So, I have a bit of an announcement to make today. I hope you’ll find it at least modestly intriguing.

In a year with no shortage of bleak higher education stories, one of the big questions we’ve been asking this year is: how do institutions actually recover? Not in the vague, inspirational sense, but in the real-world, practical, hard-choices-on-the-table kind of way. That’s what our Recovery Project has been all about. Drawing on past periods of retrenchment, we’ve been learning what it takes to navigate the current financial crisis: how to mitigate damage, how to keep people motivated, and how to keep one eye on long-term transformation even as you’re putting out short-term fires. The conversations have been revealing—and they’ve played no small part in convincing us that now is the right time to bring people together for something bigger. Retrenchment ends with recovery, but the path to recovery also allows us to explore innovations and new solutions to longstanding problems. Hence: this announcement.

As faithful readers know, I have long bemoaned the absence of spaces in Canadian higher education where we can collectively learn about what does and does not work in running our institutions. As a sector, we can be reluctant to experiment, and when we do so, we have very few ways to share good practice.  

At the same time, we are in crying need of change. Not to put too fine a point on it, nobody wants to pay for the system of higher education that we have built. We can decry it all we like, but we’re out of new sources of money. If we want to save those parts of the system that we most cherish, the parts that create the future, the bits that transform the lives of young people and the destinies of communities, we have to be prepared to re-think a lot of what we do.  

As they say in Sicily, everything must change if everything is to stay the same. Or, to quote one-time Canadian scientist Ernest Rutherford, “gentlemen, we have run out of money. It is time to start thinking”. Canada, like a lot of countries right now, needs a new model for universities. But, as I say, we lack the spaces in which to discuss and build those models.

And so, the team here at HESA Towers has decided to create a space of its own. After the roaring success of our recent AI-CADEMY conference in Calgary, we’ve decided to host a meeting to have these conversations. So, save the date: January 29th and 30th, 2026, for HESA’s Re:University Conference. We’ll be hosting a big show, with guests from around the world and across Canada, discussing how best to adjust to our new fiscal reality. What are the secrets to running financially sustainable higher education institutions? What proven methods exist to become more agile and to accelerate the process of academic innovation? How can we deploy technology intelligently to improve teaching and delivery? And how can institutions collaborate more effectively to support sustainable change? In short: how can we build new models of universities, quickly, to build a new and stronger Canada.

We’re trying to make this event as interactive and collaborative as possible. There will be the usual plenaries and breakouts, but our goal here isn’t to provide a passive experience for conference-goers. When we say we want to build a new university model, we know that’s not going to happen without a lot of input from everyone. (The running tagline in the office is Re:University. The conference that could not have been an email). 

And that means that we want to hear from you! We know everyone out there is doing what they can to adjust and survive. How is it going? What are your successes? What are your failures and what did you learn from them (and what can everyone else learn from them)? Drop us a line at events@higheredstrategy.com and let us know if you’ve got stories to tell. Learning from each other is the best way to speed up the re-invention process. There’s no formal proposal process to make a presentation, but we’ll be curating stories; just let us know which of your stories the rest of the sector wants to hear. And even if you are too shy to talk – tell us what kind of subjects you’d like to hear about. That helps us in the curation process, too.

Now, you may have noticed that although I said January 29 & 30, I haven’t given you a place for the meeting. That’s because we are still in discussions with a few potential partners and sites, trying to keep costs low (we’re acutely aware of everyone’s budget constraints). What I can tell you is that it will be somewhere central-ish (not on the coasts). And we’re working hard to create partnerships and sponsorships that can keep things affordable as well (want in on the party? Drop us a line.) Look for an update on this in a couple of weeks.

Anyways, we’re greatly looking forward to this and we hope you’ll join us for two days of creative and thoughtful collaborations to create a new Canadian university model. Our goal, as in everything we do, is to help institutions who want to be ambitious, who want to improve through experimentation, and who want to collaborate and share knowledge with institutions across the country because the existing, expiring model wasn’t created by any single institution, and the new model institutions we all want to be, won’t be created by anyone in isolation either.

See you in January.