There's an interesting piece in today's Daily Telegraph claiming that the brain drain from the UK to the USA is getting out of hand and that our universities need more money to help them stem the tide.
It brought back a couple of memories from my former life that make me wonder whether American academic salaries and working conditions really are any more tempting than they were 25 years ago.
In 1984, I spent a semester as a visiting professor at an American university, where I was paid per week exactly the same as I was paid per month (at the top of the readership scale) in Oxford - and I only had to teach for three hours a week.
After Margaret Thatcher had been prime minister for about ten years, I also remember being stunned by a press report claiming that the number of British academics who had migrated to the North America since she had come to power was greater than the number of Jewish intellectuals who had fled in the same direction from Nazi Germany during the 1930s.
It's too long ago for me to be able to recall which newspaper published the story, or how they'd worked out the numbers.
But I haven't forgotten getting the point into one of Paddy Ashdown's leadership speeches at a Liberal Democrat conference - where it produced a collective gasp and fulsome burst of applause from the audience.