The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Academia

Inside Italian Higher Education: Excellence, Affordability and Change

This podcast basically comes in three flavours. In one, we interview authors of new and interesting books. In the second, we talk about current events in one country or another. And in the third, we talk about specific countries’ higher education systems and what makes them interesting and/or distinctive. In the early days of the podcast, we used to do a lot more of number three, but we haven’t lately because, well, we managed to cover most of the world

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October 22, 2026 No Comments

Lords of Serendipity

As you might imagine, I am pretty fond of campus novels. A frequent weakness, however, is that the idealize the idea of a campus, or at least the of a particular type of campus, or at least of a particular types of program (English professors are hugely over-represented in campus novels and indeed among campus novel-ists). What you don’t often see is a campus novel that actually exhibits genuine skepticism about the enterprise itself. That’s not the case with Randy Boyagoda’s new

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October 1, 2026 No Comments

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 liberated from mere place. But for most of their history, universities have been undeniably place-based, material to the max. Today, my guest is William Whyte. He’s a professor of social

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September 17, 2026 No Comments

Universities, Colonialism, and Indigenous Knowledge in Australia

Dhoombak Goobgoowana can be translated as “truth-telling” in the Woi Wurrung language of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people from the unceded area now known as Melbourne, Australia. It’s also the name of the recently published two-volume work on Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne. The books are an extraordinary read, not at all your usual institutional history. Made up of dozens of essays by different authors, it’s not so much a corporate history as it is a meditation on

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May 7, 2026 No Comments

The Cost Implications of AI in Postsecondary Education

I have been noodling for a while on the question of how the use of Artificial Intelligence is likely to change the cost structure of institutions, so I thought it was worth a blog. Particularly since most of the theories I hear about in this area are almost certainly wrong. The one thing I think we can confidently rule out about AI and teaching is that AI will “replace professors” (or in more extreme versions, “replace universities”). This is a

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May 21, 2025 1 Comment
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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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