This morning an interesting report appeared on my Google news feed. According to the news, France recently advertised that it would take in American academics who were seeking to escape the research cancellations and climate of intellectual crackdown in the US. France reports that some 40 researchers in science, sociology, and the humanities have already taken up the invitation. Moreover, France is saying that it won’t be able to absorb all the interested academics and is telling the rest of Europe to open up for them as well. I don’t imagine all of Europe as a bastion of intellectual freedom; Germany certainly is not. Yet it seems that these academics are preferring at least France to the US. It’s the reverse of what happened in pre-war Germany, when German academia was split between those who supported the rising folk nationalism and those who felt threatened by it. Germany ended up losing to America some of its brightest minds, not only in science but in philosophy and sociology as well. As I noted before, it’s ironic that the man who would MAGA is doing the opposite for American academia.