A leading Australian university has recruited more than a dozen academic researchers away from the United States amid widespread concern that the Trump administration’s hostile stance toward higher education, including cuts to research funding, would prompt scientists and researchers to move abroad.
Monash University near Melbourne, Australia’s largest university, has invested $10 million so far to recruit American researchers in a range of fields to reestablish their careers there, including academics from Dartmouth College, Harvard Medical School, MIT, Cornell University, and the University of California, Berkeley.
“There’s all this background noise that prevents you from really focusing on the work that you want to do,” said Charles Crabtree, a researcher studying class-based discrimination who recently relocated to Monash from Dartmouth. “Monash was providing a place where I can do that work without those pressures [and] daily concerns, with significant research investment, which is very welcome given the research funding landscape in America.”
