France and the EU are to step up their efforts to attract US-based scientists hit by Donald Trump’s crackdown on academia, as they prepare announcements on incentives for researchers to settle in Europe.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, alongside the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, will make speeches on Monday morning at Sorbonne University in Paris, flanked by European university leaders and researchers, in which they are expected to announce potential incentives and protections for researchers seeking to relocate to Europe.
The event, bringing together European academics and European commissioners, is the latest push to open Europe’s doors to US-based academics and researchers who fear their work is threatened by federal spending cuts for universities and research bodies, as well as the targeting of US higher education institutions over diversity policies.
Macron’s office said the move comes “at a time when academic freedoms face a number … of threats” and when Europe “is an attractive continent”. An Élysée official said: “We are a space where there is freedom of research and no taboo topics.” The official said the event was about “affirming France and Europe as stable spaces that can guarantee freedoms and academic research”.
France is thought to be particularly keen to attract scientists working on health – particularly infectious diseases – as well as climate research and artificial intelligence.
Monday’s event, titled Choose Europe for science, comes after 13 European countries, including France, Germany and Spain, wrote to the European Commission urging it to move fast to attract academic talent.
France launched its own Choose France for science initiative in April with a dedicated platform for applications to host international researchers.
The French research ministry told Agence France-Presse: “Some foreign researchers have already arrived in France to familiarise themselves with the infrastructure, waiting for the funds and platform to be set up.”
In recent days, France’s flagship scientific research centre CNRS launched a new initiative to attract foreign workers whose research is threatened, as well as French researchers working abroad, some of whom “don’t want to live and raise their children in Trump’s United States”, its president, Antoine Petit, told AFP.
In France, Aix-Marseille University launched its “Safe place for science” programme in March. It will receive its first foreign researchers in June.
In a letter to French universities in March, Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister for higher education and research, wrote: “Many well-known researchers are already questioning their future in the United States. We would naturally wish to welcome a certain number of them.”
Challenges remain because research investment in the US – including private-public partnerships – has for many years been greater than in Europe. For decades, Europe has lagged behind the US on investment in universities and research centres.
French researchers have regularly raised the issue of the comparatively low salaries and precarious contracts for many researchers in France. On average, an academic researcher in the US is paid more than their French equivalent. Trade unions in France have called for better contracts, better salary provisions and better funding across the board at research institutions.
Some in France hoped the pay gap between scientists in France and the US would narrow, once the lower cost of education and health, and more generous social benefits in France were taken into account.
Germany’s incoming chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said last month: “The American government is currently using brute force against the universities in the US, so that researchers from America are now contacting Europe. This is a huge opportunity for us.”
