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Category: Academia

Centralization and De-centralization in Campus Services

One of the constant tensions in University and College management is working out which services need to be delivered centrally and which can be decentralized and, if the latter, how they can be provided in a way which has at least some semblance of coherence. The deal is this: generally it’s cheaper to provide most services centrally.  Doesn’t really matter what kinds of services: administrative, research, teaching and learning, internationalization, etc.  Economies of scale exist, partially because you get fewer

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January 13, 2021 2 Comments

Freedom of Speech

You may remember that one of the Ford government’s first acts on taking office was to order institutions to develop Freedom of Speech policies based on University of Chicago principles, and ask the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario to research and evaluate how free speech is addressed by postsecondary institutions and produce reports thereon.  Their second annual report came out last month and is worth a read (it’s short) HEQCO’s reports focus on two things: events on campus which are cancelled for reasons

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January 5, 2021 No Comments

Disciplines vs. Domains

One of my current projects has me thinking a lot about the university of the year 2040.  And my conclusion right now is that universities, as institutions, may be up for as big a re-think as anything they’ve faced in the last hundred years.  Specifically, there is probably going to be a need to re-think the role of disciplines in organizing higher learning. Disciplines and institutions sit uneasily against one another.  The original universities might have had individuals who might

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November 23, 2020 6 Comments

U of T, Soft Landings, and the Nuclear Option

I know you’ve all been very busy, so you may not have kept up with the to and fro of the University of Toronto’s law school lately.  Let me fill you in. A little over a month ago, the Globe and Mail revealed (over a number of articles, most notably these two: here and here) that the University of Toronto law school had run into some trouble in filling the job of Director of its International Human Rights Law program.  Over the summer,

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October 20, 2020 5 Comments

How Many Faculties is Too Many?

Academic bureaucracy is weird.  Basically, about 150 years ago, it was decided that it was important to have two layers of administration interposed between an individual faculty member and a University President (and later, once the university expanded, a senior team with various Vice-Presidents).  One layer came to be called a “department” and one level came to be called a “faculty”.  These theoretically mapped on to the branches and limbs of the Tree of Knowledge (so to speak).  But they

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October 6, 2020 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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