Get American universities here.
Trump’s fight with elite US universities creates an opportunity.
President Trump’s Education Secretary, Linda McMahon, said "Universities should continue to be able to do research as long as they're abiding by the laws and in sync, I think, with the administration and what the administration is trying to accomplish".
On those grounds, LSE economists should have been producing anti-Brexit reports until the day of the referendum, and then pro-Brexit reports the day after - to be “in sync” with the government of the day. So much for academic freedom, being led by the evidence, and so on. No university can work on that basis.
When it comes to tariffs, there is some truth in the TACO claim - that “Trump always chickens out”. Not so with his battles against universities. There is no chickening out - as Harvard will tell you. The US government is trying to repeal Harvard’s tax exempt status, prevent it enrolling foreign students, and has frozen $3bn of federal funding - mainly for medical research.
So here is my policy idea - one I had years ago, in very different circumstances. The University of Manchester is a fine university. It ranks 53rd in the Times Higher’s ranking of global universities. That is a genuinely good result - but still, the University of Manchester is not Harvard, MIT or Stanford.
I think - and have always thought - that it would be brilliant for the UK to attract a top US university to the UK. I think the UK giving MIT a lot of money to open a new campus in Manchester is a plausible regeneration strategy. It would be much more likely to be transformative than spending far more money to knock an hour off the journey to London. Getting a top US university to open a substantive campus would be world news, changing global perceptions of Manchester.
This is not an attack on the University of Manchester, or any UK university. Harvard is not harmed by being near MIT, nor vice versa. LSE is not harmed by being near UCL. Quite the reverse. A university cluster makes recruiting staff easier. This would help, not hinder the University of Manchester.
Clearly we would need KPIs. We would not want to gift a lot of money to a US university only for them to have the hot shots go back to the US in 4 years. There would have to be commitments about faculty quality (there are many plausible measures), how long they are here each year, and so on. We don’t want a campus that is just a summer school for US students.
Would Professors move? I can’t be sure, but academics are very, very internationally mobile, willing to move country to do the best research they can. So I think some would - indeed many top US academics were born abroad, so have already shown a willingness to move country to get a better research environment.
The cuts are brutal. Harvard Professor, Sarah Fortune is currently studying how the immune system fights TB. Her research funding has been stopped by the US government. Professor Joseph Loparo is a biological chemist at Harvard Medical School who studies DNA repair processes. His research funding has been stopped. Harvard Professor Donald Ingber is developing drugs to treat long-term radiation exposure, including from chemotherapy. His research funding has been stopped. I would be delighted if any of these people came, with their teams, to work in the UK. I think it is likely that we would gain materially from job and prosperity creating tech spinoffs from people like this working here.
I want to propose two people to do these deals. First, Rishi Sunak. As Chancellor he was hugely committed to his constituency and the area around it - that is why HM Treasury now has a Darlington campus. He is now a visiting Professor at Stanford, and knows all the top people there. Second, Ed Balls, who now has active and substantive links with Harvard. And since he is married to the Home Secretary, he might, just might, be able to persuade her to grant these Professors and their teams UK visas…
This talk of academic refugees from the US and whether UK or EU governments should be trying to poach them en masse seem to be based on the assumption that what makes the US research ecosystem so strong is that it has these brilliant people in it, more brilliant than the people we have.
I don't question their brilliance, or even necessarily the tactical case for cherrypicking the very best of them.
But ultimately I don't think that the brake on, to use your example, the University of Manchester being as good as MIT, is anything to do with a lack of clever people in the UK or in the north west of England. There are far more brilliant people than there are academic jobs already here.
Rather than outsourcing to a US university, or spending precious research funding to attract even more people into an academic job market that can't absorb the talent we have, shouldn't we be spending that money on trying to build/reform institutions and capacity here?