The Political Earthquake Rocking Universities

When top U.S. scholars of fascism last week announced they were driven by conscience to move from Yale University to the University of Toronto, they may have made history in leading a Donald Trump-triggered exodus.

In joining U of T’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, Jason Stanley, Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore are at the vanguard of what could be thousands of academics, Americans and others, seeking shelter here.

They may face a colder academic climate than they expect if Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives win the federal election. On the campaign trail last week Poilievre unveiled a part of his party’s Quebec platform that vows: “A Conservative government would put an end to the imposition of woke ideology in... the allocation of federal funds for university research.”

If they come, the surge of academic refugees will be both an enormous opportunity and a political challenge for Canada.

I’ve been watching the unfolding battles in higher education with personal interest. A key hot spot has been my alma mater, Columbia University, whose main campus saw bitter protests over Israel’s war in Gaza, both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian. The university’s president resigned after congressional accusations of antisemitism at Columbia. Some students have been expelled or suspended or seen their degrees revoked.

A recent Columbia MA graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, has been arrested by officers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE. Despite his status as a legal U.S. resident, Khalil was flown to Louisiana under threat of deportation; his case has recently been moved to New Jersey.

The Trump regime demanded impossible changes from Columbia, threatening to withhold the institution’s $400 million in federal grants because it supposedly failed to suppress antisemitism on campus.

The demands included putting the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies, also known as MESAAS, into “academic receivership” for five years. Several faculty in the Columbia Law School have demolished the legality of Trump’s threats.

Sheldon Pollock, a MESAAS faculty member who has been chair of the department, likened the demand to a ransom note from a mob boss.

“Columbia is required to decide by Thursday 20 March how to respond to this ransom note, with the government threatening to cut off two of the university’s fingers: academic freedom and faculty governance,” he said.

On March 21, Columbia lost those fingers, saying that it would accede to Trump’s demands as set out in a March 13 letter. The alternative would be to lose $400 million in federal grants, half of them from the National Institutes of Health to support medical research.

On March 28, just one week after Columbia folded, its interim president, Katrina Armstrong, resigned and Claire Shipman, co-chair of the university’s board of trustees, became the acting president until the next president is chosen. It will be interesting to see who will want to preside over the ruins.

As Jason Stanley told CBC: “There is no more Columbia. It’s just a joke.... You’re preserving the name and some buildings.”

On Saturday’s Alumni Day, some of Khalil’s fellow Columbia graduates protested by ripping up their diplomas.

As a Columbia alumnus, I was surprised to be so upset about the Trump government’s attacks and the university’s submission. I’ve never been sentimental about my alma mater, and I haven’t set foot on campus since graduating in 1962.

But Columbia’s collapse is worth examining when exploring two questions suddenly front and centre. What has been the purpose of universities in liberal democracies? And why do authoritarian governments consider them nests of enemies?

For, as professor Stanley observed, the attack is not just on Columbia. It is the opening shot in a war on the entire U.S. post-secondary system.

That system has enabled millions of young Americans to launch careers that have helped keep their country an economic and political superpower. Regardless, that same system, in the view of Trumpists, produces too many graduates that are the wrong kinds of Americans.

Columbia made itself an attractive target for the Trumpists during the 2024 student demonstrations in support of Palestinians in Gaza. Almost a quarter of Columbia undergraduates are estimated to be Jewish, and they themselves were sharply divided on the issue of Israel’s war in Gaza, with some finding common cause with their Palestinian classmates.

This led to charges of university-sanctioned antisemitism, despite Columbia’s reputation as a school with a high proportion of brilliant Jewish faculty and students.

But even antisemitism was only a pretext for something much more serious. In December 2024 Max Eden, a Yale graduate and right-wing education researcher, discussed how Trump’s nominated education secretary, Linda McMahon, could use the antisemitism issue to “overhaul” higher education.

“To scare universities straight,” he wrote, “McMahon should start by taking a prize scalp. She should simply destroy Columbia University.”

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BRAIN BOOM

Understanding Columbia’s problem requires some historical perspective.

We now take for granted that a university education should be the foundation of any ambitious career, and a reliable escalator to a higher social class and income. But until the end of the Second World War, both private and public universities were relatively small, catering to wealthy families and a few scholarship students — mostly young white males. Most young people in Canada and the United States were lucky just to finish high school.

But after the war, both Canada and the United States saw a surge in university enrolments. Thanks to our veterans charter and the Americans’ GI Bill, scores of thousands of veterans enrolled in university programs.

These were mostly men in their 20s and 30s, many of them survivors of both the Depression and combat. They had hard-earned maturity and serious plans for their lives, and as graduates they helped to sustain the 30 glorious years of postwar North American prosperity.

But the veterans’ enrolments had obliged the universities to grow, adding more faculty, staff and programs. Universities soon realized that they needed more students to replace the graduating veterans.

Demography and the Cold War came to the rescue: the war babies born in the early 1940s reached Grade 12 just as the Russians put Sputnik, the first Earth satellite, into orbit. Money flooded into education in both the United States and Canada, and a whole generation of working- and middle-class kids set foot on the social-mobility escalator.

I was part of that lucky generation, graduating in 1962 just before the baby boom peaked; the education systems in both Canada and the United States were expanding rapidly, and eventually I found myself in Vancouver teaching community college students, baby boomers only a little younger than I.

A social transformation was underway, even if my colleagues and I didn’t really understand it. We thought we were providing social mobility and more opportunities for kids in the working class. But eventually it was clear that they weren’t working class anymore. Social mobility lifted them quickly into professional and managerial careers, serving governments and corporations.

They were becoming what French economist Thomas Piketty calls the Brahmin left, serving what Piketty calls the merchant right. We post-secondary faculty were Brahmin left too, disliking the increasingly neoliberal, merchant-right governments we served but still doing their bidding.

Post-secondary was now trapped in a growth spiral, always needing money from governments no longer eager to provide it. Tuition fees went up, and students’ families groaned but paid. The baby boom was followed by the baby bust, meaning fewer students were applying for admission.

Classes got larger. Money went to programs that could fill classrooms, while low-enrolment programs died. Graduates began to find that a BA was not always a ticket to a job, because other applicants had MAs or even PhDs. The paper chase kept some students in school (and paying fees) right through their 20s. They could spend their 30s and 40s paying off their student loans.

Still, many graduates did extremely well and contributed to advances in both sciences and the humanities. A BA had become a lottery ticket, not a job guarantee, but the odds of winning were still pretty good.

In the meantime, post-secondaries became a powerful interest group. Any given university is often the biggest employer in its town. Its presence attracts business and raises property values. Enterprising faculty may spin off startup companies, and the tax base can support good schools, hospitals and other social services.

Professors who populate these quasi-autonomous realms have to be good at their jobs, but politically they can become dangerous to the status quo. If some professor or academic association criticizes government policy, it’s from a position of credible authority. Wise governments welcome correction, but not all governments are wise, and unwise governments are quick to punish their critics.

That’s why academic freedom is critical: if scholars can’t report the facts they find they are left only with the lies they’ve been ordered to confirm.

The tension first came to a head during the Vietnam War, when Washington began to see universities as innately hostile. The Occupy movement against inequality and then climate change politics intensified the feeling, and the COVID-19 pandemic has made health itself a third-rail issue.

THE WAR ON DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION

By the 1980s university enrolment by women was steeply increasing. And North America had a vast system of community colleges, with lower tuition fees that more working-class and racialized students could afford; get good grades in the first two years of an academic transfer program, and you could snag a scholarship to the local university.

We were also welcoming immigrants, whether from Uganda or Chile, Vietnam or China. Then we welcomed foreign students, whose families were willing to pay the full cost of their kids’ tuition. That subsidized Canadian resident students, who paid only a fraction of their tuition.

In U.S. universities, foreign grad students in 2023-24 totalled over 1.1 million — over half of them from India or China. They have become critical to the success of their research programs, which may involve federal grants of millions of dollars. In return they contributed more than $50 billion to the U.S. economy.

This was all happening as both the United States and Canada were coming to recognize the political and economic value of diversity, equity and inclusion. The universities needed diverse students to stay alive, and they produced graduates very well equipped to succeed in fields that had once been dominated by affluent white males. Given an equal chance to learn, non-white, non-male students performed superbly. Without their inclusion, universities would have been impoverished.

Students and professors alike began to understand that the historic absence of Indigenous, Black and other minority students was due to systemic racism, not to innate inferiority; the system itself needed change. Hence the growing emphasis on land acknowledgment and policies encouraging diversity, equity and inclusion.

What the universities did not understand was that white male supremacy had not vanished after the 1960s; it had gone underground. With the advent of the internet in the 1990s, supremacists began to find one another. I wrote about them in 1996, but as an unpleasant curiosity. Less than 30 years later, they rule the United States, and the universities are among their first targets.

It doesn’t matter that Trump’s regime is staffed by graduates of high-prestige universities — Vice-President JD Vance went to Yale Law School, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio is a graduate of the University of Miami School of Law. Men and women who made such progress through higher education seem ready to dismantle the institutions that made them what they are today.

But the Trumpist rejection of the status quo involves the white-supremacist fantasy that white males are discriminated against, replaced in university classrooms by innately incompetent women, Black people, Asians and Latin Americans. And that diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI programs are divisively unfair to whites rather than effective approaches to raising awareness of structural discrimination and countering it.

In January, the University of Alberta made the controversial decision to change its DEI policy framework, substituting the words “access, community and belonging.” Like their U.S. counterparts, Alberta universities seem exquisitely sensitive to politically dangerous connotations.

To our south, the Trumpist attack on post-secondary has been underway for years, led by people like Christopher Rufo, not to mention the red-state politicians who blame critical race theory for all the ills of U.S. schools. Critical race theory is also condemned in Canada by the Council of European Canadians, a white-supremacist group.

The collapse of Columbia University now serves as a warning to all other U.S. universities, private and public: Don’t accept Black students, or Asians, or Latinos, or women. At most, set quotas for their admission. Certainly don’t promote African American studies or women’s studies. International students? They’ll soon learn to apply in other countries. Clean up the curriculum. Faculty will teach only approved subjects, in an approved manner.

Universities that try to resist Trump’s demands will see their federal funding cut to nothing, while their endowments pay for endless legal battles and students look elsewhere. That could affect Canadian universities that sometimes receive U.S. federal research grants. Some French companies that have received such grants have now been told to comply with Trump’s DEI ban.

In the United States, embattled faculty will take early retirement or resign. Some might go into the private sector; others may go abroad. European universities are already recruiting U.S.-based researchers. A residue of academics will teach what they’ve been told and keep their mouths shut otherwise.

CANADA’S INTELLECTUAL WINDFALL?

What happens to Canada when the U.S. universities have imploded?

Along with the hundreds of thousands of immigrants seeking asylum and diaspora Canadians returning home, expect another group to arrive at our doorstep: U.S. and foreign-born university faculty, students and support staff, and their families.

This will be an intellectual windfall most countries can only dream of, like the German Jewish scientists, including Albert Einstein, who found refuge in the United States before the Second World War. But to us, it will be like winning a $50-million lottery, payable in dimes.

Where would we put thousands of refugee academics and their families? What jobs could we give them? And should they take jobs that would otherwise have gone to Canadian citizens?

Back in the 1950s, when we were a smaller and poorer country, we welcomed thousands of Hungarian refugees including a whole forestry department that became part of the University of British Columbia. It might be possible to do something like that on a larger scale.

Another possibility might be to dramatically expand and strengthen our research institutions, like the National Research Council, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canada Foundation for Innovation. Working with Canadian universities and businesses, refugee scientists and scholars could continue their work — or start new projects — under our auspices.

We might even steal an idea from the old Soviet Union and build our own “akademgorodoks,” academic towns designed to support scientific and engineering research and development as well as education in specialized fields.

The Canadian post-secondary system would creak and groan under the pressure of thousands of new people, as well as our K-12 schools trying to accommodate refugee kids. Amidst all this, we’ll need to design a demographically resilient education system that doesn’t need endless growth to survive.

The costs would be daunting, just as they were when Canada entered the Second World War straight out of the Depression. But the 11 million Canadians who survived the Dirty ’30s and overseas service came home determined to build a better life than they’d had before the war.

When life gives you lemons, they say, make lemonade. When life gives you refugees, make a refuge.

Tyee contributing editor Crawford Kilian taught in B.C. community colleges from 1967 to 2008.