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
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
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
A few weeks ago, Statistics Canada released a paper profiling graduates of community colleges who already held bachelor’s degrees. A significant number of these were graduates of foreign universities – immigrants who came to the country with a degree and then found they needed a Canadian credential. But there were also a substantial number – fully 8% of all college graduates – who already had a degree from a Canadian university. In the 1990s, when colleges first started pointing out this
A couple of years ago in a blog post I noted a tendency among western academics to assume that the Western view of the university was the only possible one, and specifically that universities which existed in illiberal or autocratic settings were not “real” universities. At the time, I said: There are other university traditions, not all of which require liberal democracy to flourish: Lord knows the continual ascent of Tsinghua, National University of Singapore and others in international rankings is
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