberal countries are going to respond to this challenge. They have strong universities, but it’s no question that right now, the U.S. university system is the best. There’s no country that can quite be at the same level. If the E.U., the U.K., and Canada got their act together and tried to really recreate some of what was previously in the United States, that could be very successful.
Have you been hearing from colleagues who are making the same sort of calculation?
It’s certainly on many people’s minds. In reality, these things are hard to arrange. As I mentioned, we have been working on this for years. You don’t get a new job in an instant. You have families, you have spouses, you have children, so people are attached. I wouldn’t expect a wave of people moving right away. It’s going to be a trickle.
A number of American schools decided to cut the size of their grad programs, because they have all this funding uncertainty right now. Many of the research universities have hiring freezes. So I would expect that next year we’re going to have many more of the very best graduates in all the different fields going to jobs in Canada and Europe compared to normal years. So these things will accumulate gradually over time.
In the past, you might have advised early-career researchers from other countries to go to the United States to do their work. What would you say to young international scholars now?
It’s a tricky thing, because they’re still amazing universities, they still have amazing faculty and resources. But you do tell them to be more careful. Make sure you have something to fall back on. If somebody has similar options in the U.S. and elsewhere, you should maybe think about going somewhere else right now.
