The Grauniad as a Little Englander

The Guardian is presenting it as a negative but I have to wonder if this might not be one of many hidden dividends of Brexit - the winnowing out of cognitive pollution from Universities.

Gender pay gap expert among top professors quitting Brexit Britain by Anna Fazackerley. And if this weren't inducement enough to proceed with Brexit, there is this further promise in the sub headline.

Leading academics in climate policy and economics have also had enough of hostility – and funding goes with them

A return to a reality-based academia would be a huge step forward.

When the EU referendum result was announced Vera Troeger, professor of quantitative political economy at Warwick University, was at an academic conference in Brussels. She spent the whole day crying. Today she has had enough, and is leaving the country where she has built her career.

Troeger, an expert on the gender pay gap and the impact of parental leave policies on productivity, was associate editor of one of the most highly ranked academic journals in political science. She has been in the UK for 14 years and loves Warwick, but she has accepted a professorship at the University of Hamburg. After more than two years of uncertainty, she says other European colleagues, too, are preparing to go.

“I have a lot of academic friends over here from Spain, Italy and France, and they have all congratulated me on leaving all this behind,” she says. “Of course the academics who will be able to leave are mostly the successful ones. It will be a brain drain.”

Defining social justice critical theory jacobins as the standard of success is of course an interesting unstated assumption. Brain drain or draining the swamp - a lot hangs on which view you take.

I must admit, I was amused to note the oh so cosmopolitan Grauniad getting caught in the quintessential Little Englander error of mistaking two major foreign cities because they marginally sound alike to the ever-untuned British ear.

This article was amended on 26 March 2019. A previous version said Vera Troeger was going to work in Hanover. This has been corrected

She is moving to Hamburg.