Ireland hopes to entice academics as US becomes ‘a cold place for free thinkers’

Ireland is to launch a scheme to poach academics and university lecturers from overseas on the basis that the Trump administration has made the US “a cold place for free thinkers and talented researchers”.

The higher education minister, James Lawless, will on Tuesday seek cabinet approval for a “global talent initiative” to entice top international academics, including those seeking to leave the US or deterred from working there.

The plan envisages deploying roving academic talent scouts who will offer potential recruits attractive packages, with the Irish government contributing up to half of the salaries offered by Ireland’s third-level institutions. The talent hunt will reportedly prioritise experts in renewable energy, food security, digital technology, artificial intelligence, semiconductors and healthcare.

Lawless told an Irish universities association seminar on Monday: “Today, as US research freedoms come under threat, Ireland has a unique opportunity to emulate their post-war success by offering a stable, open, EU-aligned environment where world-class researchers can thrive, contribute and shape the future of science. Ireland will be a welcoming host for the best and brightest fleeing the US university system.”

Perceptions of the US as a haven for research had changed in recent months, the minister said. “It has become a cold place for free thinkers and talented researchers. We all know how that will grind advanced research to a halt. And that is nothing in the face of the human suffering of targeted student arrests and deportations”. Reports of library culls “bring to mind book burnings of old”, he said.

As a precedent Lawless cited Ireland’s success in enticing Erwin Schrödinger to Dublin on the eve of the second world war. The Austrian physicist helped to set up the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies (DIAS).

The Irish scheme follows efforts by Belgium’s Vrije Universiteit Brussel, France’s Pasteur Institute and other European institutions to recruit US researchers by offering themselves as a haven for those keen to escape a White House crackdown on research and academia. In March the Netherlands said it planned to launch a fund to attract researchers.

The Trump administration has frozen billions in federal funds for research under in the name of efficiency and punishing alleged anti-semitism and other transgressions in academia. It has been called an “RMS Titanic moment” for American higher education.

The migration of talent might initially benefit only individual, high-profile researchers but there would be an economic effect, Cas Mudde, the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, recently wrote in the Guardian. “That might force even the Trump administration to change course.”