My personal contribution to the US/Canada trade war

If you’re active in academic circles, you might have seen my name in a big announcement today. (Okay, maybe it would have been a bigger announcement if Trump hadn’t announced renaming Lake Ontario. But the FT quotes me… which you can only read if you can get behind their paywall…)

This leads to my own announcement, one that’s big enough that it comes in three parts.

The government of Canada has recruited a set of senior professors to Canadian universities to build research labs, expanding the country’s commitment to academic research and to training the next generation of academics. Academics coming to Canada are receiving enormous support to recruit and train students, with grant support extending from 8 to 12 years.

My good news first. Starting in June 2027, I will be joining the McGill Max Bell School of Public Policy as the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair in the Digital Public Sphere. I’m part of a cohort of scholars moving their work to Canada – the government announced today that 64 scholars are joining 21 Canadian universities. I’ll be one of six professors moving their work to McGill, and we’re just the first class – there’s a second group that should be announced later this fall.

My team and I at McGill will work on interrogating platform power: using data to answer hard questions about social media, search engines and AI tools. We’re specifically advancing the idea of “unpermissioned research”, advancing technical methods that use scraping, sampling and data donation to understand what sorts of content platforms host and how they moderate it. This work is not just technical – the hope is to encourage Canada to adopt a set of policies that protect researchers (academic, journalistic and activist) whose work violates terms of service and platform preferences in the interests of public benefit.

Montreal has an amazing community of AI researchers and experimenters, and our lab hopes to bring some new questions to the table around models of generative AI that put the provenance of data and giving credit to human creators at the center of AI training and inference. I’ll be hiring Masters and Doctoral students in the next few months, as well as a post-doc, and will share those opportunities as I learn more about how McGill admits post-bac students.

Our team will work closely with Taylor Owen and Aengus Bridgman and their Media Ecosystem Observatory, a lab that’s set a very high bar for what scholars can learn about how a media ecosystem works. The tools I and my teams at UMass and MIT have worked on – MediaCloud, Tubestats, Tokstats – will be available to Taylor and Aengus’s team. I’m hoping we can combine some of the things we’re good at (random samples of huge platforms, studies of how media are used differently in different parts of the world) with what they’re the best in the world at: understanding the social and political conversation in Canada.

The sad bit

Spring 2027 will be my last semester at UMass, a place I have loved working at and am very sad to be leaving.I want to be as clear as possible: I was not looking for jobs beyond UMass until I was invited to apply for this position by an old friend. I’ve had a marvelous 5.5 years thus far, and was planning on spending the rest of my career there. The main obstacle I had to work through in considering a position at McGill was the fact that I’d have to leave a university I’m very proud to be part of.

As my regular readers know, I am an accidental academic. I ended up at Harvard when my careers in software development and international development ended, and one year as visiting fellow turned into eight years, launching Global Voices and Media Cloud from within the Berkman Klein Center. I was invited to the MIT Media Lab to take over the Center for Civic Media, and spent nine years building a community and learning to help graduate students with their work. I have lots of pride in what I did within both universities, yet I never felt entirely comfortable working within such elite institutions. I have high hopes that McGill – which is both an elite institution and an affordable public university – may balance the priorities I care about.

My mentor at UMass, Jane Fountain, once told me that the UMass system was the most powerful tool for economic advancement in the state. The students I’ve taught at UMass have included countless students who’ve worked their way up through community colleges into the state’s “flagship” institution, military veterans discovering their post-service careers, people who grew up unhoused or in dangerous situations, finding safety and community at UMass. Some of my favorite students have been refugees fleeing political persecution, seeking to understand their situation in their home countries and parallel situations around the world. I could not be prouder of the work I’ve done at UMass and the people I’ve had the privilege of working with.

In addition to being lovely people, the faculty and students I’ve worked with at UMass are some of the brightest I’ve worked with in 20+ years of teaching. Most of my students at MIT knew they were brilliant – many of my UMass students were just figuring that out for the first time. And the faculty at UMass do the best job of balancing being ambitious and creative scholars with being decent, kind and approachable people that I’ve ever encountered in US academia. I hope to be collaborating with my UMass friends for many years to come, whatever institutions we find ourselves at.

The complicated bit

When the opportunity to apply to McGill came up, I asked my wife Amy whether I should put my hat in the ring. We have a great circle of friends in western MA, where I have lived since 1989, she for the past decade. Our son is in an amazing public school, where he is thriving. My parents and my sister live an hour away. Our lives are pretty great: Is an opportunity, even a really great opportunity, worth the change to our happy, comfortable lives?

With unexpected intensity, Amy told me that, if there were ever a moment to look at leaving the US, this was probably it. There is, as she’s noted, a sense that the wheels may be coming off this iteration of the American experiment. However you feel about that prospect broadly, there’s a good case to be made for it as concerns US universities.

The Canadian government saw an opportunity to recruit academics at the precise moment when the US government is making life difficult for universities in two big ways. Cuts to NSF, NIH and other grantmaking agencies are making it hard to build research teams in the US. Most of the support for my work has come from generous private foundations. that funding, which has always been highly competitive, has become exponentially more so as federal support has evaporated.

Second, the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants have made coming to a US university a risky proposition for international students. At schools like UMass, international students are both an important part of our community and of our economic picture. As we lose students who cannot get visas to the US – or choose not to study in a country that appears actively hostile to them – our enrollment shrinks, and we’re left with another set of financial pressures.

The hostility to international students also creates a moral risk: can I feel good about inviting students to study with me, knowing that we take on controversial topics and methods, and that I cannot guarantee that their work won’t have consequences for their immigration status? I’ve always encouraged students to be politically active – is it safe for students to protest issues they care about given a focus by the administration on deporting pro-Palestine activists? I hate that these are questions I have to think about as a professor, but it would be irresponsible not to think about them.

The general attacks on American universities are even more acute in some of the areas where I work. Researchers of mis/disinfo and content moderation have been accused of being part of the “Censorship Industrial Complex”, a fiction in which scholars trying understand how foreign governments are working to influence the US public sphere are accused of censoring right wing voices. My work has been referenced – and badly mischaracterized – in House reports, but I’ve been lucky to be spared the harassment that some of my colleagues have experienced from both Congressional subpoenas and ideological trolls. Yet I am acutely aware that work holding platform power accountable is in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.

Against this backdrop, Canada is offering me and my lab sufficient funding to support a core team of students for 8 to 12 years. That’s a level at which I’ve never been able to even dream, never mind plan… and I’ve been lucky to have brave and generous foundation funders who’ve funded my work extensively. Investing in scholars over the course of a decade is something foundations are rarely able to do – it’s the sort of bet that governments are better positioned to make. Canada is investing $1.7b ($1.2b US) in recruiting senior researchers and sponsoring postdocs at the same time the Trump administration has announced terminating $7-8 billion in research grants.

As moving to Montreal became a real possibility, I’ve started thinking about benefits beyond academic opportunity. For more than a decade, I’ve planned on spending sabbatical time exploring other universities, hoping to spend time in walkable European cities, learning how academic life differs in places far from rural Massachusetts. As parenting has kept me closer to home this past decade, I’ve become increasingly interested in how places that are geographically close together can have very different destinies: why has Pittsburgh had a renaissance that’s skipped Buffalo, why does Binghamton struggle and Rochester thrive? Quebec is four hours away from my long-time home by car, and feels worlds away.

As I’ve started researching the question of how Massachusetts and Quebec differ, I’ve found some data that fascinates – and worries – me, hence the “complicated” part of this announcement.

92% of Canadians see their fellow citizens as morally good. Only 47% of Americans do. Despite sharing a massive border and a great deal of cultural commonality, Canadians and Americans represent the opposite polls in a survey of citizens from 25 countries. The researchers at Pew who conducted this study offer some reasons for why Americans are the only of 25 studied nations who believe their fellow citizens are morally bad people: we have an especially divisive political culture, as well as a strong moralistic stream. They don’t offer speculation on why Canadians are so likely to trust each other.

I’ve had a hard time being optimistic about the US the last several years. It’s not just about the chaos of the past 18 months – it’s a general sense that the problems facing our nation right now are too much for our existing institutions to address. (That was, in essence, the thesis of my 2021 book, Mistrust.) Canada seems to be navigating immigration, deindustrialization and public goods very differently than we are in the US, and I’m curious to see whether Canadians have figured something out that we might bring back to communities in the US.

I am acutely aware that I’m in an incredibly privileged position to consider these questions, taking a dream job in a wonderful city while trying to hold onto the community that’s supported me for decades in western MA. This summer – in addition to navigating my eye surgery – has been about trying to lighten my physical footprint, sorting through the crap (some of it very precious crap) that accumulates when you live in the same house for almost 30 years. The dream is to be able to feel at home in Montreal, in the Berkshires and anywhere else, with a minimum of physical stuff.

I’m bad at this, I know – I commuted to Cambridge MA for seventeen years and Amherst for six because I so love where I currently live. That’s not the right way to handle this new role: I want to build the sort of scholarly community we had at Center for Civic Media, and I know that will be easier to do if I’m on campus every day. That Montreal is fascinating and alluring is certainly a strong plus.

The next few years will be complicated transitional ones for my family and me. My son Drew has two more years of high school and Amy and I will be commuting back and forth during his senior year between Montreal and the Berkshires. After that: we’ll see. Like everyone in the US, we’re wondering what the next couple of years will bring and that, as well as what we discover about our new city, province and country.

So: excited for a new lab, sad about leaving UMass, with complicated and layered feelings about my relationship to the US. Grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with good friends on important topics, to build a new research group and to explore the next chapter of my life and work. Guilty about leaving the US at a moment when the future of our country seems so uncertain, but equally uncertain that there’s anything I can do from inside the US to improve things, and oddly hopeful that I might be able to do more from Canada. In other words, I’m happy, proud and grateful, but it’s complicated.

More to come in the future about the work we’re starting at McGill and opportunities to work with the new lab.

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