Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government (HKS) and the University of Arizona (UA) are making contingency plans for international students who are unable either to enter or to safely remain in the United States due to the tightened student visas announced by the Trump administration.

Beginning with the fall semester, HKS international students will have the option of continuing their degrees at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy (Munk) at the University of Toronto in Canada’s largest and most diverse city.

While details of UA’s plans are still being worked out, UA Vice-President Jenny Lee told the Arizona Board of Regents two weeks ago: We are offering first-semester study abroad as a pilot in London that keeps students on track without losing time (on their) degrees.”

Lee also told Regents that the campus will help undergird international enrolment, which, as national enrolment numbers drop because of the declining number of traditionally aged university students, has become a major source of students for the university, accounting for more than 3,600 of the university’s 56,544 students.

In his letter to the HKS community dated 25 June, Dean Jeremy M Weinstein wrote that even as two federal judges have enjoined the Trump administration from enforcing executive orders revoking Harvard’s ability to enrol international students (that is, which means the university can continue to do so) the university has “been developing contingency plans to make sure that HKS can continue to contribute to bring together the world’s best students and train them to tackle the world’s biggest problems”.

At the HKS at Munk School programme, international students who cannot come to the US “will continue their HKS education as part of a visiting student programme. ... These students will take a mix of courses taught by HKS faculty (both online and in person) and instructors from the University of Toronto,” wrote Weinstein.

In the 2024 to 2025 academic year, almost 60% of the HKS students came from 96 countries other than the US.

In a written statement Munk provided to University World News, Dr Janice Stein, Munk’s founding director said: “These are exceptional times. If Harvard Kennedy international students are not able to complete their studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy looks forward to providing shared academic and co-curricular experiences for students from both our schools.”

Committed to academic freedom

The students who will study at Munk will be following a path cut first by two international relations professors, Brian Rathbun and Nina Srinivasan Rathbun, who left the University of Southern California last year, and the well-known scholar of fascism, Timothy Snyder, Marcia Shore and philosophy professor Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works: The politics of us and them (2018), who left Yale University this year for Munk.

“In this last year, several scholars from the States have joined us because they are deeply concerned about the assault on universities, the threat to academic freedom and the attack on rights more generally,” Stein told the New York Times.

“At the Munk School, we are totally committed to freedom of inquiry, to the independent pursuit of scholarship and to academic freedom,” she added. “For some coming from the United States now, those core values are of paramount importance.”

Munk’s welcoming of students who either will not be granted visas to study in the US or fear that they could be rounded up by masked and heavily armed agents belonging to Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) and of professors who, because of political pressures, have left the country previously seen as a beacon of scholarship, is redolent of Nazi Germany and other authoritarian regimes.

“We’ve seen this situation before in authoritarian regimes like 1930s Germany and Victor Orbán’s Hungary today,” said Isaac Kamola, professor of political science at Trinity College (Hartford, Connecticut) and director of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.

“These regimes, which depend upon coercion, are threatened by the university and therefore seek to control what is taught and researched. In this context, students and faculty are hounded out of the country,” said Kamola, author of Manufacturing Backlash, an investigation of legislative attacks on academic freedom between 2021 and 2023.

“The fact that the University of Toronto is giving shelter to prominent scholars and Harvard students is evidence that the repression of American higher education is escalating under Trump.

“Whereas governors like DeSantis and Abbott were able to transform public higher education in Florida and Texas, Trump can use the full force of the federal government to coerce private universities into capitulation as well,” he added.

“We are seeing faculty, students, unions, and the wider public organising against this repression. But even more is needed. Not only to defend higher education but to rebuild the institutions that all Americans deserve,” he noted.

For his part, David Robinson, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, told University World News: “While a modest agreement in terms of the number of students covered, it is quite remarkable.

“Who would have predicted that in 2025 a Canadian university would be opening its doors to US-based students facing threats and persecution south of the border?

“Higher education in the US is arguably facing an existential crisis. Perhaps this agreement shows that international cooperation and solidarity might be the best defence at the moment.”

A ‘safe place for science’

Coincidentally, the same day that HKS and Munk announced their agreement, 3,700 miles to the east of Harvard, Éric Berton, president of the Aix-Marseilles Université (AMU), was speaking at a reception for several of the 20 American scholars who, under the “Safe Place for Science” initiative, will relocate to the university in Provence, France.

AMU’s “Safe Place for Science”, which will cost €15 million (US$17.71 million), is partially funded by €100 million set aside by the government of France’s President Emmanuel Macron to attract and support American scientists who want to leave the United States.

“Here in France, research is a priority, innovation a culture, science a limitless horizon. Researchers from all over the world choose France, choose Europe,” Macron said in a post on X, as reported by France24.

At the reception, Berton went further than simply welcoming the refugee scholars; he called for the government to “enshrine the concept of science refugees in law”.

History repeats itself

Berton was alive to the irony of the moment: “More than 80 years ago [during the Second World War but when the US was still neutral], America welcomed exiled researchers, extended a helping hand, and allowed them to keep science alive.

“Now, in a sad reversal of history, it is some of you, American scientists, who are coming to France to seek a space of freedom,” Berton said.

According to Brian Sandberg, a professor of French, European, and Mediterranean history, who will be a Senior Fellow at the Iméra research institute at AMU for the 2025 to 2026 academic year, Berton also spoke about how Marseilles was the city where Varian Fry, an American journalist working for the Emergency Rescue Committee, arranged for 2,000 people, including such luminaries as the writers Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel; the artist Marc Chagal; the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin (who committed suicide after being stopped at the Spanish border) and Alma Mahler to flee Nazi-dominated Europe.

“The president is very, very conscious of this history. The parallels are real from an historical point of view, but also, it’s part of the thinking of research administrators, how they are going to respond to the situation.

“Berton made a direct reference to this history and to the setting up of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton [where Albert Einstein found an academic home] as part of his rationale for launching the programme,” said Sandberg.

Sandberg is awaiting his interview for a spot in the “Safe Place for Science” programme to start in 2026 so that he will not have to return to the university in the Midwest where he has taught for more than a decade but which University World News has agreed not to name.

UAM administrators are not, Sandberg explained, alone in thinking in these historical terms.

“I’ve talked with some friends of mine in Marseilles who are not, not academic, but who have followed some of the coverage because this programme has been well covered in the local and regional media. Several of them reached out to me Friday morning, for example, and said: ‘Saw you on the cover of Provence,’ or ‘Saw you on the cover of La Marseillaise’,” he noted.

“So, they’re aware of it. I’ve heard some French people that I know, again, not academics, talking about what Trump is doing as being like the early days of Nazism, a parallel to the collapse of Weimar democracy, to the speed at which it collapsed.

“That’s definitely being related by ordinary French people to what’s going on in the United States. I’ve had several friends say what’s most shocking [about what is happening under Trump] is the speed of the changes,” he added.

This article was corrected on 9 July to reflect the fact that the University of Arizona has not yet announced where its London pilot programme will be hosted and to correct its international enrolment figures.