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Tag: Institutional Isomorphism

No Competition

Lately, I’ve been wondering whether we have reached some kind of dead-end in the history of universities.  Specifically, whether because of a combination of increasing regulatory control, professional conformity and institutional mission creep, we have got to a point where it has actually become impossible to imagine alternatives to the modern research university as a way of organizing post-18 education. If you look back at the history of universities, you see periodic reinventions of the form.  There was the original

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December 8, 2021 2 Comments

Post-Soviet Higher Education

As loyal readers know, I am a big believer that Soviet Higher Education teaches some real eternal truths about our sector (see here and here in particular).  This week I’ve been reading a book of essays called 25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries: Reform and Continuity edited by Jeroen Huisman, Anna Smolentseva and Isak Froumin.  And although structurally it’s a bit repetitive (as any book containing 15 identically-structured essays is likely to be), it’s very much worth a read

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June 15, 2018 No Comments

Competitiveness, Homogeneity, and Historical Contingency

In his excellent book about the American higher education system A Perfect Mess, David Labaree makes the following point about how the American university system came to be so hyper-competitive. Its origins were remarkably humble: a loose assortment of parochial nineteenth-century liberal arts colleges, which emerged in the pursuit of sectarian expansion and civic boosterism more than scholarly distinction. These colleges had no academic credibility, no reliable source of students, and no steady funding. Yet these weaknesses of the American

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November 16, 2017 2 Comments

A More Productive Debate on “Differentiation”

One of the big topics over the past three years in Canada – and particularly in Ontario – has been that of “differentiation”.  The idea of differentiation as a boon to the university system essentially traces back to Adam Smith.  Just as in Smith’s hypothetical pin factory production can be increased multi-fold, by having different workers work on different aspects of pin-making, so too can a university system  be made more productive by having institutions concentrate on different aspects of

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February 26, 2014 6 Comments

Differentiating University Missions (Part Five)

Our conference, Stepford Universities? Differentiation of Mission in the New Higher Education Landscape, wrapped up yesterday, and there were a lot of very interesting ideas floating around. To end the week, I’ll just touch on a couple of them. Clearly, part of the problem we have in discussing a touchy issue like this is one of vocabulary. As panelist Ellen Hazelkorn of the Dublin Institute of Technology says, we haven’t got the language to talk about this issue in a

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September 30, 2011 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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