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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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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
The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada, 2026
Morning all. The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada 2026 is out today, and you can download it here. Sincere thanks to our partners at Studiosity, Riipen, Pearson, Duolingo, Intellectual Property Ontario and Westcliff University for helping to produce this year’s version and keep it free for everyone to use.
Back to School 2026
Welcome back everyone. It’s the Tuesday after Labour Day, and that means it’s time to start Blog Year 16 (gulp) with a look ahead over the next ten months or so. I’m looking at three very big themes. Let’s start with the one big piece of news over the summer
Canada AI Strategy and Higher Education
Morning all. Today is a special blog to cover an important Ottawa policy development. Back in June, the Government of Canada released its National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, with the somewhat awkward subhead “AI for All”. Due to a packed blog schedule, I didn’t have time to really get to it.
The Fifteen: June 12, 2026
Morning, all. The higher education news never stops. In addition to the usual stories of American universities being subjected to increasingly absurd right-wing assaults, there’s some interesting stuff happening in places that don’t often make the Fifteen, including the Czech Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iceland, and Panama.
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