Let me start with language, even though it's not my area of expertise. In 1632, the scientific language of Academia Gustaviana was Latin. Until World War II, German would have naturally served as the language of scholarly communication in our corner of Europe. A century ago, German was also the global language of physics; when I attended university, my alma mater in the United States still required knowledge of German or Russian in order to earn a doctorate in physics. Today, neither is required.

English has become our lingua franca. Perhaps one day — especially if we fail to take responsibility for our future amid a rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape — our meetings in Tartu will be held in Mandarin.

In what follows, I will focus on the opportunities we have to become more international at a time when the world is marked by great geopolitical anxiety. Not on how difficult everything is, but on how challenging times can open up new possibilities. I'll look at it from a slightly different angle: how geopolitical shocks are reshaping the academic world and how we can turn those changes to our advantage.

An apocryphal joke and the truth it hides

I'll begin with a completely apocryphal story from the 1940s in Los Alamos, New Mexico — a place that, during World War II, was the ultra-secret nuclear weapons development site under the Manhattan Project. Physicists Edward Teller, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard and Robert Oppenheimer are deep in discussion about the challenges of building an atomic bomb. At one point, the American Oppenheimer leaves the room and one of the three remaining men says: "Good, now we can speak Hungarian again."

I should add that this same John von Neumann, together with Alan Turing, was also one of the founders of computer science. Drawing on their classical European education, they coined the term "cybernetics," from the Greek word kybernētēs, meaning "helmsman." This happened in the 1940s. Later, the term was shortened to "cyber," which gave rise to today's "cyber-" prefix.

The story may be fiction, but its meaning is real — not in terms of academic language, but rather as an example, in my view, of how changes in the world affect science and academic life. Teller, von Neumann and Szilard weren't just brilliant physicists who happened to be Hungarians living in the United States — they were refugees who had fled an increasingly authoritarian Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.

The academic world and science do not float above history. Political upheavals move scientists, ideas, funding and the balance of intellectual power across borders — often across oceans and onto other continents. Throughout the modern history of the West, political, and especially geopolitical, shifts have had a profound impact on universities, science and education.

Four waves that shaped the modern academia

Over the past century, we've seen four major disruptions — some larger, some smaller — that have had broad, paradigm-shifting effects on our academic, intellectual, economic and cultural life. And even more importantly, they have influenced the economic success of nations, whether as countries that lost skilled refugees or as those that received them.

The first and largest upheaval, already mentioned, took place in the 1930s and 1940s in Europe: hundreds of thousands fled Nazi and Soviet repression for the United States. This exodus transformed American science, the humanities and the arts.

This was especially true of Central Europe, particularly German-speaking Europe, as Jewish scientists, scholars, artists and writers sought refuge in the U.S., bringing with them an invaluable wealth of intellectual and cultural capital — reverberations of which, as mentioned earlier, are still felt today. Germany, by contrast, arguably never recovered intellectually from those devastating losses. A look at the list of just a fraction of the tens of thousands who found sanctuary in the U.S. is simply astonishing, particularly when we consider the impact they had on America's development.

And we're not just talking about scientists who helped "make America great" for the first time. Philosophers like Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt, both of whom deeply influenced 20th-century social and political thought, writers like Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig and Vladimir Nabokov also fled European tyranny.

In music and film, we can point to Sergei Rachmaninoff, Igor Stravinsky, Otto Klemperer, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich, Peter Lorre, Josef von Sternberg, Otto Preminger, Max Ophüls and Alexander Korda — all of whom helped American cultural life flourish.

The giants of the social sciences — Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse and Albert O. Hirschman — also moved to the U.S. to escape European repression. Many were affiliated with the University in Exile in New York, which eventually, when it became clear they would not be returning to Europe, was formalized as The New School for Social Research.

The second major exodus began in 1971, when Soviet Jewish emigration to Israel — Aliyah — began in earnest after exit bans on "refuseniks" were lifted. About 150,000 people left the Soviet Union and a large share of them went to Israel. Israelis say that welcoming and funding these Soviet scientists laid the foundation for the country's high-tech economy and scientific advancement.

The third science-altering geopolitical disruption came after 1989: the collapse of communism triggered an exodus of underpaid scientists from Central and Eastern Europe and the USSR to Western Europe and the United States. This outflow continued throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s. It was no longer a flight from repression, like in the 1930s and 1940s in Europe or the 1960s and 1970s in the Soviet Union, but rather a rational step in search of jobs and research funding.

In Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, researchers and academics were paid absurdly low wages and research was chronically underfunded. So when the communist regime collapsed, the academic system collapsed with it. Once again, the brightest minds left their countries — not to seek political asylum this time, but to earn a decent salary and do meaningful work in their fields. Sadly, we must acknowledge that Estonia, like the other Baltic states, also experienced a brain drain during this period.

The fourth disruption is happening right now: this time, the academic crisis is the political upheaval in the United States, which we are witnessing firsthand. Major national and public research institutions and elite universities are facing politically motivated firings, abrupt cancellation of grants and a wave of strategic hostility toward anything perceived as inconvenient to the government.

Thousands of PhD-level researchers and postdocs in the U.S. have been summarily fired from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — once (or perhaps more accurately: formerly) the world's largest and most powerful institution for biomedical and behavioral science research.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to lay off over a thousand scientists from its research division. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has ended contracts for hundreds of probationary employees, including scientists and engineers. A particularly telling sign of the severity of the situation is that when the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), under the Department of Energy, dismissed several dozen employees, the government suddenly realized it had just let go its entire nuclear safety staff.

Other federally run research centers — and even worse, scientists at major research universities like Harvard, Columbia and Stanford — are now facing the reality of abruptly revoked grants due to the Trump administration's animosity toward America's elite universities.

In short, the U.S. scientific community is facing a crisis the likes of which have never been seen in American history. And this upheaval, in turn, creates enormous opportunities for other countries and universities that are willing to offer these professionals jobs where they can continue working in their fields. Some European universities — particularly in France, Germany and Switzerland — are already sharpening their pitch and making offers. But it's not just Europe in the running. China, too, has rolled out the red carpet, offering labs and funding.

Regardless of the weekly headlines, the net effect is clear: thousands of highly trained scientists and scholars are weighing and deciding where they can continue their life's work. Europe is taking action. China has spotted the opportunity. The question is: are we — here in Estonia and at the University of Tartu — doing the same?

Our opportunity should we decide to seize it

In the short time I've observed, the Nordic and Baltic region has typically been slower to recognize new opportunities. We tend to be less flexible than others and, I sometimes fear, a bit more provincial and cautious.

We value quality and process above all else. But history — as we know from our own experiences in the 1990s, whether it be the European Union or digitalization — favors those who seize opportunities first. When a wave of people with extraordinary experience is looking for new places to settle, the countries that welcome them gain a lasting advantage — in laboratories, classrooms, studios and ultimately in their economies.

I would add that we already have a history of welcoming those fleeing oppression. Sweden took in a large number of first- and second-generation Baltic refugees, many of whom found their place in Swedish universities. Professor Hain Rebas once calculated that after World War II, 75 percent of the University of Tartu's scholars found refuge in Sweden.

Estonia, too, has a history of helping refugees. Our first refugee scholars and writers arrived after the Bolshevik terror in Russia between 1918 and 1920. And even later — paradoxically, during the Soviet occupation — the University of Tartu welcomed one of the most prominent Soviet social scientists in the Western academic world: philosopher and semiotician Juri Lotman, who, as a Jew, was unable to get work in Leningrad during Stalinism. To this day, an entire school of semiotics bears his name and his work in Tartu made the university known in the non-Communist world as early as the 1960s and 1970s.

As the example of Lotman shows, we should not only welcome scholars but also avoid repeating a key mistake of the 20th century: we must not focus solely on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

America's renaissance in the 1940s and beyond was not built by physicists, mathematicians and chemists alone — it was also shaped by philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, social theorists like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, writers like Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig and Vladimir Nabokov and artists and filmmakers like Igor Stravinsky, Victor Klemperer, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang and Marlene Dietrich. Intellectual ecosystems thrive on diversity.

Što delat? — "What is to be done?" — asked another refugee from tyranny, perhaps less loved here, but at the time living in Zurich: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

It is our university's task to make it clear to today's von Neumanns, Adornos, Arendts, Manns and Wilders that they can find a home and meaningful work here, in Tartu. We must recognize the scale of the catastrophe now facing the American academic, scientific and, increasingly, cultural community. We do not yet fully understand it.

We need to consider revising our rather strict immigration policy, especially toward those coming from outside the European Union. Indeed, since the large 2015 immigration wave from the Middle East and Africa — composed mostly of unskilled labor — our policies have become much stricter. But today we are not talking about unskilled immigrants from unfamiliar cultures. We are talking about exceptionally qualified individuals.

What to change?

To avoid remaining stuck in abstract reflections, I'd like to offer a few concrete steps that should be taken.

1. A fast track for talent

The government should be urged to pilot a points-based residence permit system for researchers and creatives from democratic allied countries outside the European Union (primarily the United States), without requiring a pre-signed employment contract.

Points should be awarded according to a framework like this: highest degree earned, citation count or portfolio (in the case of creatives), major awards, leadership of funded projects and contributions to fields where formal doctoral degrees are rare (such as composers, filmmakers, novelists and investigative journalists). The process should include spouses and children.

2. The state must fund the arrival of researchers in Estonia

A talent endowment fund should be created to co-finance host institutions' personnel costs, lab access, postdoctoral work and language training over a period of 3–5 years. The fund should be competitive but nimble: applications should be reviewed on a rolling basis, decisions made within six weeks and funding disbursed within twelve.

3. Support must include many disciplines

At least 40 percent of the grants should go to the social sciences, humanities and the arts — fields in which many U.S. scholars currently feel under pressure — and 60 percent to the natural, medical and engineering sciences. Excellence should be the primary criterion, with breadth serving as a form of risk insurance.

4. Use English where appropriate

In research teams and English-language degree programs, a scholar's lack of local language skills should be a preference, not a barrier, during their first contract period. Those who come here should be offered free intensive language courses and given realistic long-term goals for language development. It's worth remembering: Arendt and Mann didn't arrive in the U.S. speaking English!

5. Build Partnerships beyond academia.

The program should be linked with incubators, hospitals, cultural institutions and industry, so that incoming talent contributes not only to publications and h-indices, but also to startups, clinical trials, galleries and public discourse.

Certainly, my proposals will raise objections. I can already list them.

"We can't compete with U.S. salaries."

That's true — but for many, it's secondary, especially for those who've lost their jobs or face a hostile climate every day.

When the choice is between unemployment in one's field or a future without prospects, when the political atmosphere becomes increasingly intolerable, many choose to emigrate — just as they did in earlier times. Here in our part of the world, we can offer stability, academic freedom, outstanding infrastructure, including extremely affordable and high-quality healthcare and a welcoming scholarly community. When researchers decide where to rebuild their careers, these factors often outweigh a high salary.

"English is not our language."

English is already the working language of science, technology and industry here. Let's be pragmatic: first we welcome, then we teach.

"The budget is tight."

So it was in Israel in the 1990s. In 1991, Israel launched a tech incubator program and expanded grants through its Ministry of Economy's Innovation Authority (formerly the Office of the Chief Scientist). At the time, Israel's GDP per capita was $14,346 — significantly lower than Estonia's today.

Some incubator teams were led by immigrants themselves; with government support, they were provided lab space, seed funding and mentorship that transformed knowledge gained under the Soviet system into startups — particularly in algorithms, signal processing, medical devices and materials science.

It was this combination of top-level scientists and engineers and a diverse ecosystem of institutions — incubators, grant systems and universities — that made the wave of Soviet immigration to Israel a lasting competitive advantage in areas like software, cybertech, electro-optics and deep tech. We could do the same here in medicine and gene technologies.

Israel's experience was a smaller-scale replay of the massive impact refugee inflows had on postwar American science, the humanities, the arts and culture in the 1930s and '40s.

In short: targeted funding, aligned with universities' own strategic priorities, can yield extraordinary long-term returns in attracting talent, securing research grants and fostering innovation.

Why is this especially important for us?

We cannot outsource our future. If we remain passive, others will absorb the talent and reap the benefits. If we act, we will not only strengthen our university — we will accelerate Estonia's entire scientific, cultural and economic metabolism.

At the same time, due to both layoffs and cuts as well as a general economic downturn in the United States, the number of jobs for exactly the kinds of people we need and want here is rapidly declining.

As early as March 27, Nature reported — well before the mass layoffs and funding cuts of the last seven months:

"The massive changes in U.S. research brought about by the new administration of President Donald Trump are causing many scientists in the country to rethink their lives and careers. More than 1,200 scientists who responded to a Nature poll — three-quarters of the total respondents — are considering leaving the United States following the disruptions prompted by Trump. Europe and Canada were among the top choices for relocation."

On September 27, The Guardian published a piece titled "U.S. faces largest mass layoffs in history as Trump continues major cuts." It said:

"The total number of expected departures through the delayed resignation and voluntary separation programs, attrition and early retirement programs is about 275,000 employees They are entering a lagging job market as the unemployment rate in August 2025 ticked up to 4.3 percent, the highest since 2021, and only 22,000 jobs were added amid disruptions and uncertainty caused by Trump's tariffs."

Our response should be simple: open the door, remove the obstacles and compete to win.

History doesn't wait. And neither should we.

This commentary is based on a speech delivered at the University of Tartu Development Conference on October 27, 2025.

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