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Category: Academia

Globe Data Wrongness

On Saturday, the Globe and Mail ran a major story about the gender gap in pay at Ontario universities by Chen Wang and Robyn Doolittle.  On the whole, I thought the piece was accurate concerning the politics of equity inside the academy.  But one of the conclusions was that there is “steadily growing” gender wage gap at universities and this is codswallop, born of some seriously suspect data analysis.  Consider the blog my way of correcting the record. Wang and Doolittle’s data

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June 7, 2021 1 Comment

What You Have to Believe to Believe the Cromwell Report

You will likely recall the Azarova affair at the University of Toronto, which I first wrote about back here. It has now risen to international prominence because of Masha Gessen’s piece in the New Yorker, the Canadian Association of University Teacher’s (CAUT) censure motion and an increasingly successful boycott U of T campaign.  To summarize: early last August U of T’s law faculty, while hiring a new Executive Director for its International Human Rights Program, began employment negotiations with Dr. Valentina Azarova. She is a)

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May 25, 2021 1 Comment

Customers

On the off chance you’re wandering through the halls of academia (non-COVID halls, anyway) and feel like picking a fight with another wanderer, the best advice I can give you is to use these three words: “students” “are” “customers”. See?  Half of you probably want to fight me right now.  But what I want to argue today is that while there are circumstances where that three-word statement is untrue, for the most part it is not untrue in the way

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May 18, 2021 3 Comments

Focus

On Friday, Newfoundland’s Premier Andrew Furey ruffled some feathers at Memorial (now officially “the Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador”, so no more calling it MUN, please).   In trying to explain what he intended to do with respect to the “Big Reset’s” recommendation of a 30% cut in grants without actually saying anything of substance, he stated: Memorial University has to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up…It has amazing potential, and it too is at a crossroads, of

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May 17, 2021 1 Comment

Problems in Writing the History of Academia

All my historian readers seemed to enjoy last Thursday’s piece about writing campus histories, so I thought I would do a quick follow-up on things that drive me spare about the state of the art in writing about academia.  To my mind, there is a single serious problem, and it is this: institutional histories are everywhere, but they are almost all rooted in local and national histories whereas academia is global.  As a result, most institutional histories are limited when it comes to

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May 13, 2021 2 Comments

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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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