This week’s podcast is different. At first most of the talking is done by me. The topic is something I’ve written about elsewhere: declining political interest in higher education, except to make it cheaper or punish it for perceived wrongdoing. The venue is McGill University, where this event was recorded last week. In the second segment, I’m joined by a panel of distinguished university administrators for a frequently surprising discussion of the topic.
This is the first of several talks I’ll give, in different parts of the country, on public-policy topics, thanks to the support of Calgary’s Max Bell Foundation, for which I’m very grateful. While Substack autogenerates a transcript for podcast episodes, I thought I’d publish the text of my remarks below. Listen along in the podcast episode!
I’m happy to be speaking tonight in my capacity as a Max Bell Foundation Senior Fellow at McGill University. This is the first of several talks I’ll be giving in different cities on topics in public policy, with the support of the same excellent organization that helped to found the Max Bell School here in 2017.
But what I told the Foundation when they asked me to do this is that I work best when I’m starting conversations. So at each of these events, my remarks are only the prologue to a fuller conversation among experts in the field. Tonight those guests are Christopher Manfredi, the Provost and Executive Vice-President (Academic) at McGill; Maud Cohen, the President of the École Polytechnique; and Graham Carr, the President and Vice-chancellor of Concordia University.
So I am pleased to be at a great university, talking about universities. But I come from news. So I’m often preoccupied with whatever just happened. And I come from Ottawa, so I’m especially preoccupied if it’s something that happened in politics. So let me begin with some thoughts on the economic policy that was published on Monday by the man who’s been shaking up federal politics, Mark Carney.
Mr. Carney was the governor of central banks in two countries, Canada and the UK, something nobody else has ever done. He’s running to be Prime Minister. It’s been going well. And he’s running as the smart guy, bringing a level of seriousness that’s been hard to find in Ottawa.
This policy document that he released on Monday is designed to deepen that brand advantage.
Carney writes: “The core mission of my government would be to grow the strongest economy in the G7. That … means growth that improves the quality of life of all Canadians, increases the real wages of all Canadians, supports and improves our social model, finances our rising security needs, and provides Canadians with a deserved sense of optimism and confidence that our future will be much better than our past.”
And while he’s doing all that, he promises to “support young people in fulfilling their potential.”
How? By “cutting taxes for the middle class and providing additional boosts to the incomes of younger Canadians so they can build a prosperous future.”
Now, I’ve got some specific concerns with Carney’s plan that I might yet get around to writing about. But it’s fair to say that a strong economy, rising wages and confidence in the future is exactly what people want a political leader to talk about. Mark Carney will probably win the Liberal leadership next month, and the prospect of his arrival is making the Liberals competitive again in the polls as they face Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, in an election that will probably happen soon. So good for him.
But what was striking to me as I read this platform, knowing I would be speaking to you tonight, is that the word “university” does not appear anywhere in the document.
The word “college” does not appear. The word “research” does not appear. The words “education” and “innovation” do appear, one time each. Each time, it’s in conjunction with an ambitious project that excites Mr. Carney so much he doesn’t really pause to explain it. He wants to “leverage AI” and “deploy AI” and “harness AI” and “lead the world in AI.”
Now, sure, leveraging and deploying all of this artificial intelligence will probably also require the deployment, somewhere along the line, of some intelligence. And at no point in Carney’s brief manifesto does he express active antagonism toward higher education. I suspect he’d be surprised to learn that his own economic plan uses the word “catalyze” four times and the word “university” not at all. He’d probably protest that higher education is implied, or that it goes without saying, or that he’ll mention it tomorrow.
After all, this is a man who spent 11 years at two of the world’s most revered universities, Harvard and Oxford, and whose career since then would be unimaginable if he hadn’t.
But trade isn’t implied in his platform document. He mentions it nine times. NORAD isn’t assumed in his plans for the future, or the Parliamentary Budget Officer, or manufacturing, or Indigenous reconciliation, or North Korea. He uses his words to talk about all of that stuff.
And incidentally, if by now you think I’m picking on Mark Carney, I should point out that another leading candidate for the party’s leadership, Chrystia Freeland, has been more detailed in her own policy proposals than Carney has — when you’re Number Two, you have to try harder — but I can’t find a single reference to universities in any of it. Nor any mention of research.
She does want to “help young Canadians build our sustainable future.” She’ll do that by “making trade schools free.”
This is all starting to get a bit odd. Just like her colleague Mark Carney, Freeland went to Harvard and Oxford. Unlike him, she’s been a cabinet minister in a government formed by a party that was elected and re-elected. She’s had to make governing decisions. In that capacity — as Canada’s finance minister less than a year ago — she said, in her 2024 budget speech, “A prosperous future and abundant good paying jobs depend on Canada’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and researchers. That is why we are supporting them.”
That budget provided $5 billion for AI compute and increases to the budgets of the research granting councils, which pay for a lot of Canada’s university research. These investments were belated, because Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has been only sporadically interested in higher education and research. But at least it was there. The new spending followed recommendations by Frédéric Bouchard, the dean of arts and sciences at the Université de Montréal, in a report he wrote for the federal government.
But when I say the budget provided $5 billion for university research, what I mean is that the budget said some government should spend $5 billion on university research over several years. In the 2024 budget year, only 13% of that money actually got spent. The other 87% is hanging out there in the future. Final decisions on whether to spend it will be made by future governments.
So it may be a problem that the two most prominent candidates to run that government have forgotten that Canada has universities.
And of course there’s no guarantee that a Liberal will be prime minister in a year. Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative party of Canada and still the likeliest winner of the next election, has been talking about universities.
Two months ago, he told the Winnipeg Jewish Review that he will “defund” “all of those with a woke antisemitic agenda” including at universities who receive federal funding, as well as all federally funded museums. He said he’ll “defund” all “those who are imposing a radical, terrifying, toxic ideology” and this will apply to “everything that the federal government controls.”
So if you want a leader who’s been talking about universities, there you go.
I’m making a broader point here. The public statements of politicians has a relationship to public opinion. Sometimes politicians are a leading indicator, rushing boldly ahead of conventional wisdom on an issue. Sometimes they’re a lagging indicator, trying their best to catch up.
And sometimes they simply keep their distance. This is one of those times. I’ve never seen universities more absent from our politics. For those of us who believe universities, and higher education more generally, can be ingredients in a country’s prosperity and success, there’s nothing benign in that neglect.
This becomes clearer when we look at what’s been going on in several provinces. For much of what follows, I’m indebted to Alex Usher at Higher Education Strategy Associates, who reads every party’s election platform before every provincial election to see what’s being proposed on higher education. He’s been busy lately.
Ontario is electing a provincial government today. Alex called the Ontario Liberals’ higher-education proposals “Objectively the worst Liberal platform commitment on postsecondary education anywhere in Canada in my lifetime. Just awful.”
Of Premier Doug Ford and his incumbent Progressive Conservatives, who are likelier to win today, Alex writes that “Ontario has never been a leader in funding or regulating postsecondary education, but the Ford government has taken things to new depths, sometimes by ignorance or sins of omission, but more often through acts of deliberate vandalism, like a tuition freeze, a deliberate super-charging of international student enrolments at colleges, and of course an utter failure to deal with the fallout when the federal government called a halt to things. They are a disaster.”
To its credit, Ford’s government has recently announced the creation of new medical schools at York University and Toronto Metropolitan University. But the cost pressure facing every university in the province won’t spare those two just because they’re now running ambitious new programs.
It’s the same story in other provinces. The NDP in Saskatchewan and the Conservative Party of BC have little in common, but their platforms last year had no university-related promises at all. Parties that did mention higher education were often focussed on reducing the cost to students. This is a telling choice. Deciding whether to attend university is a cost-benefit analysis. Lately political parties would rather compress the cost than increase the benefit.
This is new. Governments that were excited about the future used to want to get closer to universities, because universities represented youth and discovery.
On the first full day of the 2000 federal election campaign, I was amazed to follow Jean Chrétien into the Computed Rotational Angiography lab at the John P. Robarts Research Institute of the University of Western Ontario. His opponent was a younger man, Stockwell Day, who led the short-lived Canadian Alliance party. Chrétien’s goal was to show that at any age, he still understood the future better. So he spent a lot of time in rooms full of lab coats. After that 2000 campaign, Chrétien’s majority in Parliament was bigger than before.
For years afterward, thinking about the future meant thinking about universities. Here’s my favourite example. In 2007 the British Columbia government, under Premier Gordon Campbell, published a report, written by a former provincial attorney general, called Campus 2020. Its top-level goal was to make British Columbia the best-educated jurisdiction in North America by 2020. Along the way, BC was supposed to achieve the highest level of participation in post-secondary education in the country. And Indigenous rates of post-secondary attainment would match the rates in the general population.
“Reaching these targets,” the report said, “will require leadership, planning, commitment, focus, resources and innovation.” In the end, BC ended up not reaching those targets. Fortunately, not reaching those targets required less leadership, less planning, less commitment and less focus. So that was easier.
But just because the discourse on universities changed, I don’t believe the politicians of the early 2000s were brave visionaries and the politicians of the 2010s were functionaries bereft of vision. Politicians almost always do their best. I just think the context has changed, in important ways. Let me list a few.
First, the longer any budget line grows, the harder it becomes to sustain that growth, and the more tempting it becomes to ease up. It’s the law of geometric progression, and it applies to higher education in Canada as it does to anything.
Higher education in Canada grew very fast for many years. The country had 22,000 university undergraduates in 1920 — and four times as many in 1948, the peak of post-war free tuition for veterans. But because going to university wasn’t the only thing veterans did after the war, Canada soon had a baby boom to manage. So university enrolment quadrupled, again, by 1966.
By then it wasn’t just the scale of higher education that was changing, but its nature: community and technical colleges were added to the system. Universities became centres of research as well as scholarship. That’s more expensive. So not only did enrolment triple from 1960 to 1974, spending per student nearly doubled at the same time.
The oil crisis of 1974 brought a durable end to the spree, for nearly 20 years. By the time Canada got its fiscal house in order, Jean Chrétien was prime minister, his brother was a medical researcher, and rapid increases in federal funding for university research became something the sector thought it could count on once again.
But the numbers involved by this point were large. Any government faces competing claims for that kind of money: Infrastructure, national defence, family benefits. And thanks to something else that happened while Chrétien was prime minister — the sponsorship scandal that led to the Liberals losing power for a decade — governments had become far more concerned about being able to account for every dollar they spent.
One of the most wonderful things about research is that it’s inherently mysterious. Sometimes a line of investigation doesn’t pan out. Sometimes an experiment kills a beautiful hypothesis. And sometimes it leads to discoveries with implications very far from the original hypothesis. With applications very far from the original field. You can’t really predict the outcome of research. Really the only way to know how it’s going to work out is to do the research.
Geoffrey Hinton’s work on AI was considered a terrible bet for many years before it started to pay off huge. Tony Pawson’s work on signal transduction in cells began with a question about an odd virus that occurs naturally in chickens. For decades, in three different countries, he managed to get funding for his research, but at the beginning, nobody was excited about the research. They were more excited later, when Pawson’s discoveries led to a global industry in protein kinase inhibitors, a class of drugs worth tens of billions of dollars.
So you just never know what you’ll get. Increasingly, governments hate that. They don’t know how to explain it to their bosses.
Accountability isn’t the only obstacle to unfettered research. So is the growing obsession in large organizations with a certain idea of effective communications.
I’ve written a lot about this. When smartphones and social media became ubiquitous after 2008, the amount of random content our civilization pushes out increased exponentially. “Five exabytes (or five billion billion bytes) of data could store all the words ever spoken by humans between the birth of the world and 2003,” the Harvard Business School economist Bharat Anand has written. “In 2011, five exabytes of content were created every two days.”
This meant that anyone in the communications business was now shouting into a hurricane. Anand writes: “It’s a strategic and marketing nightmare even to make consumers aware of what you’re producing.” He calls this ‘the problem of getting noticed.’”
The response to this cacophony was the rise of message discipline as a paramount virtue for large organizations. Say what you’re doing. Say it in a simple, catchy way. Repeat it endlessly, because it will take forever for your message to cut through. Don’t say anything else, because it’ll just confuse your message.
And above all, don’t listen. Don’t let new information distract you, because you might change your message to reflect this new information, and that will just confuse your message too. So the worst thing that can happen to your message is you paying any attention to anyone else’s message.
This isn’t a hobby for people in public life. It’s an overriding strategic imperative. If you can’t sell your story, you have no story. Which means you can’t be heard. And you can’t win.
If you’re in government, your message is always going to be an essentially heroic story about how you fixed a big problem and made everything better. “I built more homes.” “I made life affordable.” “I brought Canada back.”
This heroic vision is easier to sell if the politician can claim a direct link between action and outcome. “I leveraged AI” is a good heroic story. A man stands up, he has a lever, there is AI.
Here’s a much harder heroic story to sell: “I gave scientists some of your money. They decided among themselves how it would be spent. We’re pretty sure it will all work out. Next year I’ll give them more.”
So for all these reasons, it’s much harder to get increases in funding than it used to be.
But universities, and especially community colleges, in Canada have understood for many years that governments’ willingness to support their research mission was flagging. Which is why so many higher-education institutions spent the last decade turning, like sunflowers, away from research dollars as a way of paying the bills, and toward international students.
We know how that turned out. For a while, governments and higher-education institutions worked together to bring in international students at an unprecedented rate. Especially in Ontario and especially in some of that province’s community colleges. Then it all came crashing down. Ballooning student populations put too much pressure on housing stock, and a year ago, Marc Miller, the Immigration minister, announced a two-year cap on international student permits.
In itself, that represents a substantial cut in total funding for higher education, but some provinces have gone further. Yesterday, Quebec’s government announced it will accept 20% fewer international students next year than it did last year.
People who’ve been trying to run institutions of higher education must feel like they’ve been getting a runaround. Shortly I’ll be joined for a panel discussion by distinguished administrators from McGill, Concordia and the Ecole Polytechnique, but here’s a quick version of what those places have been through.
In 2012, after province-wide protests, governments in Quebec abandoned tuition increases for university students from Quebec. So whoever was going to pay for Quebec’s universities, it mostly wouldn’t be the sons and daughters of Quebec families.
At the time, it was reasonable to assume governments would pay more and more for universities out of general revenues. And that an activist federal government would keep increasing its research budget. And that Canadian students from outside Quebec would pay more. And students from other countries.
But governments got tired of putting ever-higher amounts toward higher education. Research funding fell out of fashion. Last year, the Legault government decided there were too many students from outside Quebec, so it made it harder and more expensive for them to come here. International students were all that was left, as a significant source of higher income for the system. And now there’ll be fewer of them, too.
So far I’ve mostly been talking about universities as a function of costs and revenues. Of course that’s a terribly arid way to talk. It short-changes the remarkable contributions of Canada’s finest academics and the students they attract and inspire. But it also neglects a less lovely aspect of university life in recent years, which is the cultural debate they provoke.
If you talk to parents of university-age children, these days you’re likely to hear them talk about four undergraduate years as a questionable indulgence. More and more parents I know are resigned to the idea that the student in the family will need some vocational training after university, to teach them something useful. And, increasingly, as a kind of detox. Campuses have been the centre of some extraordinarily acrimonious debates in recent years. I don’t know a lot of people who think those debates have helped much. I don’t know a lot of people who want to bring those debates into their workplaces.
When he was a candidate for the Liberal leadership, 12 years ago, Justin Trudeau talked about “public and private investment in science, and the innovation and productivity growth it spurs.” I think fewer people are convinced these days that investment in higher education is synonymous with investment in science. And I think that in particular, people doubt that we’re getting a lot of innovation from our universities, or anything likely to increase productivity.
Which is how we get a front-running candidate for the highest political job in the country talking about Artificial Intelligence as though it were the product of a virgin birth. Sure, harness and deploy and leverage AI, but don’t talk about where it comes from, and don’t try to have more of it happening. It’s just too fraught.
I have, in the last couple of years, become a bit of a hanging judge on the social role of Canadian higher education. I’m the guy who shows up and rains on the parade. All I can say is that I took care not to be the only speaker on this bill; that the people we’re about to hear from know more than I do about what’s going on in higher education, and that Canada already benefits from their optimism and their industry. But the first step is to admit you have a problem.
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