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Author: Alex Usher

How Godawful were the Nineties?

No, this isn’t a Chuck Klosterman riff, and nor is it a pitch for Andrew Potter’s new blog on the end of the analog age (although I would strongly recommend reading both if that period is of any interest to you). It is, however, an attempt to close a little gap in my readers’ knowledge. I have been told by some of my millennial readers that my frequent references to the horror of the 1990s fly completely over the heads

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March 25, 2024 3 Comments

Higher Education in Russia

Higher education systems around the world usually share one thing in common: path-dependency. Once a country’s higher education system finds a groove, it tends to stay there barring any major cataclysm. There’s one exception, though, and it’s a pretty big one: Russia. Over the past century and a bit, Russian universities have gone through a series of convulsions. Starting out as a network of mainly German-style elite universities prior to the first world war, the system was Sovietized and massified

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March 21, 2024 No Comments

Are We Out of Ideas?

I was prepping yesterday for my podcast interview with Australian higher education expert Andrew Norton on the subject of the Australian Universities’ Accord (watch for it a week tomorrow) and while reading the report—which is a competent one, as these things go—it occurred to me: my God, this is boring. Used to be you could count on the Australians to come up with at least one or two cool ideas that would make you think” “really? We can do that?”

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March 20, 2024 No Comments

The History of the Future

I spent a good chunk of the weekend catching up on reading. On the fiction side, it was Haruki Murakami’s Dance, Dance, Dance, Roberto Bolano’s By Night in Chile, both of which I found good but not great. But I also read a book I picked up from a used book stall in Winnipeg: Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler (his wife Heidi was co-author, but this is deffo not evident from the cover and the marketing). If you’re under 50

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March 19, 2024 1 Comment

Towards a National Process Nerd Collective

Higher Education Strategy Associates does a lot of town-hall meetings at universities and colleges across the country. Part of the service. And there are a few things that we hear everywhere, no matter what. The first is that there are never enough resources (which, y’know…whatever…I’ve been to hundreds of universities in dozens of countries and I’ve never come across one which described itself as “overfunded”). And the second is that people are deeply frustrated at the speed at which universities

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March 18, 2024 6 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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