In The Atlantic, George Packer turns a jaundiced eye to the announcement that three distinguished Yale professors, the philosopher Jason Stanley and the married historians Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore, are leaving the institution for posts at the University of Toronto, due to what two of them present as dire political exigency. “Snyder says that his reasons for leaving are entirely personal, but Shore insists that she and her husband are escaping a ‘reign of terror’ in America. Stanley compares the move to leaving Germany in 1933.” Packer suggests that there is something morally unserious about Stanley’s and Shore’s comparisons (“These well-known academics … aren’t just changing jobs … They’re getting out while they can”), a sentiment in which he is not alone. “Incredibly embarrassing,” is how one historian on X characterized an interview Stanley gave to Vanity Fair about his decision.
In that interview and others, Stanley has been profligate with analogies. “Just like Ukraine is squarely targeted by Russia, Canada is the Ukraine of North America right now. We’re a fascist regime, so we can’t tolerate a free democracy next to us.” In an interview with The Guardian, he invoked his family’s flight from Nazi Germany: “Part of it is you’re leaving because ultimately, it is like leaving Germany in 1932, 33, 34. There’s resonance: My grandmother left Berlin with my father in 1939. So it’s a family tradition.” (Echoes of Woody Allen’s Love and Death: “We have to take our possessions and flee. I’m very good at that — I was the men’s freestyle fleeing champion two years in a row.”)
Packer’s not having it. “The secret police aren’t coming for Snyder, Shore, or Stanley.” But the secret police, or something like it, are coming for noncitizen faculty members and students. A version of the emergency that Stanley et al. have been warning about is coming to pass — but they are not its victims, and are not likely to be. They have not been forced, like Erich Auerbach, to abandon their libraries for reduced conditions in an unfamiliar land. Mightn’t these defectors be dressing up a lateral career move as political exile? Why not stay and fight? Packer concludes by admonishing Snyder with his own “Lesson 19" from On Tyranny: “Be a Patriot.”
Read George Packer’s recent essay.
