Economist Matthias Doepke once believed the U.S. was the pinnacle of academia: open, diverse, global. He immigrated to Chicago from Germany to pursue his doctorate, and most of his classmates were international students.
“That’s an exciting thing, to bring talent together from everywhere,” said Doepke, now 54. “That’s how science is supposed to work.”
It was an American Dream. He joined the Northwestern University faculty in 2008, with reams of research to his name. He married an American, became a U.S. citizen and raised three sons in Evanston with his wife.
But their shiny life buckled when President Donald Trump took office in 2016. Threats to academic freedom and hostility towards immigrants seemed eerily reminiscent of past authoritarian regimes. To Doepke, it felt profoundly un-American.
“I felt already at that time, that what had attracted me to stay originally was gone,” he said.
Trump’s reelection was the tipping point. In April, Doepke sold his house and permanently moved his family to England to teach at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
He hasn’t looked back.
“Every day of news makes us more secure that we made the right decision,” Doepke said. “It’s a terrible situation for higher education.”
In just six months, the Trump administration has unraveled the once-symbiotic relationship between universities and the federal government. In an effort to align higher education with his political agenda, the president has pulled funding, restricted international students and even threatened accreditation. At Northwestern, five months of a $790 million federal funding freeze have hammered the campus with cuts.
Some professors say Trump’s escalating campaign could reverse the country’s stature as the global leader of research and science. Universities in China, Canada and Europe have moved to hire American academics en masse — signaling a potential brain drain.
France, for example, recently launched a campaign touting its research programs to U.S. scientists. Several universities in China announced streamlined transfer options for American students. In May, three Yale University fascism scholars made headlines after announcing plans to move to the University of Toronto.
“There’s been some very public cases of faculty declaring they’re leaving, particularly from Yale, but then there’s a lot of faculty all over the country who have quietly left or quietly applied for jobs in other countries,” said Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors. “It’s not surprising. It is a growing pattern, and it’s of concern.”
A survey of 1,600 scientists from the journal Nature in March found that more than 75% would consider leaving the U.S. amid the political uncertainty.
Doepke, for his part, put his contingency plans into place years earlier. Even after Trump lost the 2020 election, he was skeptical that the “Make America Great Again” movement was just a blip. The president had unleashed a “culture of xenophobia” that spread across the country unchecked, Doepke said.
The warning signs, he believed, had been piling up for years. Among them was Trump’s so-called Muslim travel ban, a 2017 executive order which suspended entry to the U.S. from several predominantly Muslim countries. Then there was the president’s repeated labeling of COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus.”
“This pattern of populists blaming all problems on immigrants was already very much apparent,” Doepke said.
In 2022, Doepke saw an opening at LSE — one of the world’s premier economics institutions — and he took it. It wasn’t an easy choice. His three sons were still in school, and his wife had built a career casting for local television shows including “Chicago Med” and “The Chi.” Even so, the couple felt a growing urgency to leave while they still could.
They agreed on a two-year trial period in London. Doepke took unpaid leave from Northwestern, with an option to return full time in 2025. But soon after the move, the family fell in love with the city. They settled quickly into the quaint Queen’s Park neighborhood and felt closer to Doepke’s family in Germany.
“London is a pretty good place to be for kids,” he said.
