Tag: Alex

  • Alex Kozinski on JD Vance’s censorship speech — First Amendment News 459

    Alex Kozinski on JD Vance’s censorship speech — First Amendment News 459

    The Wall Street Journal recently published an op-ed by former Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski in which he, among other things, praises Vice President JD Vance’s recent speech in Munich about the evils of censorship in Europe — which included references to Kozinski’s birthplace, Romania. 

    Judge Alex Kozinski

    True to form, the Kozinski article was bold in ways certain to provoke criticism. Below are a few “fair use” excerpts:

    JD Vance’s speech to the Munich Security Conference . . . mentioned the Romanian election twice and held it up as a cautionary tale of what can happen to societies that seek to coerce rather than persuade, suppress rather than debate.

    Could American elections be canceled next? Some states came close in 2024 by attempting to remove from their ballots the candidate who eventually won the presidency. There was no uproar; the Supreme Court had to intervene. . . If enough panic is stirred up, canceling elections isn’t inconceivable.

    Our legacy media have greeted Mr. Vance’s speech largely with disdain and horror. They are wrong. The speech is epic. It reminds Europeans and Americans that the values of the Enlightenment, as captured in our Constitution—not least the right to think, speak and debate freely—are the glue that binds us together. If we don’t defend those values, there isn’t much left worth defending. 

    Related

    Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced today that the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana granted his motion to block top officials in the federal government from continuing to violate the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans. The judge’s ruling is 155 pages long and includes 721 footnotes.

    The judge had harsh words for the federal officials. He noted that this is “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” that the Biden administration has “blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech,” and that the Biden administration “almost exclusively targeted conservative speech.”

    Attorney General Bailey’s motion for preliminary injunction, which he filed with Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, highlighted over 1,400 facts from more than 20,000 pages of evidence exposing the vast censorship enterprise coordinated across multiples [SIC] agencies within the federal government. [reversed on standing grounds in Murthy v. Missouri (2024)] 

    SCOTUS denies review in ‘buffer zone’ abortion clinic protest cases 

    The case is Coalition Life v. City of Carbondale (Paul Clement, counsel for Petitioner). Earlier this week the Court denied review, with Justice Thomas dissenting (and with Justice Alito voting to grant certiorari). In this case, the Justices were invited to reconsider and reverse Hill v. Colorado. 

    Clarence Thomas official SCOTUS portrait

    Justice Clarence Thomas

    Below are a few excerpts from Justice Thomas’ dissent:

    It is unclear what, if anything, is left of Hill. As lower courts have aptly observed, Hill is “incompatible” with our more recent First Amendment precedents. Price v. Chicago, 915 F. 3d 1107, 1117 (CA7 2019) (opinion of Sykes, J., joined by Barrett, J.). Start with McCullen v. Coakley, 573 U. S. 464 (2014). There, this Court unanimously held unconstitutional a Massachusetts law that prohibited anyone from entering a 35-foot buffer zone around an abortion facility. Id., at 471– 472, 497. In doing so, the Court determined that the law was content neutral because—rather than targeting certain kinds of speech such as protest, education, and counseling—the law prohibited virtually any speech within the buffer zone. Id., at 479. The Court made clear, however, that the law “would be content based if it required ‘enforcement authorities’ to ‘examine the content of the message’” to determine whether the law applied. Ibid. That position is irreconcilable with Hill, which the Court did not even bother to cite.

    Hill is likewise at odds with Reed v. Town of Gilbert, 576 U. S. 155 (2015). Reed involved a First Amendment challenge to a town’s sign code that regulated various categories of signs based on “the type of information they convey.” Id., at 159. Relying on Hill, the Ninth Circuit concluded that the sign code was content neutral, reasoning that the town “‘did not adopt its regulation of speech because it disagreed with the message conveyed’” and its “‘interests in regulat[ing] temporary signs are unrelated to the content of the sign.’” 576 U. S., at 162. That court then applied a lower level of scrutiny and upheld the code. Ibid. We reversed, holding that a speech regulation is content based—and thus “presumptively unconstitutional”—if it “draws distinctions based on the message a speaker conveys.” Id., at 163.

    Our post-Reed decisions have firmly established Hill’s diminished status. In City of Austin, for example, the majority ran as far as it could from Hill, even though Hill was the one “case that could possibly validate the majority’s aberrant analysis” on the constitutionality of restrictions on bill-board advertising. 596 U. S., at 86, 102 (opinion of THOMAS, J.). The majority nonetheless insisted that any alleged similarity was “a straw man,” rejecting the notion that its opinion had “‘resuscitat[ed]’” Hill, and reminding readers that it did “not cite” the decision at all. 596 U. S., at 76. Our latest word on Hill—expressed in a majority opinion joined by five Members of this Court—is that the decision “distorted [our] First Amendment doctrines.” Dobbs, 597 U. S., at 287, and n. 65. If Hill’s foundation was “deeply shaken” before Dobbs, see Price, 915 F. 3d, at 1119, the Dobbs decision razed it.

    [ . . . ]

    Hill has been seriously undermined, if not completely eroded, and our refusal to provide clarity is an abdication of our judicial duty.

    The Court also denied review in Turco v. City of Englewood, New Jersey (another abortion “buffer zone” case) (Justices Thomas and Alito voted to grant the petition).

    Defendants’ motion to dismiss complaint in Iowa pollster ‘fraud’ case

    Iowa pollster Ann Selzer with a Des Moines Register headline and Donald Trump silhouette in the background

    The plaintiffs “can no more sue a newspaper pollster for diverted resources than a farmer could sue a TV weatherman for crop damage due to unexpected frost.”

    Below are a few excerpts from the motion to dismiss in Trump v. Selzer (US Dist. Ct., S. Dist., Iowa, Case 4:24-cv-00449-RGE-WPK: Feb. 21) (Robert Corn-Revere, lead counsel for Defendants):

    FIRE Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere

    Robert Corn-Revere, lead counsel for Defendants.

    Introduction 

    Plaintiffs’ claims are barred by the First Amendment and the Court should dismiss them with prejudice. In the United States there is no such thing as a claim for “fraudulent news.” No court in any jurisdiction has ever held such a cause of action might be valid, and few plaintiffs have ever attempted to bring such outlandish claims. Those who have were promptly dismissed. [citations]

    There is good reason for this. History’s judgment repudiated the 1798 Sedition Act which prohibited “false, scandalous and malicious . . . writings against the government of the United States” or its president, and that fraught episode “first crystallized a national awareness of the central meaning of the First Amendment.” N.Y. Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 273 (1964). Since then, courts at all levels have confirmed our “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,” id. at 270, holding that speech is presumptively protected unless it falls within one of a few limited and narrowly defined categories. United States v. Stevens, 559 U.S. 460, 468–70 (2010). Those categories do not include a general exception for “false speech,” United States v. Alvarez, 567 U.S. 709, 722 (2012). 

    Plaintiffs seek to illegitimately expand them to include “fake news,” a tag line that may play well for some on the campaign trail but has no place in America’s constitutional jurisprudence. In this regard, civil damages, no less than criminal sanctions, cannot lie against protected speech. Snyder v. Phelps, 562 U.S. 443 (2011); Sullivan, 376 U.S. at 277. 

    Even if such a cause of action existed, the Amended Complaint is fatally flawed on every level: Plaintiffs fail at the threshold to allege any recoverable damages, and do not state plausible claims, either on the law or on the facts as alleged. No court has ever accepted claims like these, and this Court should not be the first. 

    [ . . . ]

    Plaintiffs Illegitimately Seek to Create a New First Amendment Exception. 

    Mr. Trump and his co-plaintiffs assume “false news” falls outside the First Amendment’s protection, but over 200 years of American free speech law and practice prove otherwise. 

    “Authoritative interpretations of the First Amendment guarantees have consistently refused to recognize an exception for any test of truth—whether administered by judges, juries, or administrative officials—and especially one that puts the burden of proving truth on the speaker.” Id. at 271. 

    As the Supreme Court recently explained, “[o]ur constitutional tradition stands against the idea that we need Oceania’s Ministry of Truth.” Alvarez, 567 U.S. at 723. 

    “From 1791 to the present . . . the First Amendment has permitted restrictions upon the content of speech in a few limited areas, and has never include[d] a freedom to disregard these traditional limitations.” Stevens, 559 U.S. at 468 (cleaned up). These “historic and traditional categories long familiar to the bar” include obscenity, child pornography, defamation, fraud, incitement, fighting words, and speech integral to criminal activity. Id. (cleaned up) (collecting cases). Former Justice Souter observed that “[r]eviewing speech regulations under fairly strict categorical rules keeps the starch in the standards for those moments when the daily politics cries loudest for limiting what may be said.” Denver Area Educ. Telecomms. Consortium, Inc. v. FCC, 518 U.S. 727, 774 (1996) (Souter, J., concurring). Consequently, the Court steadfastly resists efforts to increase or expand the boundaries of these categories as “startling and dangerous” and has rejected any “freewheeling authority to declare new categories of speech outside the scope of the First Amendment.” Stevens, 559 U.S. at 470, 472. 

    Plaintiffs try to shoehorn their claims into an existing category by calling the Iowa Poll “fake” and asserting actionable “fraud” occurred. But “in the famous words of Inigo Montoya from the movie The Princess Bride, ‘You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.’” [citation] As a matter of basic law, Plaintiffs’ allegations about polls and news stories they dislike have nothing to do with fraud. [reference] I.B. They also sprinkle the complaint with loose talk of “election interference,” [citation], although they stop short of including a separate claim on that basis, perhaps out of awareness that “no court has held that a scheme to rig an election itself constitutes money or property fraud.” [citation] 

    Categories of unprotected speech are defined by precise legal tests, and Plaintiffs cannot stretch those boundaries to serve a political narrative. The Supreme Court routinely rejects attempts to broaden those limits based on assertions that the speech at issue is somehow “like” a recognized exception. See, e.g., Stevens, 559 U.S. at 470–71 (Other “descriptions are just that— descriptive. They do not set forth a test that may be applied as a general matter . . . .”); Brown v. Ent. Merchs. Ass’n, 564 U.S. 786, 793–96 (2011) (rejecting “attempt to shoehorn speech about violence into obscenity,” citing a lack of “longstanding tradition in this country” restricting such speech); Hustler Mag., Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46, 55–56 (1988) (rejecting bid to leave “outrageous” speech unprotected because it “does not seem to us to be governed by any exception to the . . . First Amendment”); Alvarez, 567 U.S. at 721–22 (“The Government has not demonstrated that false statements . . . should constitute a new category of unprotected speech” based on a “tradition of proscription.”) (quotation omitted). 

    Because the categories are governed by history and tradition, the Plaintiffs could not have chosen a worse candidate for inclusion than “fake news.” America’s first experience with prohibiting false news — the Sedition Act of 1798 — expired under its own terms, and all fines assessed under that misbegotten law were remitted. President Thomas Jefferson denounced it as an unconstitutional “nullity, as absolute and palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image.” Sullivan, 376 U.S. at 272–76. While the Supreme Court never adjudicated the Sedition Act’s attempt to punish “false” writings about public officials, “the attack upon its validity has carried the day in the court of history,” defined “the central meaning of the First Amendment,” id., and conditioned “the fabric of jurisprudence woven across the years.” [citation] 

    Plaintiffs’ quest to punish “fake news” not only ignores this history, it also fumbles the conceptual basis for unprotected speech categories, which the Court first described as speech “of slight social value.” Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568, 572 (1942). Here, Plaintiffs seek to create a new First Amendment exception for speech that has always received the highest level of constitutional protection — political speech and commentary. In a word, it just doesn’t fit. 

    The Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed that the First Amendment “‘has its fullest and most urgent application’ to speech uttered during a campaign for political office.” Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310, 339 (2010) (citation omitted). Speech about the political process is “at the core of our First Amendment freedoms,” Republican Party of Minn. v. White, 536 U.S. 765, 774 (2002), because a “major purpose” of the First Amendment was to protect “free discussion of . . . candidates.” Mills v. Alabama, 384 U.S. 214, 218 (1966). Accordingly, the “First Amendment affords the broadest protection” to “[d]iscussion of public issues and debate on” the political process. McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm’n, 514 U.S. 334, 346 (1995) (citation omitted). Political polling is “speech protected by the First Amendment” both because it “requires a discussion between pollster and voter” and the resulting poll itself “is speech.” [citation]

    The First Amendment accords speech in this area wide berth because “erroneous statement[s] [are] inevitable in free debate, and [they] must be protected if the freedoms of expression are to have the breathing space that they need to survive.” Sullivan, 376 U.S. at 271– 72 (cleaned up). Efforts to regulate “truth” in political commentary are thus presumptively unconstitutional and subject to strict scrutiny. [citations] Bottom line, political polls and news reports are not the stuff of which First Amendment exceptions are made. 

    Related

    The Associated Press sues Trump administration 

    The Associated Press sued three Trump administration officials Friday over access to presidential events, citing freedom of speech in asking a federal judge to stop the 10-day blocking of its journalists.

    [ . . . ]

    The AP says its case is about an unconstitutional effort by the White House to control speech — in this case refusing to change its style from the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” as President Donald Trump did last month with an executive order. “The press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government,” the AP said in its lawsuit, which names White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles, Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

    Emergency hearing request and motion in opposition 

    Related

    Executive Watch


    WATCH VIDEO: Trump escalates attacks on the free press

    Forthcoming scholarly article: Lakier & Douek on stalking and the First Amendment

    Professors Genevieve Lakier (left) and Evelyn Douek (right)

    Professors Genevieve Lakier (left) and Evelyn Douek (right)

    In Counterman v. Colorado, the Supreme Court decided an imaginary case. It held that Billy Ray Counterman’s conviction could not stand because it did not meet the First Amendment requirements for prosecutions based on threats. But this is puzzling because Counterman was not in fact convicted for making threats. He was convicted of stalking, under a law that does not require that the defendant threaten anyone in order to be guilty of the crime. 

    This Article argues that the Supreme Court’s confusion about the most basic facts of the case was not an aberration but instead reflects broader pathologies in First Amendment jurisprudence. These pathologies are a consequence of the impoverished view of the First Amendment’s boundaries depicted in the Court’s recent decisions, which suggest that the First Amendment’s doctrinal terrain can be described by a simple list of historically unprotected categories. 

    This thin account of the First Amendment, and the doctrinal distortions it creates, are not inevitable, however. The Article argues for an alternative, more multi-dimensional approach to the question of the First Amendment’s boundaries — one that rests on a richer understanding of the traditions of speech regulation in the United States — and sketches out its implications for the law of stalking and, potentially, many other areas of free speech law. Courts do not need to deny the facts of the cases they adjudicate to craft a First Amendment jurisprudence that is doctrinally coherent, historically informed, and normatively desirable. 

    ‘So to Speak’ podcast: Corn-Revere and London on censorship at home and abroad


    From JD Vance’s free speech critique of Europe to the Trump administration barring the Associated Press from the Oval Office, free speech news is buzzing. General Counsel Ronnie London and Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere unpack the latest developments.

    More in the News

    2024-2025 SCOTUS term: Free expression and related cases

    Cases decided 

    • Villarreal v. Alaniz (Petition granted. Judgment vacated and case remanded for further consideration in light of Gonzalez v. Trevino, 602 U. S. ___ (2024) (per curiam))
    • Murphy v. Schmitt (“The petition for a writ of certiorari is granted. The judgment is vacated, and the case is remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit for further consideration in light of Gonzalez v. Trevino, 602 U. S. ___ (2024) (per curiam).”)
    • TikTok Inc. and ByteDance Ltd v. Garland (The challenged provisions of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act do not violate petitioners’ First Amendment rights.)

    Review granted

    Pending petitions 

    Petitions denied

    Last scheduled FAN

    This article is part of First Amendment News, an editorially independent publication edited by Ronald K. L. Collins and hosted by FIRE as part of our mission to educate the public about First Amendment issues. The opinions expressed are those of the article’s author(s) and may not reflect the opinions of FIRE or Mr. Collins.

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  • Where Canada lies in Global Trends with Alex Usher

    Where Canada lies in Global Trends with Alex Usher

    Happy New Year and Welcome back to the World of Higher Education Podcast! I’m Tiffany MacLennan, your host for the day which means our guest is the one and only, Alex Usher.

    In this episode, we’ll explore key global trends in higher education and then dive into how Canada fits—or doesn’t—within them. From widespread funding challenges to the politicization of universities and the evolving focus on vocational education, we’ll unpack how these issues play out on a global scale and what they mean for Canadian post-secondary sector. Let’s hear from Alex.

    The World of Higher Education Podcast
    Episode 3.15 | Where Canada lies in Global Trends with Alex UsherKelchen

    Transcript

    Tiffany MacLennan (TM): Alex, many of our guests this year discussed how their higher education systems are grappling with significant funding challenges. Can you tell me what some of the issues have been globally? Have there been any places that haven’t been struggling financially?

    Alex Usher (AU): I think in the developed world, you’ve got very similar issues: slow economic growth, price volatility, an aging demographic, and frankly, increasing skepticism about how higher education translates into economic growth. What you’ve seen everywhere, I think, is a weakening in the desire to invest in higher education—certainly compared to where we were 20 years ago. Back then, when global rankings started, everyone wanted to climb higher in the rankings. That reflected a belief by countries that investments in knowledge paid dividends, that more top universities meant a better economy. I just don’t think people believe that anymore. And until that belief comes back, it’s going to be tough to get public funding. Private funding—through higher tuition fees, for example—is still possible, and it works in some places, like China. But in much of Europe, where taxes are high, people feel like they’ve already paid their dues and don’t want to pay tuition fees. In North America, Australia, and the UK, there’s growing skepticism about whether higher education is delivering value for money. The combination of those two have put higher education in a difficult position.

    So, globally, there’s a gap. Universities and academics know what kind of product they’d like to offer the public, but nobody wants to pay for it—either privately or publicly. That gap, I’d say, is about 10-15% in most countries. India and Turkey being exceptions to the rule with recent increases.

    TM: That’s interesting. Are these funding challenges playing out in the same way in Canada, or are there unique factors at play here?

    AU: When it comes to public funding, I think Canada’s pretty much following the global trend. Maybe we’ve defunded institutions a bit more than some other countries, but that’s because we thought we’d found a workaround: international students. I always say public funding of public education is a public good, but foreign funding of public education? That’s a public great. If you can get another country’s middle class to subsidize your middle class’s education, why wouldn’t you do it?

    And that’s what Canada did. We thought that marketization would save us and in marketization, in our case, was largely about internationalization. For a decade, every time governments said, “We’re not investing this year,” institutions said, “That’s fine, we’ll bring in another 10,000 international students.” And it worked—for a while, a decade really. But we weren’t the only ones. The UK, Australia, and the Netherlands became similarly dependent on international students.

    And in all those countries, decades of nimbyism and a failure to build housing eventually hit a breaking point. Housing prices soared, and international students—fairly or unfairly—got blamed for it.

    In Canada, we’ve seen the federal government move to cut international immigration, including reducing the number of international students coming in. That’s caused rental prices to drop for the first time in years. But it’s also exposed the vulnerability of this funding model. You can’t rely on international students forever if the public doesn’t want to pay for higher education.

    TM: One of our past guests, Simon Marginson, has talked extensively about the growing polarization in higher education around the world. We’ve heard about this polarization in the U.S. with the Trump administration, in Russia, and in other places. Can you summarize what this polarization means and how it’s playing out globally?

    AU: I’m not convinced that polarization is the right way to frame it. What we’re really seeing is the increased politicization of higher education, a public good.

    For a long time, the idea was that publicly funded higher education would be responsive to the public. But if the public goes bananas—if they elect fascists—then higher education reflects that. It’s not polarization per se; it’s increased state control over higher education, regardless of how much governments are actually funding it.

    In Canada and the U.S., for instance, governments don’t fund post-secondary education to a huge extent, but they’re exerting more and more influence over it. Meanwhile, in places like China and Russia, we’re seeing autocratic governments tighten their grip on higher education—not because of polarization, but because they see academia as a threat. Putin has been in Russia for 25 years, there’s not a new polarization, he’s now choosing to exert greater state control.

    For years, there was this idea that higher education would democratize these countries. “Educate more people, and they’ll demand democracy.” But it didn’t happen. Instead, higher education made autocrats more aware of the potential for political dissent and using higher education to affect political change, and they’ve responded by cracking down on it.

    I think this trend is almost universal. Governments are less democratic overall because of short time frames. You see it in Canada, where provincial governments increasingly order universities to do things. And next week, Alma Maldonado is going to talk about how a left-wing populist government in Mexico is doing similar things. It’s not a left-right issue—it’s about state control.

    TM: Do you think Canada is more insulated from this politicization, or are we seeing divides within our own higher education system? It’s January 6th right now, Justin Trudeau stepped down about 4 hours ago and we’re going to go into an election. How does this affect the next handful of years in Canadian higher education?

    AU: We’re not insulated from it, but the pressures here are less extreme. For example, the Ontario government made a big deal about free speech on campus six years ago, but all it has amounted to is a two-page report every year from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario and nothing else happened. It’s performative but the conservatives are happy because they showed those liberal jerks where to get off, and that’s fine. The right is satisfied with a certain level of performativity.

    You’re seeing it right now in Alberta, there’s been some noise about shutting down equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) programs. Calgary and Alberta have rebranded EDI portfolios as “access, community, and inclusion,” but they’re not doing anything fundamentally different, even though they have different letters of the alphabet. Boards and universities know it’s worth being inclusive, and they’re not going to stop doing that.

    So you have to give conservative governments symbolic victories over universities, but they still want their kids to go there. That’s different from the U.S., where we’re seeing a real shift in how Republican families view higher education and how many children, male and female, want to attend university. Here, I think we’ll see culture war issues pop up, but I don’t think they’ll reach U.S. levels.

    TM: Another hot topic on the podcast this year has been the vocationalization of higher education—this push for more work-ready graduates. Is this part of a global trend?

    AU: I’m not actually sure this is a new trend. Since at least the 1960s, as we’ve moved from elite systems of higher education to mass and then universal systems, vocationalization has been part of that shift. Once higher education is no longer a luxury good, it becomes more about what people can get out of it.

    Massification has always been accompanied by vocationalization because most people want to know that what they’re studying will help them get ahead. That’s not new.

    You do hear rhetorical volleys about this, like “We need more plumbers and fewer philosophy grads.” I think Rick Scott might’ve been the one to say that. But you don’t actually see governments translating that rhetoric into significant program changes. What really drives programming shifts is student demand—what applicants choose to study. Which is very different from governments coming in and making these changes. For example, are students less interested in the humanities? Sure. But we still have higher humanities enrollments today than for 99% of human history. They’re not as high as they were in the 1980s or 1990s, but they’re still significant.

    In countries that are newer to mass or universal higher education—like in parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America—you’re seeing more demand for vocational programs. That’s because it’s not just the upper class going to university anymore. Middle-class and lower-middle-class families want to make sure their investment in education leads to tangible returns, they don’t want to do it just because it’s a nice time.

    So, is vocationalization a global trend? Yes, but it’s been happening for decades. It’s not a new phenomenon.

    TM: In Canada, do you think recent changes to immigration and student work visa policies will shift the balance between vocational and liberal arts education?

    AU: Let me start with vocational education in Canada, because I think it’s one of the best things we do. Over the last 60 years, we’ve built a remarkable system—completely unplanned, of course. Canadians don’t really plan higher education; we stumble into things. But we ended up with a system that offers a lot of options for people who don’t want to go to university or pursue more theoretical studies.

    We’ve created pathways into the middle class through vocational education, which I think is the secret to Canadian egalitarianism. The community college system—whether it’s polytechnics, local community colleges, or CÉGEPs in Quebec—provides young people with opportunities that don’t exist in many countries. And they’re good options that lead to good jobs.

    The problem is, like universities, no one wants to pay for it. Governments don’t seem to understand that not training enough people is part of what’s causing bottlenecks in areas like building things and meeting labour needs. It’s wild—especially in Ontario, where the Ford government has no sense of how this all ties together.

    On the international student front, Canada’s college system has been attractive because it offers a pathway to permanent residency. That’s brought in a lot of international students, and some colleges have benefited immensely—especially those that took full advantage of this, and pigged out. They’ve become incredibly rich, and much of that money has gone into building infrastructure. But now, with changes to immigration and postgraduate work visa policies, we’re going to lose a lot of those students. It’s already starting to hurt.

    In Ontario, for example, international students were cross-subsidizing some of the most expensive programs, particularly in the trades. Without them, it’s going to be tough to keep some of those programs running. We’re going to see closures and cuts.

    Universities, on the other hand, won’t be as affected. Most international students at universities are in business, science, and engineering programs, which are less impacted by the policy changes. But for colleges, especially those that relied heavily on international students, the next few years are going to be very difficult. It’s carnage in the colleges and it’s bad for universities.

    TM: Last question. Which of the recent trends do you think will stick, and what do they mean for the future of Canadian higher education?

    AU: I think most of the trends we’re seeing now will stick around for a few years. I don’t foresee governments suddenly having a revelation and deciding, “We should fund post-secondary education more.” It just doesn’t seem likely. You might see some marginal changes, but they won’t be transformative.

    Take Alberta as an example. Over the next decade, they’re expecting a 30 to 40 percent increase in the youth population. You’d think that would lead to investments in higher education capacity—this is as predictable as it gets with demographics—but it’s not happening. It’s not that they can’t see it; they simply don’t want to spend the money.

    One way Canada stands out, though, is how limited our thinking has become when it comes to skills. The PIAAC data came out recently, but it barely made a ripple. Twenty years ago, governments would have looked at that data and asked, “What skills do our young people need to succeed in the world?” Now, when you mention skills, they only think about trades and healthcare. The broader idea of transversal skills—those that matter for the entire economy, not just specific occupations—has disappeared from the conversation.

    Our policy community in higher education seems to have been lobotomized over the past couple of decades. We’ve stopped focusing on the big issues. That said, when governments are lazy or inattentive, institutions sometimes have the space to innovate. I think we’ll see some exciting developments around teaching, AI, and microcredentials. Maybe not as much as some expect, but more than I would’ve thought a few years ago.

    I also expect shorter university programs to emerge—likely returning to three-year degrees, as we had in the 1980s and 1990s. With labour shortages becoming more acute, institutions won’t be able to keep students for four years anymore. This will take time—probably a decade or so—but I think it’s coming.

    In general, universities are going to need to focus more on labour market outcomes, skills, and efficiency. Students will likely appreciate this shift, especially if institutions start respecting their time more. But it’s going to require universities to think differently about money. For decades, the solution has been to find more revenue and throw it at problems. That’s no longer viable. Now, they’ll have to look at the cost side and find smarter, more efficient ways to operate.

    It’s going to lead to a very different kind of university system—one that’s more focused on cost-effectiveness, shorter programs, and labour market alignment. These changes could last five, maybe even ten years, but they’re coming, and they’re going to reshape the sector.

    TM: Alex, thanks for joining us this week. Join us next week, when Alex is back as host, and Alma Maldonado joins us again to give an update on the Mexican higher education system. See you then!

    *This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.

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