While he was figuring out his next move, on the other side of the Atlantic, Eric Berton, the president of Aix-Marseille University, was ready to take action.

I was shocked by the sheer violence of what was happening in the United States.

So in March 2025, I decided to create the Safe Place for Science program to welcome researchers from American laboratories whose academic freedom was being restricted by the Trump administration.

Eric Berton sees Sheth's trajectory as a reversal of history.

That's what happened in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and that's what's happening in the US today.

When an authoritarian regime starts restricting freedoms, one of the first things to come under attack is science.

Authoritarian governments tend to want to control what's being said in lecture halls.

They want to rewrite history.