IT is, said the president of the Australian Academy of Sciences, an “urgent and unrivaled opportunity” to seize the best American minds for Australia. The president of the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore agrees, but thinks that chaos in the American academic world is, rather, an “gold opportunity” for Asian universities.
ON THE CONTRARYsaid President Macron of France. While the universities of his country are launching “scientific asylum” programs for researchers fleeing the United States, the time has come, he said, to “choose France for science”.
Perhaps not since the victorious allies competed to attract the best scientists in Germany in 1945, there was such a manifest competition to catch the intellectual human capital of a country.
But, says Sir John Bell, the head of the British Institute Ellison of Technology, there is probably no need be greedy. If he has to believe, this is the atmosphere in the American academic world that there will soon be enough scientific refugees to go around for everyone. “I have the best guys from the best universities in America who all say:” When can we move? “” He said.
It is not the direction that brain flight is normally. No institutions in the world corresponds to American universities for wealth or resources. Little correspond to the reputation. Less can offer comparable wages. Of the last 20 winners of the Nobel Prize in British origin, Ten have chosen to end their careers in the United States.
But there is something else whose universities outside the United States are missing: President Trump.
Since his election, academics in the institutions considered by the Republicans as bastions of leftist thoughts feared more and more that they were attacked. The Trump administration seeks to reduce $ 21 billion in funding to the National Institutes of Health – half the budget of the world’s latest medical funder in the world. The man ultimately in charge, Robert F Kennedy Jris not considered by researchers as a friend of science; He has repeatedly attacked the vaccines and, on an occasion, argued that the airplane trails are a secret plot to spray the population of chemicals.
Robert F Kennedy Jr, the United States secretary
Images Alex Wong / Getty
So far, RFK’s promise to stop “this crime” of “chemtrails” has not been made. But other Trump administration promises have not done so. As part of a push against “perception” perceived in university institutions, Billions of funds were retained by universities of the Ivy League Unless they respect the requests that include the closure of diversity programs. Harvard alone had more than $ 2 billion in frozen funds.
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These tribulations did not go unnoticed abroad. Patrick Cramer, president of the Max Planck institutes in Germany, wrote to the president of Harvard to offer solidarity. “Threats to science everywhere are threats to science everywhere,” he said-while also, with slightly less solidarity, setting up a “transatlantic program” to attract talents like Harvard.
It is too early to know if it translates into migration. But speaking to the Chamber of Lords Chamber and Technology Committee, Bell reflected the words of his international rivals. “There is a huge opportunity,” he said.
He tries to obtain high -level scientists for the Ellison Institute, a new new research center on the outskirts of Oxford, and he hears the same thing from potential recruits.
“Experience reflection. You are an exceptional scientist. You are sitting in an American institution. Things don’t seem well. You know for sure that they will be bad for four years. They will probably be bad for eight years. It will take another four years to recover it.
“If you are a great scientist at the end of the forties or in the 1950s, you are not going to sit down, right?”
Now a race is on. The Max Planck institutes are not the only ones to free up routes for American scientists. The Australian Academy of Sciences said that the country should “act quickly … to attract the smartest minds leaving the United States”, announcing a global talent program. The Aix-Marseille University in France has instituted a “security location for science” program.
Vrije University in Brussels has reassured funds to create a hotline for curious American academics. “American universities … are victims of political and ideological interference,” said Jan Danckaert, university rector. “They see millions of research funds disappear for ideological reasons.”
However, is it a pile wish? Will scientists really flee a continent where, as some see, is science cut for ideological reasons, to find itself in one time when science is cut for the most economic?
Although Europe can claim to offer more freedom in the academic sense, it certainly has less in the monetary sense. In the United Kingdom, a recent report from The Office for Students provided that 72% of the institutes could be in deficit next year And should take an “increasingly daring action” to combat lower income and cost increase.
This is one of the reasons why politicians and academics are trying to sound specific funds for the fence. In the Netherlands, the Minister of Sciences said that spending more to bring talents would be paid for himself. “The best scientists are worth their weight in gold,” he said.
Of course, European academics like to think that it is more than money. In a discourse in the European Parliament, Ekaterina Zahariva, commissioner for the EU, invoked the very philosophy of science.
Citing the way in which American cuts particularly affect specific subjects that Republicans consider politicians – such as research on climate change, vaccines and minorities – she declared that the intellectual effort itself was attacked.
“As a place of birth of enlightenment and the scientific revolution, Europe has historic responsibility for defending academic freedom,” she said.
But, it did not need to add, for a sclerotic continent which fears that it is lagging behind economic and technologically, it is also a historical opportunity to seize precious academics on cheap.