New Haven, Connecticut - A Yale University professor who studies fascism announced he is leaving for Canada over fears the US is becoming a "fascist dictatorship."

Jason Stanley, author of the 2018 book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, has accepted a position at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

Currently the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale, Stanley told the Daily Nous "the decision [to change positions] was entirely because of the political climate in the United States."

He said he wants "to raise my kids in a country that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship."

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A big factor influencing his move, Stanley said, was Columbia University's decision to cave to the Trump administration's demands in its intensified crackdown on pro-Palestine student protests, after the president cut $400 million in federal funding to the institution. These measures include banning masks at protests, hiring more campus cops, and increasing scrutiny of the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department.

Stanley, who is Jewish, was born and raised in upstate New York after his grandmother, Ilse Stanley, fled Germany with his father in 1939. Ilse Stanley is credited with rescuing more than 400 Jewish people from Nazi concentration camps between 1936 and 1938.

"When scholars of authoritarianism and fascism leave U.S. universities because of the deteriorating political situation here, we should really worry," Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, posted on Bluesky.

Professor and historian Timothy Snyder, who specializes in such topics as tyranny and the Holocaust, previously announced his move from Yale to the Munk School.