First, everything is on fire; as bad as things have been looking, and continue to look, for English-language universities in Quebec (a long story I won’t bother with at the moment), the Trump administration’s war on academia has ramped up so dramatically in the US, and on so many fronts — from arresting and deporting students for participating in protests or writing opinion pieces in campus papers, to canceling long-since-awarded individual research grants across STEM, humanities, and social science disciplines, to freezing bullions of dollars in federal grants to universities, to imposing a bowdlerized narrative of US history, to insisting on political appointees to judge what can be taught and by whom — that it has virtually drowned out the still-ongoing crisis in academic employment across North America. (Not that things look great in the UK, either, even from here.) It is a bad time to be in the business of teaching or research, no matter the field.

On that note, I’ve written something for Slate on the red herring of “STEM vs Humanities” — or on the ways it is and isn’t a red herring to think of these as opposed, and on how we might think about the meaning of their opposition now that both are so obviously subject to the same political cynicism, and (though this should not be surprising) the same fascist tactics. What began as poorly focused, pseudo-liberal rants about “postmodern” or “neo-Marxist” or “CRT” or “activism” in humanities has flowed, uninterrupted, into state decrees against “wokeness” or “cultural Marxism” or “DEI” in the sciences, too, threatening everything up to and including such notably radical left-wing causes as history museums and cancer research. For some of us it was obvious, from the indiscriminate and unsubstantiated nature of culture war claims, that something like this was possible, if not likely. Only the speed and the degree of violence are remarkable.

Second, I’m changing jobs. As incongruous a time as this is for good news, much less good news about one’s academic career, I am very excited indeed to be joining the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, starting this July. It’s been an honour to teach at Concordia University for seventeen years, and I will especially miss the students as well as the distinct mission that public universities have — even if their institutional leadership often appears to be struggling against it, and in Concordia’s case in spite of the provincial government’s best and continuing efforts to snuff it out. I’ll be commuting back and forth on a regular basis for the foreseeable future, so I’m only half-leaving Montreal; Philadelphia, for its part, makes a very good impression.