Leaving Yale was a weighty decision for me and a difficult one. I chiefly want to express gratitude for my time at Yale, but I should say something about my decision. I moved to Toronto with my family last summer and at a time when Joe Biden was the president of the United States. Had Kamala Harris won the November election, I would not have come back.  Indeed, the scenario I dreamed of last August was that Harris would win and that I would have more time for my scholarly work. Press coverage around my departure from Yale, prompted by a colleague, was something that I hadn’t expected and for which I wasn’t prepared. I took some time to check in Toronto in the fall on some family matters and the capacity of the university to support the projects with which I am engaged. I did not leave Yale because of anything Trump is doing; the chronology and the psychology are all wrong; I was not and am not fleeing anything.  

Residing in Toronto these last seven months has not changed my engagement. Since moving there, I have published a book about freedom, spoke about it underground in Kharkiv before visiting the front in Ukraine, spent weeks in the Midwest talking about freedom and doing other work before the election, more weeks in Europe after the election talking about what to expect from the new conjuncture, helped open an underground school in Zaporizhzhia during another visit to Ukraine, raised money for armored evacuation vehicles, given lectures around the country — including this week in Memphis and New York — consulted with opposition and resistance groups and politicians in the United States and elsewhere and written the sorts of things I have always written. No one, I think it is fair to say, noted any difference in my public activity, because there has been none. Nor will there be. I am excited about opportunities in Toronto that I believe will elevate this engagement. I will, as long as I am able, go to the places I go and do the work that I do.

Rather than have everything revolve around Trump and his destructiveness, what I had hoped to write was a note of appreciation. I resign from my position as the Richard C. Levin chair with sadness and with fond feelings for Rick and fond memories of his 20 years as president. I have no animus towards Yale, and no conflict has driven me away. I loved being at Yale. My colleagues have been kind these last three years, since the latest Toronto offer came, as I have tried to sort through conflicting senses of obligation and have been generous in allowing me to take leave and then, after the decision was made, to agree upon preserving or creating affiliations with Yale: continuing as faculty advisor to the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies and as of July 1, a Blue Visiting Professor at the Jackson School of Global Affairs.  

I retain a number of other affiliations within the United States, including as a senior fellow for democracy at the Council on Foreign Relations. I have been adjunct faculty at the University of New Haven, which has allowed me to take part in the extraordinary Yale Prison Education Initiative, run by Zelda Roland ’08 GRD ’16. The prison teaching I will miss and will hope to do it again. And I am still affiliated with organizations beyond the United States, as I was while I was at Yale: as the Lesya Ukrainka Permanent Fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna; and as the chair of the faculty advisory council of Ukrainian History Global Initiative, among other pleasant duties.

My main identity as of July 1 will be as a historian at the Munk School at the University of Toronto. I am delighted about that and looking forward to some special initiatives that we have in the works. In the very immediate future, Toronto will be a place where clear and significant conversations about freedom and unfreedom, unfortunately ever harder in the U.S., will take place.

I have been at Yale longer than most of the people who have kindly tried to persuade me to stay. I loved teaching at Yale; from the beginning, way back in September 2001, it was an honor and a pleasure. I have had a chance to think about what has been so special, what has kept me here for so long, and what has kept me so happy about the place. Yale’s great achievement is to create an oasis for its undergraduates, and I believe that there is no better place to spend those four years of life. The undergraduate students constitute a rich and durable connection to Yale, the thousands of them in the dozens of lecture classes, so many of whom I still hear from or see in my travels. The lecture classes on Eastern Europe have surely made a difference; we need the broad classes because our students encounter regions of the world and the oceans of ignorance around them. I am also proud of my master’s students, and especially of my doctoral students, several of whom are now historians themselves.  

The open stacks of the Sterling Library rescued me again and again. I wrote for long periods in its Slavic Reading Room and held courses there when I could. I cannot stress enough that its collections, as well as the collections of other Yale libraries and archives, made my career as a writing historian possible. Sterling is the center of Yale, and I hope that it will be honored and funded. It has been a special privilege to serve as the faculty advisor to the Fortunoff Archive, an especially precious collection now at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library — pioneering in its time, preserved and honored for long years by Joanne Rudoff, who welcomed me there and who once attended my seminar on the Holocaust, now made more accessible and fruitful thanks to the extraordinary work of Stephen Naron.  

Yale has been a wonderful place to write. The lecture classes as well as the specialized seminars helped me to work on “The Reconstruction of Nations,” “Sketches from a Secret War,” “The Red Prince,” “Bloodlands,” “Black Earth,” “Road to Unfreedom,” “On Tyranny,” “Our Malady,” “On Freedom,” the second edition of “Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe” and to help the late Tony Judt compose “Thinking the Twentieth Century.” I could not have done any of this without an environment, created by a History Department that has only gotten better and better in the quarter century I have spent here, that treated the book as the proper unit of work — “this is what we do,” said my first chair — and reveled in publication. I was happy to play a very minor role in the creation of the Jackson School of Global Affairs, which is now proudly expanding. I was pleased that its vision could include historians, which is one way that it is unique. The Jackson School, like Yale itself, always enabled my journeys for archival and other research and welcomed the results of that work. I came to Yale as a young American used to living in other countries and having the freedom to follow the threads of research where they led; it has been an immense privilege to be able to continue that way of living, now with family, during my time at Yale.  

That first book on the list, “The Reconstruction of Nations,” treats the roles of emigrants and emigrant institutions in building resistance movements and civil society as well as generating political thought and the baseline for future policy. Students of these issues know that there is no binary choice between “stay and fight” and “leave the country.” People who have done a lot of staying and fighting often go away for a while, then come back. This is true historically, and it is true of my friends now, including those who know prison and war. And people who go away will have something to offer.  

Personally, most everything I have had to say about the United States comes from looking at it askance, from the past of other countries, or from perspectives that I gained by living abroad. I did not move because of threats, denunciations, attempts at stochastic violence from low people in high places, sanctions by Russians, warnings from friends at home and abroad, etc. But what if I had? More to the point, what if people who are far more vulnerable than me, and they are legion, decide to leave? Some of them already have, and more of them will. We need to support such people and learn from them. There are many problems on the American Left, and a signal one is the tendency to turn our energy against ourselves. If people decide to emigrate, they will have their reasons. For most, it is not an easy decision or any easy process. It is best to show understanding and solidarity. People will have things to offer from various positions. We will have to work together.  

I did not leave Yale because of Donald Trump, or because of Columbia, or because of threats to Yale — but that would be a reasonable thing to do and that is a decision that people will make. More scholars will leave the United States if universities cannot make the case for themselves and stand together while doing it. The business of universities is to exemplify and create the conditions of liberty. There are reasons why tyrants come after universities first, and this is the main one. I never once felt at Yale the slightest sense that I should or should not say or write anything in particular; it is important that everyone have that sense. What is coming to the United States now is an attempt by the federal government to encourage conformism and denunciations for the purpose of spreading terror and idiocy. This is hugely challenging to all of those who run our universities; self-defense begins with claiming the concepts. Universities are and should name themselves champions of freedom.  

Much of what made my decision to leave Yale for Toronto had to do with matters that are of no public interest. I was drawn professionally to the possibility of teaching at a large, public institution. I also liked the vision of the Munk School: its scale and its ambitions. Because of its structure and flexibility, Munk will be able to support me not only in my research and teaching but in collaborative work with a number of institutions in and beyond North America. Toronto is also home to valued friends and colleagues with whom I have shared durable collaborations in Ukrainian studies, which will now be enriched and intensified, at a critical time for Ukraine. I didn’t choose Canada because of the current conjuncture, but the current conjuncture is one for which I believe the University of Toronto is extraordinarily well suited, and for which they are visibly gathering strength. Together with colleagues and supported by leadership, I hope to take part in programming and institutions that improve our conceptualization of freedom and unfreedom and which welcome and accommodate scholars from beyond Canada who study and who have experienced tyranny. I am incredibly fortunate to have such choices.  

I have been writing and speaking for a long time about self-induced regime change in the United States and about the origins of modern tyranny. I share the belief of friends and colleagues that American higher education, the best such system that has ever existed, is now in peril because of the policies of people who wish for it not to exist; and I share the hope that universities will cooperate with one another, rather than be picked off one at a time, that they will support their students at a time of the suppression of freedom of speech and government terror. The attacks by the federal government on Yale don’t have anything to do with my own decision, but I do want to take the opportunity to point out that their rationale is ludicrous. I wrote two books on the Holocaust while at Yale and have been personally engaged in teaching about antisemitism at Yale and around the country during my entire career. History shows that the people who attack universities are not friends of the Jews. The present American government is seeking not to combat antisemitism but to foment it. Not to notice this is to allow the word “antisemitism” to become the political instrument of the actual antisemites, and to allow universities to be destroyed in the name of the latest big lie.

I taught at Yale at all the ranks from first-year assistant professor through tenured chair. There is a sense in which I cannot leave, because Yale remains within me. I cannot mention all of the colleagues around me now from whom I learn, but I do wish to recall a few people who are no longer with us. I came to Yale seeking historians I could emulate and admire and found them. I want to recall Jonathan Spence, who was gracious to a beginning scholar from a position of extraordinary writerly and scholarly distinction. I also think of Frank Turner, who came from the same part of the world as my family. I would also like to recall Ivo Banac, with whom I taught East European history. Piotr Wandycz, who was my predecessor in Polish history, made a point of meeting with me regularly and speaking in Polish, which I loved to do. He also met regularly with John Merriman, with whom he spoke French. John was a model of enthusiasm for history. The philologist Alexander — Olek — Schenker was a connection to an earlier moment, crucial for me and my education, in which the Yale Slavic Department, full of immigrants, was the envy of the world and in which its common language was Polish. Olek was also a human connection to a cosmopolitan, interwar Eastern Europe, one which was transformed, or rather murdered. Like my doctoral supervisor, the late Jerzy Jedlicki, another survivor, Olek brought a direct humanity that I sometimes miss in the United States, and which we will be needing now. “If you think about leaving Yale,” he told me once, in another language, “remember that there are people who love you.” I remember.

TIMOTHY SNYDER is Richard C. Levin professor of history and global affairs at Yale University, and will be a Blue Visiting Professor at the Jackson School of Global Affairs starting July 1. He can be reached at timothy.snyder@yale.edu.