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Author: Alex Usher

The Blight on the Ivy

A few weeks ago, when I was in New Orleans, I was browsing through the higher education section at Beckham’s, a large, uber-musty used book store on Decatur just inside the Quarter, when I found A Blight on the Ivy by Robert and Katherine (Dr & Mrs, according to the inside flap) Gordon. Published in 1962, it is a book about a “crisis” on the modern campus. What kind of crisis, you ask? Well, check out the subtitle: “The flunkouts,

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November 6, 2024 No Comments

The Road Ahead for International Students

You could be forgiven if, after the last few months, you thought that Canadian post-secondary institutions should be turning their attention away from international students. But nothing could be further from the truth. The underlying dynamics of international student recruitment have not changed—institutions still need money and provincial governments are basically united in their determination to prevent them from getting it from domestic sources—only the tactics going forward have. Let’s start on the college side. Their business has mostly been

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November 5, 2024 2 Comments

Enshittification as a Strategy

Many of you seem amused by my use of the term “enshittification” (“word of the year” for 2023 by the American Dialect Society) to describe much of what is going on in Canadian higher education a the moment. I suspect just as many of you dislike my use of the term (hi, Mom!), but I’m going to keep using it anyway because it so concisely expresses today’s state of affairs. Technically, I am using the term incorrectly. When Cory Doctorow first

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November 4, 2024 7 Comments

Utopian Universities: A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960 with Dr. Miles Taylor

There’s something distinctive about universities that were founded in the 1960s. Maybe it’s the brutalist architecture. Maybe it’s the wild, naive but hopeful sounding principles on which they were formed, but they seem very different. And even though decades later, their distinctiveness may have been worn down by the winds of isomorphism, there’s still something that  lingers and distinguishes them from both their older and younger neighbors. The phenomenon is perhaps most pronounced in England, where these universities were at

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October 31, 2024 No Comments

Raison d’être

Yesterday I discussed and advocated for visioning exercises, particularly if your institution is about to undergo some radical changes. It is a lot easier to navigate a storm if you know where you’re going in the first place. Everyone in a university needs to be able to answer the question Why does this institution exist? What’s your raison d’être? To some of you, I expect that this question sounds stupid. Obviously, the answer is some kind of mix of “teaching,

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October 30, 2024 3 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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