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Category: Academia

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

Short Courses and Continuing Education

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

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May 11, 2021 1 Comment

Taking Your Marbles and Going Home

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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April 26, 2021 1 Comment

Laurentian Blues (1)

Laurentian University will run out of cash at the end of February.  That’s the most important – but far from only – take-away of the Monitor’s Report filed Monday in an Ontario court as Laurentian University filed for creditor protection. People are throwing around words like “unprecedented” to describe what is happening at Laurentian.  I’m always careful about that because before WWII a lot of wild things happened in Canadian universities (the Honorary Bursar making off with the entire University

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February 3, 2021 18 Comments

Failing to Look Outward

A few years ago, whilst working in an Eastern European country which shall remain nameless, I went to visit the school’s premier school of agriculture to ask them some questions about how their graduates were faring in the labour market.  “Well,” they told me, “we take this very seriously.  We do a lot of surveys of graduates and employers.” “Really,” I said.  “And what do these surveys tell you?” “They were very disappointing,” came the reply.  “It turns out that

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February 1, 2021 3 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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