Nearly 300 academics have contacted a French university after it declared itself a safe space for those looking to flee Donald Trump’s America. Aix-Marseille University on the Mediterranean coast responded to the president’s pursuit of American universities he deems to be anti-Semitic by launching a ‘Safe Place for Science’ programme.
Described as a ‘scientific asylum’, the French university will offer three years of funding for up to 20 researchers. So far 298 academics have applied, including staff from Yale, Stanford, Columbia and Johns Hopkins University. Liberation, a left-wing French newspaper, says that some of the applicants have described ‘sometimes chilling accounts from American researchers about the fate reserved for them by the Trump administration’.
As chilling, one wonders, as the persecution of some Jewish students at Columbia last year? They were physically and verbally abused as the university ‘devolved into a cesspool of antisemitic hate” following Hamas’ murderous attack on Israel.

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