UCL President says Europeans should support US higher education through difficult period

The head of University College London (UCL) has warned against European universities being pleased that US researchers are considering moving across the Atlantic in search of jobs.

In an interview with News Tank Academic, Michael Spence, President and Provost of UCL, said: “What we have been seeing is a lot of American applications for things like post-doc positions, and that’s bad for the United States, and good for us! Except that the United States has such a remarkable tertiary education system, that a healthy U.S. higher education system is in everybody’s interest”.

Referring to the EU’s ‘Choose Europe’ programme designed to attract US researchers to move, he said: “I think one needs to be careful about the signalling of things such as ‘choose whatever’. If it’s a way of bringing home expat talent, I think it's fine. But if it's a way of poaching American talent, I think we have an interest in supporting the American universities through this period”, he said.

Spence, who is serving his second term as head of UCL, said: “We are not seeing large numbers of applications or…