If you allow others to draw that line you have more incentive to ignore it and an undrawn line is easily forgotten, but I believe the question is, where do you draw the line? Can you say, loud enough for other people to hear, what your personal limit is?
I do not know.
I have had this discussion with my family. We have considered leaving the US to live somewhere else.
But, we are very white, very clearly American, have had a US passport for decades and so on. Chances are I am the kind of people MAGA approve of even if they do not like my politics.
Again, my family is discussing this but it will take some more before we jump.
That’s just us though.
I don’t think there is a bright line. It’s an unfortunately large gray area.
Apparently the professor has a job offer in another country. That makes things a lot easier.
What is easy for others is just an excuse not to act at all, in my opinion. Besides, how easy it actually was cannot be known. You line is your line alone.
It’s not an excuse.
Consider moving to < pick your country >.
You have a job offer or you just go and hope.
The courage needed to move is VERY different between those two things. Light years different. (not to mention the country being willing to let you in and let you stay)
If he wanted attention, he’d go tell it on the mountain.
Or you apply for positions in Canada until you get a job offer, if you’re lucky enough to be in a field that’s desirable there.
I work for an American company and I can do my job from anywhere on the planet as long as I have an internet connection. (Thanks Elon!)
I wonder if they’d be ok with that? Not taking any jobs away from a Canadian (or whatever country I am in). I really do not know…something I should probably research.
That’s true.
I do know that the kind of international graduate student he’s likely to admit to his program has high risk of being denied a U.S. visa. It would not make much sense for them to apply.
You can have a good university in an authoritarian country. China has two commonly ranked in the world top 15 or 20. So I don’t agree that, as he said in his interview, Columbia is gone. They probably are still good in math. But you can’t have an outstanding political philosophy PhD program in an authoritarian country.
I feel if you’re an expert on the rise of fascism in history maybe your grand plan shouldn’t just be moving to the country right next door. It didn’t really work last time.
“I think he said, ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers!’”
Unfortunately, it is getting increasingly difficult to find a developed nation that isn’t adjacent to a country trending toward authoritarianism. Personally, my choice would be Denmark but even if I could get fluent in Danish I’ve never been able to master the trick of talking like I have a potato in my mouth.
Stranger
You would be very welcome, but it’s not very productive to flee the fascist country to one of it’s targets, Canada too if you have a better choice. How about Norway? The same culture, no potato, higher prices, worse climate but beautiful nature.
Someone asked in an all-hands meeting if my current employer allowed for remote workers to live outside the United States. The answer was no because they were not prepared to offer benefits or handle employment taxes.
They point above about danger wasn’t that he would personally be in danger, but that he would be putting his students at risk. He is a US citizen, but not all of them are. Could you keep doing your job if you knew that people might lose their visas and go to jail for interacting with you?
And Toronto didn’t just reach out to him with a job. Academia doesn’t work like that.
Although Trump is making a lot of hot air about ‘annexing’ Canada and getting into some kind of fracas with Denmark over who gets to put a hotel on Greenland Ave. in the game of Global Monopoly, he’s too distractible and incapable of planning to actually engage in any military action that will take more than twelve hours to execute. Norway is gorgeous to tour about in the summer but I’m not really into stockfish, and it isn’t as if I am a gangster on the run trying to find the most remote place to hide out. Copenhagen seems more generally hospitable and full of history and culture, and also some great public transit and surprisingly good cinema. At this point I’m giving human civilization about three more decades of functional solvency on the outside, so Denmark seems to be a pretty good place to buy a plot, with Okinawa a distant second as it is beautiful but I can only take so much of the subtropical humidity and I would stand out like Tom Cruise in a Kurosawa-inspired samurai movie. Anyway, I doubt I have anything that DK really needs, so it is all just fantasizing at this point.
I had a point when I began this but it has since swam away like smelt in a broken fishing net.
Stranger
In which case, maybe a holiday on the River Seine…
Mine would be Germany. I really like Germany.
Another Yale professor leaving for University of Toronto:
Stranger
It would make sense that the people who are most knowledgeable or sensitive to a slide into dictatorship would leave first. These are the canaries in the coal mine. But is anyone listening? 
The question I was asking in my very first post was about which concrete lines would make people jump from the proverbial boiling pot, like the prof did.
My take is that, for the vast majority, there are no such lines.
Or there are lines but there are those of us who can’t cut and run even when they’re crossed. About all we can do is hunker down and hope we’re too insignificant for the fascists to come after.
How would they even know? My son spent a month visiting here in Montreal and continued to work and there was no way his employer would have even known.
When I left the US in 1968, I made sure I had a job lined up first. I could not have imagined leaving otherwise. But I still would not have accepted the adjective “performative”. It was a choice that meant one of my students could fail calculus without my being responsible for sending him to VietNam.