‘Academics are fleeing Trump's anti-intellectual America. We should take advantage'

Telegraph

31-05-2025

The University of Cambridge should take in academics fleeing Donald Trump's America, a candidate to become the institution's new figurehead has said.
Gina Miller, a prominent anti-Brexit campaigner running to become the next Cambridge chancellor, said UK universities must cash in on a US brain drain sparked by the president's assault on academia.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Mrs Miller also urged Cambridge to divest from arms companies and to be more transparent about its financial arrangements.
She vowed to uphold free speech on campus if elected as chancellor, but criticised the 'politicised' debate on the topic and said she would not invite people such as Andrew Tate, the controversial influencer, to speak to students.
Mrs Miller rose to prominence for two successful legal challenges to the former government's Brexit dealings, and now aims to take her 'fight for democracy' to the world's third-oldest university.
The businesswoman, who is undergoing treatment for breast cancer, will go head-to-head with nine other candidates in the hopes of becoming Cambridge's 109th chancellor – and the first female leader in the role's 800-year history.
Her rivals include Sandi Toksvig, the comedian and ex-presenter of the Great British Bake Off, and Lord Browne of Madingley, the former chief executive of BP.
Speaking to The Telegraph, Mrs Miller said she threw her hat in the ring after her cancer diagnosis, for which she underwent a double mastectomy earlier this year, prompted her to 'reassess' life.
'It's been incredibly difficult, but I don't want to look over my shoulder for the rest of my life, thinking 'what if',' she said.
Born in British Guiana, now Guyana, the entrepreneur was sent by her parents to an English boarding school aged 10 after her father's career as the country's attorney general put the family's life in danger.
'My father was always obsessed with Cambridge. He started as a petrol pump assistant – you know, very poor – and his dream was to become a Cambridge blue for cricket. I mean, that's how far the reach of the reputation of that university is,' she said.
She said Cambridge now had an opportunity to enhance that influence by offering a safe haven for students and academics deserting the US.
Canada and Germany have both offered 'exile campuses', but UK universities are yet to do the same – with sources suggesting vice-chancellors were cautious not to appear too 'anti-American'.
'This last year we've seen the biggest uptick in US students looking for universities outside the US. And the same goes for the academics. So why is Cambridge not making the most of that?' said Mrs Miller.
'Intellectual jealousy by Trump'
Mr Trump has attacked elite US universities in recent months, accusing them of fostering anti-Semitism on campus and adopting biased admissions policies against white students.
The US leader has also frozen around $3.2 billion in federal grants to Harvard, and on Tuesday ramped up his campaign by ordering embassies to halt all new international student visa applications.
Mrs Miller claimed the attack stemmed from a sense of 'intellectual jealousy' in Mr Trump, which she suggested was why the president had surrounded himself 'with the tech bros – because they're not wearing the clothes of traditional academia'.
She warned that the rise of 'authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism' would sharpen the need to protect free speech at universities.
However, she said she would not extend a campus invite to figures such as Mr Tate, the social media influencer who was charged with rape and human trafficking by UK prosecutors earlier this week.
'Free speech is one thing, but if it crosses the line into promoting hate and misogyny and behaviours that are actually damaging, I would say, no, absolutely not,' Mrs Miller said.
The businesswoman became a target of misogyny and abuse after winning two Supreme Court challenges in 2017 and 2019 against the then government's handling of exiting the EU, which many saw as attempts to frustrate Brexit. She received death threats.
Nine years on from the referendum, Mrs Miller views the 'old Right and Left, those old Overton Window classifications' to have gone as Reform UK continues to cleave open the traditional two-party system.
'Political parties need to up their game'
The financier, once a Labour party member, founded her own True and Fair political party in 2021, based on her campaign of the same name calling for greater transparency in the City. The party was dissolved last year after Mrs Miller stood as its candidate for Epsom and Ewell at the general election and came sixth.
She criticised recent comments by Lord Hermer as 'crass' after the Attorney General compared calls to leave the European Convention on Human Rights to the rise of Nazism.
'I wish all the parties would up their game,' she said. 'I don't see a leader. And I think that's the thing that's very worrying for us, as the 2030s will be a transformative decade.'
Mrs Miller promised to bring her campaigning for greater transparency to Cambridge, and said it was 'right' that the university's King's College earlier this month announced it would cut its financial ties with arms firms.
The founder of wealth manager SCM Direct vowed to do the same to Cambridge's £4 billion endowment fund, adding: 'I think the university has to have ethics, an ethical sense has to go through everything it does.'
'Cambridge can be an ambassador'
Pitching herself as 'someone from outside the university's inner circle', she also criticised previous Cambridge chancellors for not speaking out about important matters or attempting to boost UK universities on the world stage.
'Why is Cambridge not at Davos, for example? Cambridge has the opportunity to be an ambassador for not just itself, but actually for the sector,' she said.
'I think that's where I'd be critical of the chancellorships in the past, in that I'd say they haven't utilised that platform enough in the service of our nation, and I think that's a real shame.'
Lord Sainsbury of Turville, who was elected Cambridge chancellor in 2011, stepped down last year. He had succeeded Prince Philip, the late Duke of Edinburgh, who held the position for 35 years.
The role was not on Mrs Miller's radar until a group of Cambridge professors approached her earlier this year and urged her to apply, despite her not being an alumna of the university.
'And actually, weirdly, there was another connection. The cancer that I have is a very rare genetic mutation which was discovered by a team at Cambridge five or six years ago, so I had been in contact with that team and become really close to them,' she said.
'One of the missions of Cambridge is to be able to help the progression of humanity and society. We need to get it off the page into the real world. And I would argue that having a chancellor who is actually from the world can speak and become almost a translator and storyteller of what Cambridge is doing and how that connects to the real world.'