Professor fled the US under Trump and never looked back

Economist Matthias Doepke once believed the US 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 US 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.

Matthias Doepke, a former Northwestern University economics professor, left the US due to political uncertainty under the Trump administration. (Matthias Doepke) France, for example, recently launched a campaign touting its research programs to US 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 US 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 US from several predominantly Muslim countries. Then there was the president’s repeated labelling 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 neighbourhood and felt closer to Doepke’s family in Germany.

“London is a pretty good place to be for kids,” he said. Across the Atlantic, the US political landscape deterred Doepke further. That feeling crystallised when Trump won reelection.

“We decided, pretty much the day after the election of November, that this is going to be where we are going to be,” Doepke said. In January, Doepke returned to Northwestern part time while finalising their permanent move. What unsettled him most, he said, were the methods Trump used to stoke chaos in higher education. He saw chilling parallels to far-right movements in 20th-century Europe, including his native Germany.

“Of course, we are nowhere near where the Germans went in the ‘30s, but the structures and the methods are similar,” he said. “Undermining the rule of law, flooding the zone with misinformation, all of that we have seen many times repeated in different countries.”

Tom Ginsburg, a professor of international law at the University of Chicago and faculty director for the school’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, sees echoes of the McCarthy era. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the US government blacklisted faculty in sweeping anti-communist initiatives, repressing academic freedom, he said. It reminds him of Trump’s weaponisation of federal funding against schools like Northwestern.

“What the Trump administration has really revealed, in a way we have never seen far beyond McCarthy, is the incredible array of tools that the executive branch can wield in trying to attack universities,” he said. Ginsburg doesn’t plan on leaving the US, but it’s not out of the picture, either. “In the back of my mind, if things got really bad, I would look for a job in East Asia,” he added. US economics professors typically earn significantly more than their UK counterparts — a key reason why Martin Eichenbaum, a Northwestern economics professor, doubts many of his peers will follow Doepke to Europe. He suspects federal funding for economics will also be more insulated from Trump’s chopping block.

But Eichenbaum sees trouble brewing in the broader higher education landscape. “I think if you destroy American funding, and make it less attractive for people to set up here, it’s a huge hit to the country,” he said. As a close colleague and friend of Doepke, Eichenbaum plans to visit him in London in the fall. “Matthias is a great guy. He was a wonderful colleague,” he said. In the past few months, Doepke has received a flood of messages from academics from across the US Many have weighed their own considerations for leaving. He suspects other Northwestern researchers, particularly those from other countries, are also seeking opportunities elsewhere. LSE classes are slated to start up again in late September. “We are happy with where we are,” Doepke said. He still misses Chicago, and the quiet streets of Evanston, he said. But not enough to return.