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Tag: Books

Summer Book Report

I read a few books over the summer. Below, a few quick summaries: University of Nike: How Corporate Cash Bought American Higher Education by Melville House. Every year, there’s a new book about how college sports corrupt American universities. They are all true. As a genre, however, they get old fast. This book does the usual, looking at the relationship between the University of Oregon and the sportswear company Nike. It’s not a bad book concerning the University of Oregon,

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August 30, 2019 No Comments

Higher Education in Federal Countries

Maybe the most childish thing about Canadian higher education policy debates is the recurring insistence on the part of some English Canadians that higher education needs to be more of a federal responsibility (i.e. the central government needs to take a more active role).  If you exclude the motivated reasoning of Ottawa-based higher ed groups who want more things to happen in Ottawa so that they themselves can have more interesting things to do, this position is mostly born of

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March 8, 2019 1 Comment

What is Stefan Collini For?

If you follow UK higher education at all you’ve almost certainly come across the writing of Stefan Collini, most likely in the Guardian or the London Review of Books.  He’s not a higher education specialist (as he frequently disclaims in his work); rather, he is a professor of English Literature and Intellectual History at Cambridge who happens to have developed a rather impressive sideline in writing wry, droll, heartfelt critiques of UK higher education policy. I find him as annoying as all hell.  My

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February 15, 2019 2 Comments

A New U

When it comes to education and the labour market, universities (well, the bits outside the professional schools, anyway) like to say they are in the business of preparing students not for their first job but for their fifth, or (more grandiosely), “preparing them for life”.  There are some powerful reasons for and assumptions behind that statement, and on the whole this view has served universities and their graduates well over the past few centuries.  But in a world where experience

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January 11, 2019 No Comments

Higher Ed Books of 2018

You all know the drill.  I read a bunch of higher ed books every year (not all of them published this year) and then just before XMAS I give you my picks.  Serious higher ed nerds seem to enjoy it, but some of you will want to skip this.  Either way, here we go: Fiction – I mostly read campus novels to satisfy my masochistic streak, because as a genre they are pretty awful (Lucky Jim made me want to tear my

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December 13, 2018 1 Comment

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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