Welcome back everyone. It’s the Tuesday after Labour Day, and that means it’s time to start Blog Year 16 (gulp) with a look ahead over the next ten months or so. I’m looking at three very big themes.
Let’s start with the one big piece of news over the summer that has the potential to overwhelm pretty much everyone: the release of the Report on Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences. It’s not the world’s most sophisticated piece of analysis – a purposive network recruitment combined with voluntary-response sampling has the potential to lead to some pretty significant bias – and one should treat the specific numbers (e.g. 57% saying they avoid wearing Jewish symbols because of safety concerns) with great caution. But as a wise man once said: if the finding is big enough, even a suspect methodology will pick it up. Just read the qualitative responses to some of the questions and the stories students tell about their experiences; they are horrifying. The calls for action are going to be loud – and appropriately so.
The problem, of course, is that while antisemitism must be fought, it is also true that there are some bad faith actors out there who want to weaponize antisemitism against universities. Donald Trump notoriously shook down Columbia University for hundreds of millions of dollars in 2025 over the issue and tried (unsuccessfully) to sue Harvard for antisemitism on campus. In Germany, too, the at-least Nazi-adjacent Alternative für Deutschland uses antisemitism as a stick with which to beat universities (and the left). Even where there aren’t substantial numbers of bad-faith actors at work, charges of antisemitism at universities can consume the public agenda about higher education, as it did in Australia with a major report on antisemitism in 2025, and a week of uncomfortable testimony focused on universities at a more general Royal Commission on Antisemitism this July. Taking antisemitism seriously without empowering bad faith actors will take some skill. As academic Michael Geist has pointed out, the report has largely been met with silence, denial and – frankly – more antisemitism. That isn’t good enough. The sector is going to get deservedly hammered if it tries to sweep this under the table. Equally, of course, it will be hammered if the response does not at least nod to the need to eliminate other forms of racism and discrimination on campus. I know there aren’t many people who want to endure a rehashing of all the Gaza arguments of 2024, or many of the EDI discussions of 2020-22, but something of this nature is what the moment actually requires. Shirking this job isn’t going to make it go away. And, while I know it’s completely against everyone’s instinct to work on this at a national rather than a campus level, I think universities are courting disaster if they try to react on an individual basis. Either universities work jointly to address concerns about antisemitism or risk being picked off one-by-one by bad faith actors. You have all seen what happened to those Ive League presidents in the States. Stand together, work together … or hang separately.
Issue #2 is artificial intelligence. There have been a number of big stories about AI in higher education but let me focus on two of them in particular. The first is the scandal in Mexico, where an online entrance exam proved to be vulnerable to AI cheating, and left the country’s #1 university, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, with a very big problem on its hands. The UK thinktank Policy Exchange released a paper noting the extent to which UK universities were reliant on take-home essays and unsupervised online examinations as methods of assessment and questioned in the strongest possible terms whether, in the age of AI, anyone could take university assessment – and hence the value inherent in a university degree – seriously.
You all know that we at HESA take artificial intelligence pretty seriously (as the focus of our upcoming AI-cademy 2026 national conference at UBC), not because we think it’s potentially great/god-awful for teaching in the sector (it’s both), or because we think the labour market is about to be imminently upended by AI (it’s not – or at least not yet). But it does have the medium-term potential to radically change what we mean by expertise and, more urgently, requires some serious changes in the way we assess progress towards it. It’s not that it’s impossible to find out what someone else knows and assess their level of expertise; but it’s time-intensive and universities have a hard time doing it at scale.
And that matters because what’s at risk is public trust. Make no mistake: if people lose trust in universities’ ability to properly assess talent and certify learning, then this entire enterprise we all love will lose social license and the sector is pretty much done. And right quick. Dealing with this problem is going to require institutions to think very hard about how they approach the assessment challenge. Unfortunately, few institutions currently have the ability to really have these conversations internally, let alone arrive at a shared way forward. Partly it’s a matter of bandwidth, but mostly it’s simply that most institutions have no obvious table around which to convene the necessary stakeholders. It’s going to be challenging.
And then finally there is issue #3 which, as always, is ensuring universities are being the best institutions they can possibly be in the new, constrained, post-international student world we currently live in. This is obviously a subject pretty dear to our hearts at HESA Towers, and one we’ll be dealing with at length during our Re: University conference at Toronto Metropolitan University this February. What happens over the next few months, I think, will be the difference between whether we have a healthy sector in 2030 or not.
Here’s the basic problem: in most of the country, institutions have survived the last couple of years by becoming more efficient. In a sense, that’s good: inefficiency doesn’t help anyone. But greater efficiency without a change in the basic model isn’t necessarily a source of strength: often, it’s just a sign of brittleness and vulnerability to the next set of shocks. It really is the basic model that has to change. Forget the fact that higher education can and should respond to changes in society, the environment, the economy, and technology: how about we remember that Canadian universities as a whole are slow and risk-averse. They hand out internal vetoes to institutional change like candy. They talk a lot about the value of interdisciplinarity but rarely do much to support or sustain it. And they are mostly terrible at using evidence effectively to improve their operations (speaking of which, I do recommend this recent LSE blog post entitled Universities rarely use research evidence in their decision-making, so why do they expect anyone else to?)
This is not a model we should fight to preserve. What we need now is not a new model but many new ones. Models that allow institutions to become comfortable with change and experiment more easily. Models that don’t lead to financial crises every decade or so. Models that allow for collective input in a manner which is inclusive but not constipated. Models that can put into effect the notion of rapid collegiality and act boldly and decisively to create new programs and new partnerships, not just locally, but anywhere in the world.
What we need, folks, is not efficiency but transformation. It’s a time for imagination, to reinvent the sector. Everyone needs to have a voice in how that happens, but nobody gets a veto. And the process starts now: 2026-27 should be the year we start to change the model. And HESA will be with the sector every step of the way.
Fired up? Ready to go?
Let’s do this.
