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View of McGill University campus.
HARD NUMBERS: Anglophone universities clobbered, Mountie turncoat sentenced, Tech workers poached, Immigration minister “pissed,” Oldest American celebrated
14: Former RCMP intel boss Cameron Jay Ortis has been sentenced to 14 years for leaking police secrets to archvillains who were being investigated for money laundering, terrorist financing, and organized crime. Since he’s already been jailed for about 7 years, he will only serve half of the sentence — but the Crown is going to appeal, saying the punishment is too lenient.
6,200: The Great Canadian Tech Poach continues. The Canadian consulate in San Francisco said in the first week of February alone it processed 6,200 special work permits for highly skilled workers who had failed to get the coveted US H1-B visa, a favorite among foreign tech whizzes.
1,000: Canadian Immigration Minister Marc Miller is “pissed off,” he says. Why? Because despite Ottawa’s entreaties, about 1,000 people in the Gaza Strip with relatives in Canada have been prevented from leaving the besieged territory to join them. Ottawa reportedly sent the requests to Israel and Egypt, which oversee the Rafah border crossing, the only way out of the strip. (See our recent map of Gaza border crossings here.)
116: How old would you guess the oldest known person in the United States is? 105? 110? Keep going. This week, Edith Ceccarelli of Willits, a small town in Northern California, celebrated her 116th trip around the sun. She is the second-oldest person in the world. When Edith was born, women could not vote in the US, Russia was still run by a czar, and the average life expectancy for an American woman was a mere 48 years. Happy birthday Edith!FILE PHOTO: People walk on the grounds of the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada September 9, 2020. Picture taken September 9, 2020.
Ottawa caps visas for foreign students
The Trudeau government is shutting the door to hundreds of thousands of foreign students. This week, Ottawa moved to reduce the number of undergraduate international student visas for 2025 to just 360,000, a 35% cut, in an effort to tackle the housing crisis and rein in diploma mills that are profiting off the system.
The reduction is expected to pose serious enrollment problems for some institutions. The schools have already warned that the government’s visa cuts could lead to tuition increases, job losses, and even closures. But Immigration Minister Marc Miller said he had no choice: "We've got two years to actually get the ship in order. It's a bit of a mess, and it's time to rein it in."
International students fall in a jurisdictional gap in Canada between the provinces, which fund and regulate universities and colleges, and the federal government, which issues the visas. As provincial funding has failed to keep pace with post-secondary costs, universities and colleges have kept their bottom lines intact by increasing the enrollment of foreign students, mostly from India and China.
“I’m not the minister of post-secondary education underfunding,” Miller said. “I’m the minister of immigration and clearly in the last decade or so post-secondary institutions in Canada have been underfunded.”
While Miller pointed to systemic issues, the primary impetus seems to be the housing crisis, which has led to a shift in public opinion against immigration. And against Justin Trudeau. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has successfully attacked the prime minister about the housing shortage.
Unlike in the United States, where immigration is at the heart of the national political debate, a cross-partisan consensus around the value of immigration is normal in Canada. So the Liberals moving to rein in student visas lies in stark contrast to a longstanding welcoming approach to immigration.
There may be more to come. Radio-Canada, the French language branch of CBC, reported Thursday that Canada is poised to reimpose a visa requirement on Mexico after more than 25,000 people from that country sought asylum in Canada last year.
ChatGPT on campus: How are universities handling generative AI?
In this episode of GZERO AI, Taylor Owen, professor at the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University and director of its Centre for Media, Technology & Democracy, discusses how the emergence of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools have thrown a new dynamic into his teaching practice, and shares his insights into how colleges have attempted to handle the new phenomenon.
What does education look like in a world with generative AI?
The bottom line here is that we, students, universities, faculty, are simply in unchartered waters. I start teaching my digital policy class for the first time since the emergence of generative AI. I'm really unsure about how I should be handling this, but here are a few observations.
First, universities are all over the place on what to do. Policies range from outright bans, to updated citation requirements, to broad and largely unhelpful directives, to simply no policies at all. It's fair to say that a consensus has yet to emerge.
The second challenge is that AI detection software, like the plagiarism software we've used before it, are massively problematic. While there are some tools out there, they all suffer from several, in my view, disqualifying flaws. These tools have a tendency to generate false-positives, and this really matters when we're talking about academic integrity and ultimately plagiarism. What's more, research shows us that the use of these tools leads to an arms race between faculty trying to catch students and students trying to deceive. The other problem though, ironically, is that these tools may be infringing on students' copyright. When student essays are uploaded into these detection software, their writing is then stored and used for future detection. We've seen this same story with earlier generation plagiarism tools, and I personally want nothing to do with it.
Third, I think banning is not only impossible, but pedagogically irresponsible. The reality is that students, like all of us, have access to these tools and are going to use them. So, we need to move away from this idea that students are the problem and start focusing on how educators can improve their teaching instead.
However, I do worry that a key cognitive skillset that we develop at universities of reading and processing information and new ideas and developing ones on top of them is being lost. We need to ensure that our teaching preserves this.
Ultimately, this is going to be about developing new norms in old institutions, and we know that that is hard. We need new norms around trust in academic work, new methods of evaluating our own work and that of our students, teaching new skill sets and abandoning some old ones, and we need new norms for referencing and for acknowledging work. And yes, this means new norms around plagiarism. Plagiarism has been in the news a lot lately, but the status quo in an age of generative AI is simply untenable.
Perhaps I'm a Luddite on this, but I cannot let go of the idea entrenched in me that regardless of how a tool was used for research and developing ideas, that final scholarly products should ultimately be written by people. So, this term, I'm going to try a bunch of things and I'm going to see what works. I'll let you know what I learned. I'm Taylor Owen and thanks for watching.
- Artificial intelligence and the importance of civics ›
- Education’s digital revolution: why UN Secretary-General António Guterres says it's needed ›
- How will education change in the era of A.I.? ›
- AI's impact on jobs could lead to global unrest, warns AI expert Marietje Schaake ›
- AI agents are here, but is society ready for them? ›
- AI and the future of work: Experts Azeem Azhar and Adam Grant weigh in - GZERO Media ›
University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill testifies before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in Washington.
A bad case of “academentia” that needs to be cured
This week Claudine Gay, Sally Kornbluth, and M. Elizabeth Magill, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania, were brought before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce to speak about the dangerous rise of antisemitism on campus, especially since the Oct. 7 attacks.
The Israel-Hamas war has triggered an alarming rise in antisemitic incidents on and off campus and also a rise in Islamophobic incidents. It was so bad that back on Nov. 14, President Joe Biden released an action plan to combat antisemitic and Islamophobic events on US campuses.
So the university presidents were steeped in this issue and knew tensions had been running high. They came to Washington prepared – well, prepared for something, at least.
Sadly, expectations for these kinds of hearings are low. Politics in Washington today is more like eye surgery done with a pickax, so no one predicted a nuanced, academic discussion with three illustrious leaders. Still, what happened under the big marble-top circus of politics was a genuine surprise.
Amid the usual grandstanding, ax-grinding, partisan preening, camera mugging, sound-bite fishing — and there was a lot of that on culture war issues like “wokeism” – something noteworthy happened.
At five hours and 23 minutes into the hearing — you can watch it here – New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, who graduated from Harvard in 2006, asked a basic question of the three presidents.
Here is part of the transcript, with Stefanik questioning the president of Penn, Dr. Magill.
Stefanik: … Does calling for the genocide of Jews constitute bullying or harassment?
Magill: If it is directed or severe and pervasive, it is harassment.
Stefanik: So, the answer is yes?
Magill: It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman.
Stefanik explodes in incredulity: This is the easiest question to answer yes, Ms. Magill.
Magill (smiles, oddly): If the speech becomes conduct. It can be harassment, yes.
Stefanik: Conduct meaning … committing the act of genocide? The speech is not harassment?
Stefanik gave Magill one more shot at the answer and got nowhere before asking Dr. Gay, president of Harvard, the same question.
Stefanik: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?
Gay: It can be, depending on the context.
You get the idea.
Apparently, on campuses, calling for genocide is bullying only in certain contexts (when is it not?) and only when it turns into action.
Remember, Stefanik was not asking here if the presidents would shut down such speeches on campus. Or take action. She asked a basic, theoretical question of whether calling for the genocide of Jews constituted bullying and harassment. Not a single president answered yes.
This was academentia at its worst. The term, of course, is not medical; it describes hyper-intelligent academics who appear to have lost touch with reality. So caught up in nuance and qualifiers that they can’t answer a simple question.
Imagine for a moment, someone asking, “Is calling for the genocide of all Muslims an act of bullying or harassment? Or the killing of all women? Or the killing of all African Americans, or LGBTQ people?"
Even if US academics uphold the First Amendment, which, in the US, protects hate speech — that was not the question. The question was simply whether calling for the genocide of a specific group hit the threshold of bullying on campus.
How hard is that? Harder than we thought.
Free speech in the US versus Canada is handled very differently. In Canada, there are reasonable limits to speech, and the Criminal Code section 319 is clear that hate speech and antisemitic speech are indictable offenses and are liable for imprisonment.
Context matters as well. Hate crimes against the Jewish, African-American, Muslim, and LGBTQ communities are all up, according to recent stats. The latest FBI hate crimes data shows a 25% rise in antisemitic hate crimes between 2021 and 2022 — which is more than half of all reported hate crimes — against a population that comprises less than 2.4% of the US population. Crimes against the LGBTQ, Black, and Muslim Americans are also overrepresented, but FBI Director Christopher Wray said this week that antisemitism is reaching “historic levels.”
The same is true in Canada, where most hate crimes still target the Jewish population, but the Muslim and Black populations are also targeted.
While the Israel-Hamas war is deeply polarizing, and confusing, there are not two sides to hate. University presidents should not have to duck behind talking points and prepared statements to answer a basic question about human decency. And university students should not have to learn in hate-filled environments. We need to trust our places of education now more than ever, not less.
Higher education should not mean lower common sense.