Professors leave Yale. They are getting out while they can.

Professor Tim Snyder is the world's top expert on Ukraine and modern Eastern Europe.

He is leaving the U.S., for his own protection and to protect Yale.

Snyder and two other professors are leaving Yale to join the Munk School of Global affairs at the University of Toronto in Canada.

Snyder said his warnings about Trump's authoritarian actions put him -- and Yale -- in Trump's crosshairs. Trump has been targeting attorneys whose work puts them at odds with Trump personally or with the MAGA agenda. He uses a blunt, but effective weapon: blackballing the entire firm that they work for, including forbidding any attorney working for that firm to enter a federal courthouse. Universities are at similar risk. Snyder said he saw what happened to Columbia University, and its threatened loss of $400 million in research grants. Columbia capitulated to Trump, as did the law firms Paul Weiss and Skadden Arps.

Also leaving Yale is Snyder's wife, Marci Shore, a specialist in European intellectual history, and colleague Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor and student of fascism. Shore is the author of The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. Stanley's most recent book, published in 2024, is Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.

Tim Snyder is likely a familiar name and face to readers of this blog. His academic specialty -- Ukraine, twentieth century authoritarianism under Hitler and Stalin, and the slide of democracies into tyranny -- is center stage in current public discourse. He is visible on Substack, on YouTube, and is a frequent guest on opinioin shows on television

Lesson One: Do not obey in advance

Snyder's book, Bloodlands, described the process by which Hitler and Stalin carried out their own "Manifest Destiny" of mass murder in Ukraine. Snyder's newest books and public statements are warnings about the methods authoritarian leaders use to solidify power: undermining the media, the law, the universities, non-profit interest groups, and businesses.

Readers of this blog may have observed Snyder giving practical instructions on how to stop an authoritarian strongman. Do not obey in advance. The social skill of picking up cues as to what is desired and expected is dangerous when dealing with an authoritarian leader. Instead, make the leader spell out exactly what he wants and is doing. Disagree, and make him win in court, if he can. If the leader wants to arrest and deport people based on vague rumors and mass dragnets, then make the ruler say explicitly that that is what he is doing. Let the courts and the public judge whether they think that kind of police power might be directed against themselves. Don't cover for him.

Trump has put into the zeitgeist the fear that innocent and completely legitimate actions of a member of a large institution might jeopardize the entire institution's survival. Prudent leaders are surveying the landscape for potential risks to their own institutions. What have our people already done that might displease Trump, Elon Musk, or a MAGA-led federal agency? Trump's executive orders blackballing the entirety of giant law firms send a warning: Never let any employee displease Trump. Worse, it may already be too late.

Perhaps the judicial system will rule against Trump and prohibit the blackballing, but the damage is done and the message was sent. There are a thousand ways that a strongman can indicate pleasure and displeasure to subordinates -- a raised eyebrow, a smirk -- and favor and disfavor trickles down. Trump can get to you. You might not even know it, but the contract-not-awarded or the adverse administrative ruling may be Trump's way of punishing his enemies.

Snyder said he was "an embarrassment" to Yale. Not so. But he was unquestionably a risk to Yale.

Yale is a research university dependent upon federal grants to carry out that mission. It has an endowment at risk of being confiscated by special-punishment taxes. Its law school graduates hope to get clerkships from judges who themselves may have ambitions of nominations to higher courts. The tiniest suggestion by Trump that Yale Law graduates should be avoided as punishment for Yale tolerating Snyder would be disastrous to Yale's position as a launchpad for career success. Yale is vulnerable.

Snyder saw what happened in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s to disfavored people. Snyder sees the early warnings and is getting out now, with all three becoming department heads at the Munk School of Public Affairs. He will continue his warnings, but from a safer place.

President Reagan said the U.S. was the world's "beacon of freedom." Not anymore.