The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Author: Alex Usher

A Reading List

It’s the next-to-last blog of the academic year and that means it’s time for a quick review of books to read over the summer.  It’s a bit shorter than usual because I’ve been writing a fair bit about books these last few months, but we’ll give it a whirl. One book all higher education afficionados should read is The Low-Density University byEdward Maloney and Joshua Kim.  Not because it is particularly good or relevant, but because it perfectly captures the Spring of 2020 and

Read More »
June 16, 2021 No Comments

Missions and Moonshots

There is a crowd of policy entrepreneurs in Canada – mostly but not entirely Liberal, mostly but not entirely based in Ottawa – who have really cottoned on to the whole notion of innovation.  Like many of us who have despaired over successive governments’ lack of cluefulness on this issue, they are dissatisfied with the status quo.  Unfortunately, these people are currently marching with wholly unjustified confidence towards policies that are largely buzzword-driven. It’s not just this ludicrous notion of

Read More »
June 15, 2021 1 Comment

Truth and Reconciliation Updates

After writing about Ryerson the other day it occurred to me that I should take a look at what institutions have been committing to do with respect to the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action. When Justice Murray Sinclair issued his 2015 report on Residential Schools and issued his calls to action, a few of these calls related to post-secondary education.  A couple were simply calls for federal funding, but four very specific ones were included with respect to post-secondary

Read More »
June 14, 2021 1 Comment

Faculties of Agriculture

Agriculture faculties often sit oddly within the modern university.  I mean this literally in the sense that they are usually off at one end of campus or in some cases several tens of kilometres away from it.  Despite strong roots (heh) in the biological sciences, they get treated as separate entities for reasons that aren’t really evident from a scientific point of view.  The rough analogy from the physical sciences  is computer science, which, like agriculture, has a pretty high

Read More »
June 10, 2021 1 Comment

Back to 2038

Judging by the feedback on yesterday’s blog, y’all are pretty interested in demography (One Thought followers are the best followers. How great is it that my most popular blogs are about demography?).   So, I thought I would follow up on the three biggest threads of questions and commentary which have flooded my inbox and blog comments over the last 24 hours. First: where did I get the data?  Well, that one’s easy.  Statistics Canada does projections every few years,

Read More »
June 9, 2021 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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...