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Category: Academia

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

What do Strategic Plans Actually Say?

Today’s post is co-authored by Alex Usher and Michael Savage Yesterday’s blog focused on the structure of strategic plans, asking whether they are built from the mission statement backwards or from upwards from a checklist of ideas people had without looking at the overall picture?  (answer: for the most part they are built from checklists and hence are not particularly strategic, though they as planning documents they may work perfectly fine).  Today we’re going to dig into the substance of

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September 29, 2020 5 Comments

Fall 2020 International Round-Up: Netherlands

Here’s a headline you don’t see every day: “Dutch aim to Stop Academics Working at Weekends”.  I hope Times Higher Education won’t mind me filching the opening paragraph, which is something: Academics should not be forced to squeeze their research into weekends and holidays, according to the Dutch education minister, who admitted that pressure on some researchers had become intolerable and that professional competition had gone “too far”. Well, now.  What to make of this? Let’s start with a refresher on Dutch higher

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September 24, 2020 2 Comments

Student Unions as Early Warning Systems

One of the things that marks out Canadian student unions from their counterparts in (say) the UK is the relative lack of emphasis unions put on advocacy relating to academic quality.  For any student unions that want to change that, the next couple of weeks would be an unprecedented opportunity to do so. The remote semester has created a fundamental pickle for institutions, one which is baked very deeply into the fabric of Canadian academia.  Namely, while universities have the responsibility of attracting

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September 1, 2020 No Comments

Academic Freedom in a Pandemic

One of the things I am sure you have seen with respect to the transition to remote teaching for the fall is some kind of reassurance that institutions are doing all they can to ensure that the fall term will be the hunkiest-doriest term of all time. For instance, McGill says: that “students and their families can be assured we are planning for robust and high-quality teaching even if the modes of delivery will be modified for this term”.  Waterloo speaks

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May 26, 2020 7 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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