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Category: Academia

Two Short Notes About China

Hi all.  Short blogs for the next couple of days because HESA Towers is hopping and I’m really up against it for time. So just a couple of bite-size pieces today. Tsinghua in Trouble Once upon a time, if you wanted to point to how universities in China were driving economic growth, you’d point to Tsinghua University and specifically Tsinghua Holdings, which was a conglomerate made up of all the spin-off businesses which came out of “China’s MIT.”  Tsinghua Holdings is simply massive

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January 26, 2021 No Comments

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
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