OPPORTUNITY HUNTING AS BRAIN DRAIN

Two top academics' shift from the US has brought back the brain drain discourse. Is it likely given the realities elsewhere and the possibility of US reversal in a few years?

- 

IT's quite fascinating that in a world where new words and phrases are often coined to cleverly repackage old phenomenons, a phraseology popular in the 1960s is being brought back to describe a certain migration out of Donald Trump's America. One has to be cautious when one calls it 'migration', because one is not sure if it's really so. That is, if it's a sustained trend of conscious escape or opportunity hunting.

When Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo announced last week they were moving to the University of Zurich in Switzerland from MIT in the US, it was casually labelled as 'brain drain', although the economist couple had themselves not characterised the professional move as such.

An American news site reported that "one of the biggest risks of the White House's war on academia and its slashing on scientific research funding has been brain drain-the situation where top scholars, spooked by the worsening climate, find working in other nations more attractive instead." It said Banerjee and Duflo were 'decamping' to Zurich.

The site also quoted a source to claim the pair's departure was connected with the White House's attacks on academic freedom. It speculated: "The timing certainly is suggestive." MIT is among the top centres of learning in the US that the Trump administration has been pressuring to make institutional changes in exchange for preferential government funding. Unlike many other institutions, MIT had spurned what is euphemistically called the 'Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education' days before Banerjee and Duflo made their decision public.

Duflo had told the news site they did not wish to comment on their move especially when MIT was dealing with reaction to its refusal of the 'compact'.