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Author: Alex Usher

Kota Factory > The Chair

Some – most? – of you probably watched The Chair on Netflix last term (for the uninitiated, it’s Sandra Oh playing Ji-Yoon Kim as she runs an English Department at what appears to be a bottom-of-the-top-tier liberal Arts College in the US Northeast).  Reaction to the show was justifiably mixed: it got a few important things right about academia, but it did so in an irritatingly unrepresentative setting – my kingdom for a campus drama not set at a private

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January 13, 2022 No Comments

The Canadian Professoriate: The Long View

Recently, I noticed that Statistics Canada has data on the Canadian professoriate dating back to 1970-71.  I don’t know if this is a recent addition to the free data scheme or if it’s been there all along and I have never noticed it, but it’s certainly worth a peek. Figure 1 is the simple picture, just total numbers.  It’s a pretty simple story: long-term, Canadian higher education has expanded by about 460 full-time academics per year every year since 1970. 

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January 12, 2022 1 Comment

Faculty Salary Data, 2020-21

We haven’t looked at faculty salaries in awhile, so let’s do that. Getting a handle on recent faculty salary data is easy: it’s the one thing that Statscan does both rapidly and well in the higher education field.  It may take them 30 months to produce student enrolment data, and they collect no data at all about college tuition or non-academic staff, but by gum they can process university salary data in under 12 months! (Yes, this does tell you

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January 11, 2022 1 Comment

Victory

Morning everyone.  Ready for another term of being trampled by a goddamn virus?  Me neither.  Still.  Onwards. Towards the middle of December, the Prime Minster’s Office released mandate letters for all cabinet ministers.  Yes, a mere three months after voting day, a meager 18 weeks after Parliament was dissolved for an incredibly urgent election, “the most consequential election of our lives”, the Prime Minster finally figured out what it was that he wanted his cabinet to do.   Better late than

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January 10, 2022 1 Comment

Goodbye 2021 Hello, 2022

Ok, a few last words before we all take off for Christmas.  This blog is going on break and will return on January 10th.  This was a hard year.  In some ways harder than 2020 because Jumping Jesus on a Pogo Stick this pandemic just doesn’t end, and even if vaccines have attenuated its impact quite a bit, certain governments in particular – Alberta and Ontario, I am looking at you – spent a large part of the year actively making things

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December 9, 2021 No Comments

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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