By Thomas Escritt
BERLIN (Reuters) -Uncertainty over the future of U.S. universities under President Donald Trump’s administration has fuelled a threefold surge in U.S. applications to the Max Planck Society, one of Europe’s leading research bodies.
Changes in funding for research centres, coupled with the administration’s move last week – temporarily blocked by a judge – to ban international students from Harvard, have cast a pall over the United States’ world-leading science infrastructure.
Trump’s crackdown, which has already seen prominent academics like historian Timothy Snyder, a scholar on authoritarianism, quit Yale for a post in Canada, has led top scientists to look to Europe, data indicates.
The Max Planck Society, a German state-backed network of research centres, received 81 applications from the U.S. this spring in its latest call for promising early-career women scientists looking to set up their own research labs. Last year’s call received 25 applications.
“What’s interesting is the number of applications from other parts of the world remained constant,” said Patrick Cramer, president of the Max Planck Society.
“If you look at which institutions these applications are coming from, you see almost half are concentrated at five (U.S.) institutions: Harvard, Stanford, MIT, the National Institutes of Health and the University of California.”
With an annual budget of over 2 billion euros ($2.3 billion) and a staff of 25,000 spread over its 84 research centres, as well as 39 Nobel prizes to its name, Max Planck is one of the few outfits worldwide that can offer facilities comparable with top-drawer U.S. institutions.
Cramer said the society planned to allocate extra funds to hire as many as 20 of the applicants rather than the planned 12 if the overall quality was as high as expected.
Research organisations across Europe are making plans for what they expect to be a glut of top scholars hit by the turbulence in U.S. education.
Freshly back from a trip to the U.S., Cramer said the main topic of discussion was how research organisations elsewhere could minimise the damage done to the advancement of science.
“It came up again and again: our main concern is to ensure that we don’t lose too many talented people in this generation to global science. We have to try and offer a safe haven in Europe where we can absorb talent to bridge the coming years.”
The Trump administration revoked Harvard University’s ability to enrol international students last week and is forcing current foreign students to transfer to other schools or lose legal status, while also threatening to expand the crackdown to other colleges.
Germany’s new government plans a “1,000 brains” programme of expanded research capacity in response to the upheaval in U.S. higher education but, at a time of economic headwinds, universities across Europe face resource constraints.
Regardless, global science cannot shrug off the impact of the winds buffeting U.S. higher education, said Petra Olschowski, research minister in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg who oversees four of Germany’s 11 leading universities.
“Harvard, the other major U.S. universities set the bar: this is the benchmark we want to achieve,” she said. “And it’s precisely this constellation that is being wounded.”
($1 = 0.8808 euros)
(Reporting by Thomas Escritt; editing by Mark Heinrich)
