Residir en Toronto estos últimos siete meses no ha cambiado mi compromiso. Desde que me mudé allí, he publicado un libro sobre la libertad, he hablado de ella clandestinamente en Járkov antes de visitar el frente en Ucrania, he pasado semanas en el Medio Oeste hablando de libertad y realizando otros trabajos antes de las elecciones, y más semanas en Europa después de las elecciones hablando de qué esperar de la nueva coyuntura; he contribuido a la apertura de una escuela clandestina en Zaporiyia durante otra visita a Ucrania; he recaudado fondos para vehículos blindados de evacuación; he impartido conferencias por todo el país —incluyendo esta semana en Memphis y Nueva York—; he consultado con grupos de oposición y resistencia, y con políticos de Estados Unidos y otros países, y he escrito el tipo de cosas que siempre he escrito. Nadie, creo que es justo decirlo, ha notado ninguna diferencia en mi actividad pública, porque no la ha habido. Ni la habrá. Estoy entusiasmado con las oportunidades en Toronto que creo que impulsarán este compromiso. Mientras pueda, iré a los lugares a los que voy y haré el trabajo que hago.

Rather than have everything revolve around Trump and his destructiveness, what I had hoped to write was a note of appreciation. I resign from my position as the Richard C. Levin chair with sadness and with fond feelings for Rick and fond memories of his 20 years as president. I have no animus towards Yale, and no conflict has driven me away. I loved being at Yale. My colleagues have been kind these last three years, since the latest Toronto offer came, as I have tried to sort through conflicting senses of obligation and have been generous in allowing me to take leave and then, after the decision was made, to agree upon preserving or creating affiliations with Yale: continuing as faculty advisor to the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies and as of July 1, a Blue Visiting Professor at the Jackson School of Global Affairs.

I retain a number of other affiliations within the United States, including as a senior fellow for democracy at the Council on Foreign Relations. I have been adjunct faculty at the University of New Haven, which has allowed me to take part in the extraordinary Yale Prison Education Initiative, run by Zelda Roland ’08 GRD ’16. The prison teaching I will miss and will hope to do it again. And I am still affiliated with organizations beyond the United States, as I was while I was at Yale: as the Lesya Ukrainka Permanent Fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna; and as the chair of the faculty advisory council of Ukrainian History Global Initiative, among other pleasant duties.

My main identity as of July 1 will be as a historian at the Munk School at the University of Toronto. I am delighted about that and looking forward to some special initiatives that we have in the works. In the very immediate future, Toronto will be a place where clear and significant conversations about freedom and unfreedom, unfortunately ever harder in the U.S., will take place.

I have been at Yale longer than most of the people who have kindly tried to persuade me to stay. I loved teaching at Yale; from the beginning, way back in September 2001, it was an honor and a pleasure. I have had a chance to think about what has been so special, what has kept me here for so long, and what has kept me so happy about the place. Yale’s great achievement is to create an oasis for its undergraduates, and I believe that there is no better place to spend those four years of life. The undergraduate students constitute a rich and durable connection to Yale, the thousands of them in the dozens of lecture classes, so many of whom I still hear from or see in my travels. The lecture classes on Eastern Europe have surely made a difference; we need the broad classes because our students encounter regions of the world and the oceans of ignorance around them. I am also proud of my master’s students, and especially of my doctoral students, several of whom are now historians themselves.

The open stacks of the Sterling Library rescued me again and again. I wrote for long periods in its Slavic Reading Room and held courses there when I could. I cannot stress enough that its collections, as well as the collections of other Yale libraries and archives, made my career as a writing historian possible. Sterling is the center of Yale, and I hope that it will be honored and funded. It has been a special privilege to serve as the faculty advisor to the Fortunoff Archive, an especially precious collection now at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library — pioneering in its time, preserved and honored for long years by Joanne Rudoff, who welcomed me there and who once attended my seminar on the Holocaust, now made more accessible and fruitful thanks to the extraordinary work of Stephen Naron.

Yale has been a wonderful place to write. The lecture classes as well as the specialized seminars helped me to work on “The Reconstruction of Nations,” “Sketches from a Secret War,” “The Red Prince,” “Bloodlands,” “Black Earth,” “Road to Unfreedom,” “On Tyranny,” “Our Malady,” “On Freedom,” the second edition of “Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe” and to help the late Tony Judt compose “Thinking the Twentieth Century.” I could not have done any of this without an environment, created by a History Department that has only gotten better and better in the quarter century I have spent here, that treated the book as the proper unit of work — “this is what we do,” said my first chair — and reveled in publication. I was happy to play a very minor role in the creation of the Jackson School of Global Affairs, which is now proudly expanding. I was pleased that its vision could include historians, which is one way that it is unique. The Jackson School, like Yale itself, always enabled my journeys for archival and other research and welcomed the results of that work. I came to Yale as a young American used to living in other countries and having the freedom to follow the threads of research where they led; it has been an immense privilege to be able to continue that way of living, now with family, during my time at Yale.

That first book on the list, “The Reconstruction of Nations,” treats the roles of emigrants and emigrant institutions in building resistance movements and civil society as well as generating political thought and the baseline for future policy. Students of these issues know that there is no binary choice between “stay and fight” and “leave the country.” People who have done a lot of staying and fighting often go away for a while, then come back. This is true historically, and it is true of my friends now, including those who know prison and war. And people who go away will have something to offer.

Personally, most everything I have had to say about the United States comes from looking at it askance, from the past of other countries, or from perspectives that I gained by living abroad. I did not move because of threats, denunciations, attempts at stochastic violence from low people in high places, sanctions by Russians, warnings from friends at home and abroad, etc. But what if I had? More to the point, what if people who are far more vulnerable than me, and they are legion, decide to leave? Some of them already have, and more of them will. We need to support such people and learn from them. There are many problems on the American Left, and a signal one is the tendency to turn our energy against ourselves. If people decide to emigrate, they will have their reasons. For most, it is not an easy decision or any easy process. It is best to show understanding and solidarity. People will have things to offer from various positions. We will have to work together.

I did not leave Yale because of Donald Trump, or because of Columbia, or because of threats to Yale — but that would be a reasonable thing to do and that is a decision that people will make. More scholars will leave the United States if universities cannot make the case for themselves and stand together while doing it. The business of universities is to exemplify and create the conditions of liberty. There are reasons why tyrants come after universities first, and this is the main one. I never once felt at Yale the slightest sense that I should or should not say or write anything in particular; it is important that everyone have that sense. What is coming to the United States now is an attempt by the federal government to encourage conformism and denunciations for the purpose of spreading terror and idiocy. This is hugely challenging to all of those who run our universities; self-defense begins with claiming the concepts. Universities are and should name themselves champions of freedom.

Much of what made my decision to leave Yale for Toronto had to do with matters that are of no public interest. I was drawn professionally to the possibility of teaching at a large, public institution. I also liked the vision of the Munk School: its scale and its ambitions. Because of its structure and flexibility, Munk will be able to support me not only in my research and teaching but in collaborative work with a number of institutions in and beyond North America. Toronto is also home to valued friends and colleagues with whom I have shared durable collaborations in Ukrainian studies, which will now be enriched and intensified, at a critical time for Ukraine. I didn’t choose Canada because of the current conjuncture, but the current conjuncture is one for which I believe the University of Toronto is extraordinarily well suited, and for which they are visibly gathering strength. Together with colleagues and supported by leadership, I hope to take part in programming and institutions that improve our conceptualization of freedom and unfreedom and which welcome and accommodate scholars from beyond Canada who study and who have experienced tyranny. I am incredibly fortunate to have such choices.

I have been writing and speaking for a long time about self-induced regime change in the United States and about the origins of modern tyranny. I share the belief of friends and colleagues that American higher education, the best such system that has ever existed, is now in peril because of the policies of people who wish for it not to exist; and I share the hope that universities will cooperate with one another, rather than be picked off one at a time, that they will support their students at a time of the suppression of freedom of speech and government terror. The attacks by the federal government on Yale don’t have anything to do with my own decision, but I do want to take the opportunity to point out that their rationale is ludicrous. I wrote two books on the Holocaust while at Yale and have been personally engaged in teaching about antisemitism at Yale and around the country during my entire career. History shows that the people who attack universities are not friends of the Jews. The present American government is seeking not to combat antisemitism but to foment it. Not to notice this is to allow the word “antisemitism” to become the political instrument of the actual antisemites, and to allow universities to be destroyed in the name of the latest big lie.

Enseñé en Yale en todos los niveles, desde profesor asistente de primer año hasta catedrático titular. En cierto sentido, no puedo irme, porque Yale sigue vivo en mí. No puedo mencionar a todos los colegas que me rodean y de quienes aprendo, pero sí quiero recordar a algunas personas que ya no están. Llegué a Yale buscando historiadores a quienes emular y admirar, y los encontré. Quiero recordar a Jonathan Spence, quien fue generoso con un académico principiante desde una posición de extraordinaria distinción como escritor y académico. También pienso en Frank Turner, quien provenía de la misma parte del mundo que mi familia. También quisiera recordar a Ivo Banac, con quien enseñé historia de Europa del Este. Piotr Wandycz, quien fue mi predecesor en la historia de Polonia, se aseguraba de reunirse conmigo regularmente y hablar en polaco, algo que me encantaba hacer. También se reunía regularmente con John Merriman, con quien hablaba francés. John fue un modelo de entusiasmo por la historia. El filólogo Alexander —Olek— Schenker fue una conexión con un momento anterior, crucial para mí y mi educación, en el que el Departamento de Eslavo de Yale, lleno de inmigrantes, era la envidia del mundo y su lengua común era el polaco. Olek también fue una conexión humana con una Europa del Este cosmopolita, de entreguerras, que se transformó, o más bien, fue asesinada. Al igual que mi supervisor de doctorado, el difunto Jerzy Jedlicki, otro superviviente, Olek aportó una humanidad directa que a veces echo de menos en Estados Unidos, y que ahora necesitaremos. «Si piensas en dejar Yale», me dijo una vez, en otro idioma, «recuerda que hay gente que te quiere». Lo recuerdo.

TIMOTHY SNYDER es profesor Richard C. Levin de historia y asuntos globales en la Universidad de Yale y será profesor visitante en la Escuela Jackson de Asuntos Globales a partir del 1 de julio. Puede contactarlo en timothy.snyder@yale.edu .