Professor Shore: "People on the Titanic said, 'Our ship can't sink.'"
Marci Shore decided she didn’t want her teen-aged kids living in a “reign of terror.”
So she and her husband Tim Snyder decided to stay put in Toronto rather than return home to New Haven.
Shore and Synder are Yale professors. They and a third Yale prof, Jason Stanley, have accepted offers to move to positions at the University of Toronto’s Munk School for Global Affairs & Public Policy. Shore is the Munk School’s chair in European intellectual history.
Given that all three have spent years writing about tyranny and political terror, and warning about fascism coming to America, their decision to walk down the up-escalator of academic status made international news this past week as one response to the new Trump administration’s policies on immigration, higher ed, civil rights and liberties, human rights, independent government oversight, and relations with foreign dictators.
Shore said in an interview Thursday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program that the decision wasn’t sudden. The Munk School first made the offer a year and a half ago.
“We didn’t make a final decision until after the [presidential] election, but before this latest attack on universities. A lot of people are saying, ‘Are you staying in Toronto because Columbia capitulated?’ We made our decision back in January, before Columbia capitulated.”
Shore spoke by Zoom from her office in Toronto. The shelves behind her were mostly bare but for some books she had brought along for what began as a sabbatical year. Now that the family has decided to stay, the rest of her library will be on its way.
Ever since the Sandy Hook school massacre, Shore said, she had worried about bringing up kids amid so much gun violence. Her kids, now 12 and 14, didn’t want to move away from New Haven. She decided she wanted them attending high school in a different environment given “where violence in America was going, the toleration for violence. I could feel, with the rise of Trumpism, a permissiveness for violence, not just on the streets, not just in terms of a refusal of the Republicans to put any kind of gun control legislation in place, but also the potential for real, large-scale political violence.”
Shore, a professor of intellectual history, has spent two decades at Yale. She studies Eastern European history. Her book The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, about the 2014 citizens’ uprising that broke out in Kyiv’s Maidan Square and toppled a repressive government, made her a go-to pundit on the current war caused by the Russian invasion.
Shore has observed “two camps” among her friends here and in Eastern Europe about the daily flood of disruptive Trump actions against immigrants, lawyers, universities, among other perceived enemies.
“My East European Slavicist friends felt like this was the end of the world. My more American-focused friends and colleagues were walking around saying, ‘OK, this is extremely bad, but we’re going to get through it. We’re the world’s strongest liberal democracy. We have checks and balances. OK, everyone. Inhale. Checks and balances. Exhale, checks and balances.’
“And I thought, ‘My God, we’re like the people on the Titanic saying, ‘Our ship can’t sink.’ What you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink. That’s an illusion.”
Since her work is centered on Eastern Europe rather than the U.S., Shore doesn’t need to be here to do it. She emphasized that she doesn’t see her decision to move to Canada as in any way “noble” or “brave.” She thought of friends in Russia who stayed to fight to overthrow Vladimir Putin.
Observing the U.S.‘s trajectory over the past year, “I could feel we were about to descend into a reign of terror. On one hand, I felt like the courageous thing is to go back and fight. On the other hand, I felt like I don’t want to bring my kids back to that.”
Amid the move and the press attention, Shore is working on finishing a “dense and character-driven history” about “the search for truth in Eastern and Central Europe from the late 19th century through the 21st century, post-truth.”
She hasn’t at this point applied for Canadian citizenship. Nor has the family put its home here up for sale.
As “both a neurotic Jew and a historian of totalitarianism,” Shore reflected, she has a tendency toward “neurotic catastrophism.”
“Certainly the present moment,” she noted, “could be subtitled ‘vindication of the neurotic catastrophist.’ ”
Click on the video below to watch the full conversation with historian Marci Shore on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”