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One Thought to Start Your Day
One Thought To Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.
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Concordia’s Quiet Revolution
Okay, so Canadian higher education is pretty cautious and risk-averse, and so perhaps the bar for calling something a ‘revolution” is pretty low. But everyone needs to take a look at what has been going on at Concordia this year, because if what has been happening there were to spread widely,
Associate EU Membership and Labour Mobility
Yesterday, I sketched out the likelihood of Canada joining the Erasmus program; now I wanted to address the issue of labour mobility. As a couple of news outlets breathlessly reported during the whole EU thing last week, a new agreement might allow Canadians to “live and work visa-free” in Europe
Erasmus for Canada? Not so Fast.
Everyone seems very excited about the prospect of Canada becoming an associate member of the European Union (even though “associate member” is not an actual thing in any EU statute, but whatever), and in particular are talking about the value of greater student mobility since apparently Prime Minister Carney would
Focus Friday: Sep 18
Hi everyone, I’m Noah Arney, and I’ll be hosting Focus Fridays this year—a biweekly HESA webinar series bringing together the Canadian higher education community for timely, open conversations about the issues shaping the sector. This Friday, September 18, I’ll be joined by Sterling Crowe, Associate Dean of Student Wellness and
The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood
We tend to think of universities as places full of physical things: laboratories, libraries, property, above all, buildings. They’re more than that, of course. They’re communities of scholars with missions and values. Some people think they should be less, that education would be better off in the cloud, online, and
Defence R&D: The Long Game
Over the past year, we at HESA towers have been thinking about how post-secondary institutions fit into Canada’s national defence, security, and sovereignty priorities, and the implications for research and skills/training. We’ve also been looking at how other countries have structured their defence R&D ecosystems and sharing some of the
Bad Summer Essays
Back in the early days of this blog – lo, fifteen years ago now – I used to offer an annual award for “worst back-to-school article” in which I would excoriate whichever columnist had chosen to write something incredibly lazy, cliché-ridden and wrong. I eventually stopped giving out the award
The Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Crap H-Index Paper
Today I want to focus on a publication which came out from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute called “The equity excellence trade-off: A study of EDI in the Canada Research Chairs programs” which appeared on September 1, 2026. I have already commented on the document on social media, calling it “the worst
The Fifteen: September 11, 2026
Hi everyone. The Fifteen is back, bringing you news on the biggest developments in higher education around the world from the last two weeks. Let’s get right to it! And that’s it for now. See you back here in two weeks.
The Postliberal University
Hi, everyone. I’m Alex Usher, and this is the opening episode of season five of the World of Higher Education podcast. American higher education is going through some unprecedented times. Republican governments in the States and in Washington now treat universities and colleges not as partners, but as an enemy
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