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Universities in Europe are offering academic refuge to researchers in the U.S. who've lost jobs or who feel their academic freedom is under attack as the Trump administration cuts funding to colleges and universities. NPR's Ruth Sherlock reports.
RUTH SHERLOCK, BYLINE: One of the European programs promises protection from, quote, "political interference or censorship." Another, at Aix en Marseille University in the south of France, is called a safe place for science.
ERIC BERTON: (Speaking French).
SHERLOCK: "It's a program which offers scientific asylum for our colleagues," says Eric Berton, the president of Aix en Marseilles. "It's a reaction by us to preserve academic freedom."
BERTON: (Speaking French).
SHERLOCK: Berton says they have had over 200 eligible applications for the funds that can support about 15 researchers. These include biologists, epidemiologists and climate scientists from top American universities, including Yale, Columbia, and Stanford. Since Donald Trump took office in January, his administration has taken aim at federal funding, which has also affected researchers and universities. In part, it's over DEI policies.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We've ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
SHERLOCK: The administration has also engaged in mass firings at federal agencies, including at scientific research institutes, and canceled billions of dollars in grants as part of broad cost-cutting measures. And it's targeted studies on climate change and other major areas of research that the administration sometimes calls woke.
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TRUMP: And our country will be woke no longer.
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SHERLOCK: In online discussion boards for academics, many now discuss plans to leave the country. Researchers feel targeted and so insecure that of the 10 academics I reached out to for this story, none would speak on the record. With visas and green cards being revoked for expressing opinions and stating facts, one European professor in the U.S.S replied to me, I don't want to expose myself or my family publicly.
I spoke with one affected assistant professor who asked to remain anonymous because she didn't want her employer to know that she's applying to move abroad. She said she simply doesn't feel free to do her research or teach any longer in the U.S. Jan Danckaert is the vice chancellor of the free University of Brussels.
JAN DANCKAERT: It's important that some of these research lines are indeed continued.
SHERLOCK: European universities want to attract scientific talent, but Danckaert says there's also a genuine wish to show solidarity.
DANCKAERT: What we see in the United States is indeed an interference of government, and this is worrying.
SHERLOCK: Rob Quinn is the executive director of the Scholars at Risk Network, a nonprofit that works in countries around the world.
ROB QUINN: To protect threatened scholars and intellectuals, usually from violence or extreme coercive pressure, prosecution, imprisonment, harassment.
SHERLOCK: The more extreme aspects of this work is often in war zones, like in Ukraine, or in places with repressive governments, like China. But now he says, pressures are mounting in the U.S.
QUINN: We would say this in any country around the world. If it is the state that tells the university what questions it can ask, what dialogues it can have, what people it is allowed to admit for study, what people it is allowed to hire to do teaching - if the state is telling all of that, then you no longer have a free society, and you no longer have free universities.
SHERLOCK: Whatever happens in the U.S., European universities now see both an opportunity and a duty to open their doors. Ruth Sherlock, NPR News, Rome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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