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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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Nobody is Coming to Save Us, But…

Alex Usher March 17, 2025 5 Comments

You may have heard me say once or twice that “nobody is coming to save us.” I’ve been told that this has become something of a catchphrase in Canadian universities over the past year, so much so that I kind of wish we’d done merch with that slogan. The phrase

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (March 16, 2025)

Sandrine Desforges March 16, 2025 No Comments

Spotlight Wow. It’s already been a week since AI-CADEMY, and I’m still hung up on all the vibrant discussions that happened in Calgary, the insights shared by all, and the palpable eagerness to learn and collaborate. If you haven’t already, make sure to read Alex’s Wednesday blog for a quick

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Higher Education’s AI Future

Alex Usher March 12, 2025 3 Comments

You may have noticed—via the odd banner ad on this blog over the past six months—that HESA held a fantastic event in Calgary last week on the use of Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education. We had a great time. There were 25 sessions, roughly 100 presenters and 400 delegates from

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Time for CARPA?

Alex Usher March 11, 2025 2 Comments

Cast your mind back, if you will, to the magical days of 2021-22 when Canada still cared about things like innovation and a huge debate raged about how to do it properly, so that for once Canada might not be dead last in the OECD for things like productivity growth. 

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How UK Universities are Different

Alex Usher March 9, 2025 1 Comment

I spent a couple of days in late February in the UK at a meeting of the Higher Education Strategic Planning Association (HESPA). I found it interesting, not just because of the sessions themselves but because I actually got to understand something pretty important about how UK universities work. And

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The Fifteen: March 7, 2025

Alex Usher March 7, 2025 No Comments

Welcome back to another issue of The Fifteen. Read stories from expanding higher education markets like Egypt, India, and Nigeria, as well as from ones facing some different challenges, such as Lithuania, Korea and Italy, plus: important news out of the increasingly beleaguered American higher education sector. Happy reading. 1.

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Why Boycott? Maya Wind on the Case Against Israeli Universities

Alex Usher March 6, 2025 1 Comment

Over the past few years, calls for the boycott of Israeli universities have grown louder. This discourse generally entwines two different sets of arguments. The first is an argument about the effectiveness or validity of academic boycotts.  The second, because it’s Israel, is about whether Israeli universities are being unfairly

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Liberal Leadership Platforms

Alex Usher March 4, 2025 1 Comment

As you may have noticed, there’s a Liberal leadership vote on, with results to be announced this weekend. The conceit of today’s blog is that anyone might want to vote for a leader based on actual policy platforms rather than “electability,” so buckle up and see what it is that

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Nova Scotia’s Bill 12

Alex Usher March 4, 2025 No Comments

Just before I went on break last week, the government of Nova Scotia introduced a new bill into the legislature, Bill 12, An Act Respecting Advanced Education and Research. It quickly became apparent that this bill had not been discussed with any way shape or form with anyone in the postsecondary

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