The situation in Ukraine is incredibly bleak.  It’s not simply that Russia, led by a seemingly no-longer rational President, is trying to erase the independence of a neighbour; it is rather that it is trying to roll back 30 years of history and re-establish a pre-1989 balance of forces in Eastern Europe.  Canada, like the rest of the West, is leaving Ukraine to do the physical fighting on its own for the moment, but the prospects for more direct forms of confrontation are still pretty frightening.

Maybe I am overreacting to all this, but Putin’s performance yesterday was as deranged as anything I’ve ever seen in world politics and it’s not clear that war is avoidable just because none of us want one.  It won’t necessarily be a regular war waged with conventional weapons (though it almost certainly will be for Ukrainians), but nonetheless “hostilities” could come to Canada in a variety of ways.  I don’t think there is much likelihood at the moment of Canadian soldiers being put in harm’s way, but consider: the west, including Canada, is likely to impose some form of sanctions on Russia in the next couple of days.  It’s not yet clear if the sanctions regime is going to start big and then ramp up or if the plan is to hit Russia hard right away.  “Hard” in this sense means freezing funds in western banks, denying Russian banks access to funds in dollars or pounds and cutting the country off from the SWIFT system.  If it’s the latter, there is a reasonable chance of Russian counter-retaliation. This could take a couple of forms, the nastiest of which could involve widespread cyber-attacks on key cyber-infrastructure.  Now may be a good time to back up all your files on some kind of hard drive.  And if you’re a CIO – well, I imagine most of them are working very hard this week to prepare for a lot more denial-of-service for ransomware attacks.

This could get pretty ugly, fast.

The most important consequence of yesterday’s charade in Moscow is that the world as a whole just got a lot less safe.  I don’t just mean this in the sense of a direct threat from Vladimir Putin, but more generally in the sense that the entire post-1989 order (and in some ways post-WWII as well) is under assault.  Most importantly, in this more dangerous world, top-level science is going to be a lot less open and less free.  I know many university presidents – particularly in the U-15 – have been lobbying Ottawa hard these last few months to keep open as much co-operation as possible with China.  Well, you can forget about that.  We’re back to Cold War rules.  Get used to it.

Another important consequence is that there are likely to be a lot of Ukrainian refugees heading west very soon.  It would be helpful to think through what it is Canada might be able to do for them, and more specifically, what Canadian universities and colleges might do to assist not just individual refugees who wish to continue their studies or continue teaching, but also what help we can provide Ukrainian academia as a whole as it resists physical assault.  If there is one agenda around which Canadian universities could usefully co-ordinate action in the days ahead, it is this.

But apart from this, it’s hard to see what, in the short-term, the higher education sector can reasonably contribute.  As in every crisis, there will no do be opportunistic claims that the correct solution to this crisis (every crisis, really) will involve spending (“investing”) more money in higher education.  This, I am afraid, is probably nonsense.  Sure, in an ideal world, we’d all have been producing a lot more graduates in cyber-security than we did, but that door’s shut and the lead time to create more now is much longer than the probable duration of this crisis.  I mean sure, there will be increased private-sector demand for these kinds of programs, and I imagine quite a few community colleges will take the lead in meeting this demand.  Universities would probably do well to expect a jump in demand for Slavic languages programs next fall.  Peace and security studies too, I should imagine (I imagine Carleton’s NPSIA might be the hottest grad program in Canada next year). 

But adjusting programming to meet short-term demand is one thing – actually contributing to the crisis in the short-term is something different.  Universities are more useful for dealing with long-term challenges, not short-term ones.  I fear some of the good lines universities have been taking on “giving back to communities” are going to look less impressive in this kind of crisis than it has during COVID (and frankly, I am not sure how well it worked during COVID, either).

I really hope it doesn’t come to all of this.  But it’s past time we all started thinking about how our sector needs to react if it does.  Like COVID, it could happen a lot faster than anyone thinks.