The reverse brain-drain: Will US academics flee to the EU?

Since the most recent round of pogroms against academic institutions launched by Trump’s government in the US, hundreds of think pieces have erupted across social media and academic journals about the possibility of a “reverse brain drain”, [1] an inversion of the long-standing trend of talented EU academics leaving for the US because of better funding and job prospects.

The idea of this reversal is, to many, a rather satisfying idea. The “brain drain” arguably began in the 1930s with the rise of fascism in Europe. [2] Academics who were politically disruptive to the new regimes, were Jewish or from other persecuted minorities, or were otherwise in fear of what the new political climate would bring, accepted offers from US institutions to move there to increase US academic competition. It is often forgotten, but the motivation from the US side for accepting these refugees was to try to establish US academic prestige. US academia underwent explosive growth in the early 20th century, but without as much heritage to act as a draw, lacked prestigious staff.

Places like the Institute for Advanced Study were set up intentionally to offer the best possible deal to academics leaving Europe, freeing them from all teaching obligations and offering incredibly generous salaries. Founders Flexner and Veblen spoke explicitly about their efforts to coax Einstein, Weyl and Godel to the US through the institute. [3] Violence in Europe was the real trigger for the sudden reversal of the global academic order, as the very best and brightest of mainland and eastern Europe fled, most never to return. Not only did this leave an immediate hole in European academia but, with its institutions bereft of their best teachers, it would have knock-on effects down the generations.

But then, as now, the real difference was money. Americans often seem to ignore the economic devastation of the war, which arguably never really went away. [4, 5] Yes, the Marshall plan tried to reverse some of the damage, but all the concrete tower blocks, automotive plants and suburban development dollars can buy could not fully erase the scar across the continent. Not to mention that much of this rebuilding came with serious strings attached, including disastrous city planning and architectural experiments, inspired by US post-war “urban planners” such as Robert Moses, that many European cities are now having to pay to rip up. [6]

The idea that a rise in authoritarianism (dare I use the F word?) in the US would lead to a reversal of these fortunes has a certain poetic symmetry that clearly appeals to many, but I am not convinced; either of the similarity between these two cases or the merit of what is being proposed.

Firstly, the current state of US academia is not the same as Germany during the rise of the Nazis. Jewish scientists like Einstein were not fleeing from a decline in living standards, or reduced access to grants; they were fleeing for their lives, and they were not welcomed by the US with open arms by any measure. US institutions in the 1930s implemented Jewish quotas, mandating that faculties could not be more than a certain fraction Jewish. The institute for advanced study, while publicly creating a charter against racism, allowed prevailing racism against black academics, such as William S Claytor, to affect hiring. This blocked many scientist refugees from being able to work in the US. This is very far from the state modern US academics find themselves in, or the political attitude towards Americans in Europe. There is not, currently and I hope never, a credible threat to the lives of US academics (with a few exceptions I note below), nor are there exclusions or limitations, at least any more than those that exist in the US, that would prevent those academics who are under economic threat from migrating through normal channels.

Now of course, there are some exceptions here. Transgender and minority colleagues may well be in fear for their lives right now and welcoming them to our countries is a moral duty (though sadly they may not find the situation here much better). This may not come with academic positions, but certainly we have a duty as we did in 1931 to help those who feel the crushing weight of an authoritarian regime trying to remove their rights. I feel little moral obligation, however, to extend the same hand to US academics who are simply falling on hard times financially. Especially since those hard times are still mostly better than those we have faced in Europe since 2008.

The discussion I have seen online is laden with the language of extreme privilege. One discussion I saw on LinkedIn in particular argued that American academics should not have to compete with European academics for jobs but be granted a special hiring route only for them, which offers salaries at US pay scales. This was referred to as “rescue hiring”.

Maintaining the wealth and status of an elite by overriding equal hiring practices based on nationality is not “rescuing”, it’s discrimination. It would in fact be illegal under almost all EU labour equality laws.

But as the saying goes “when you are used to privilege, equality feels like discrimination”.

This is at a time when EU Universities are reporting calls from US security agencies asking them to remove Equality frameworks from their hiring practices or risk being cut off from US funding. [7] That American academic influencers would, in this climate, be pushing for special treatment, increased salaries and privileged hiring over the citizens of the countries they are moving to is revolting. Threads like the one below are also full of stereotyping and insulting discussions of European life; making claims about sanitation, housing infrastructure, quality of life and even healthcare that betray a frightening degree of isolationism among the authors who are leading this discussion.

The EU averages lower wages than the US, with monthly wages in western Europe falling between 3,300 EUR and 5,200 EUR (not counting Switzerland which has an outsize effect on the EU average). [8, 9] In wealthy states like California, the monthly wage is on average $6,400, or about 5,500 EUR, which is a little more than Germany. However, the minimum cost of living in California is about $5,400 a month, meaning the average citizen is earning about 118% of what they need to survive. Germany, by comparison, has a cost of living of about 2000 EUR per month in the bigger cities, meaning the average citizen here is earning 275% of what they need to survive.

Despite complaints about small houses and dirty cities, of the top ten countries worldwide by Human Development Index, eight are in the EU. [10] Of the top ten cities in the world by liveability index, the top two are both in the EU (and two are in Switzerland). No US cities make that list. [11]

The water complaint has always baffled me. While stories about contaminated drinking water in places like Flint, Michigan continue to make the news; the EU has 19 of the top 20 countries for best drinking water. [12] While metrics like the water quality index, which measure access to improved water from any source (including bottled water), rank the US very highly; when it comes to tap water the US is equal or slightly worse than the EU, with both having tap water that is mostly high quality except for some isolated areas of contamination. Despite this, I still know US academics who will only drink bottled water while in the EU, and refuse to accept arguments to the contrary.

But even putting this distasteful display of American exceptionalism aside, the tenor of this commentary is politically and economically illiterate. Europe has never struggled for talent. One of our biggest exports is scientific expertise, largely to the US. What we struggle for is money. Taken as a whole, the EU is the second biggest economy in the world, but its financial resources are far more difficult to target and leverage than those of the US due to its more devolved power structure. As a result, grants tend to be smaller and more competitive and there is a big disparity in funding by country. Overall, the US outspends the EU on science funding by at least 2:1. [13]

Despite this, Europe maintains scientific excellence at or above that of the US. Taken by Nobel prizes (which is a flawed measure but an easy one) the US has won 420 prizes, while European countries have won 614 (I’m counting countries that have historically been considered part of Europe, so not Russia or Turkey, but not countries that have been dissolved, such as Yugoslavia). Per capita, that’s 1.37 prizes per million people to the US’s 1.21; and per dollar of GDP that’s 33 prizes per trillion dollars versus the US’s 15. Europe has proven time and time again that ingenuity, diversity of thought and universal education produces better innovations than wealth, privilege and power. American academics may have more money, but unless they are bringing that wealth with them, it is hard to see what they will bring to an EU that is already equal, or arguably stronger, than the US in scholarship. This is why it is so galling to see think-pieces in Nature and even European news sites arguing that the EU needs to “take an opportunity to lead the world in science”. [14, 15] We already do. The implication that US academics are better, and the EU should be grateful and bend over backwards to accommodate them, even at the expense of its own young people, is insulting.

So, what would US academics bring to the UK if not money? There is no denying that the increased resources of America have bred areas of expertise that have been neglected in the EU. This is especially true in social sciences, which have been cut to the bone in most EU programmes. Provided there is an understanding that people coming from the US to the EU will be expected to be equal with homegrown academics, will be expected to adopt our teaching workloads and practices; extending a hand in these key areas seems like a valuable thing to do. Not least to preserve this knowledge in an environment that is increasingly trying to erase scholarship related to equality in race, gender and sexuality.

When it comes to the physical sciences, however, I am sceptical. There are several US scientists I am very close with and admire greatly (most of them were not born in the US as it happens) so I am not trying to tar all US academia with the same brush; but I have certainly noticed a cultural shift in the physical sciences of the US. At a recent conference in Italy that I helped organise, I found myself interacting with many groups of US scientists, who, without being asked, had a lot to say about the EU culture, little of it flattering. This included people complaining that the cities were dirty, that hotels were too small, that buildings were ugly, asking if water was safe to drink and loudly shouting at Italian staff in simplified English.

More worrying though were the things these colleagues had to say about equality and reform. A discussion with a US professor went sour when we were discussing the failures of condensed matter physics to advance materials discoveries into real-world products; which triggered a tirade from the Prof against “DEI!” and “the stupidity of trying to let everyone have a seat at the table”. A worse example was a US prof who got drunk and started inappropriately touching a 22 year old student in front of me. When I protested, both the Prof and the student told me it was fine because “he’s my supervisor, it’s my job to look after him”. To be clear, I don’t think these attitudes are universal in US academia, but my experiences indicate they exist in the US at a level that would not be tolerated in the EU. The ongoing bullying scandal, which exists in the EU as well to a slightly lesser extent, to me verifies that the US has serious and ongoing problems with its research culture that long predate the current administration. [16]

US academics I have seen come to my institution have sometimes struggled to adapt to local rules, especially around the DORA and metrics. I have sat on interview panels with US academics who have, despite repeatedly being told not to use h-index is hiring decisions, have thrown away CVs on the basis of citation metrics alone. I think this is a major sticking point. The US, undoubtedly, averages a higher h-index among academics than we do in the EU (though it should be noted that even in h-index less than half the top 10 academics worldwide are based in the US). [17] The reasons for this are complex; but greater resources, lower teaching loads among research intensive staff and larger post-graduate numbers (both because of higher intake and longer PhD timelines) certainly play a role. Whether or not higher h-index actually translates to better science is an ongoing and toxified debate, but I have no hesitation in saying that, at the very least, we should not assume h-index translates well between countries. But in discussions about the reverse brain-drain, I constantly see h-index brought up as evidence of US exceptionalism. This ignores the fact that h-index is itself a largely American invention designed to suit American research culture. [18]

While h-index was created by Jorge Hirsch (who is Argentinian), he invented the index while at San Diego, and did so to align with the growing importance of US based on-line publishers in academia. Like IQ, h-index has become a self-referencing metric of excellence, measuring one particular way of being, privileging that way of being, and then claiming the resulting success as evidence of the metric’s veracity. Whether it has any basis as a true measure of excellence is hard to know, but the discomfort of many academics with this flattening of scientific research has only grown in the last decade. The DORA, which also came from the US, has tried to reverse the trends created citation metrics, seeking to restore the complexity and diversity of academic assessment and publishing that existed prior to online citation tracking tools like Google Scholar. It has had mixed success, relying largely on voluntary self-policing by institutions. [19]

If h-index provides a way for US academics to outcompete EU scholars, gain easy access to positions at EU universities and dominate the already limited funding for research, it will reverse all progress made by the DORA and other programmes. This is already happening, with processes like the R4RI coming under scrutiny from scholars who favour numerical metrics over narrative reporting. Many UK institutions, including mine, are doubling down on numerical metrics or reversing policies designed to limit their power. It cannot be a coincidence that this is happening at the same time as US academics with high h-indices are eyeing up the EU.

To conclude, the EU is not a sick economy crying out for US brain power, quite the opposite. The main thing the EU needs is more funding, and if US academics are fleeing their own budget cuts, they obviously will not be bringing money. Despite our comparative low wealth and the resultant brain drain of some of our young talent, the EU has been able to maintain scientific excellence at or above that of the US. Our ability to do this, as well as maintain high standards of living for our citizens despite lower GDP, is in large part because we do not fully share US cultural and economic values. We have maintained programmes that encourage diversity and mobility of people, that prioritise things other than GDP and wealth creation and maintain non-profit enterprises in education where possible. Most EU countries have some form of welfare and socialised medicine, things that are seemingly anathema to US politics. We have plenty of our own problems, but we should not assume that because the US scores higher on the metrics they designed means they are better.

If some US academics bring ingrained assumptions about research culture and resource allocation, intentionally or not, to EU institutions, it could actually damage EU scientific competitiveness, not improve it. Not to mention that the new competition will further reduce job prospects for home grown talent, an issue that I would have though the vehemently anti-immigration US would well understand. I expect they’ll call themselves “ex-pats” though.

The original “brain-drain” occurred because academics from political, racial and cultural minorities were persecuted by the state to the point that their lives were in danger, and the US had enough money to offer them sanctuary (with some pretty hefty strings and exclusions of course). The EU cannot offer this, let alone the kind of privileged hires online influencers are arguing for. It can offer an environment that is more supportive and favourable to academics from minorities and persecuted groups, and to certain disciplines that are being targeted by the government. But that does not apply to most of the people currently writing think pieces about fleeing the US, who seem to mostly be angry that their wealth, status and vast funding resources are under threat; and expect the EU to foot the bill for them to maintain their standard of living.

While the “brain-drain” analogy has a certain poetry, I am reminded of a very different historical example; that of US GIs in Europe in the 40s, who made fun of European living standards and liked to flash their cash at the poor of wartime Britain. This resulted in the famous phrase “oversexed, overpaid and over here” attributed to comedian Tommy Trinder. But as well as distaste for the behaviour of GIs, the differences in values resulted in real conflict. The Battle of Bamber Bridge (in which my fiancé’s family fought) occurred when the US army tried to use their political weight to ban black servicemen from drinking in the pub with white locals. Both the black servicemen and the locals objected to the point they ended up in a firefight with US military police. Tension over differing attitudes to race, sex and wealth have caused regular conflict between the US and Europe, even when we are allied, and in this latest trend, I see the ingredients for a repeat of past conflicts.

The bitter irony is that the EUs good standards of living and academic culture exist in part because we have not embraced US work culture, and a flood of US academics who are baldly writing about their expectations for special treatment and lack of interest in changing their attitudes could well send our academic culture down the same path as the one they are trying to flee.