The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Academia

Working Hours

I was intrigued to read this story in the Times Higher Education about Dutch academics complaining about having to work “structural unpaid overtime” of 12-15 hours per week, which this report says is 36% above their regular paid hours.  One can infer that Dutch academics’ contracts actually stipulate they are to work a 35-hour week, which is quite a foreign concept in North America, where many “professional” jobs usually have no hours attached to them, our theory effectively being that if you are in one of

Read More »
January 29, 2020 1 Comment

Toxic Colleagues and Academic Freedom

You may remember in the fall of 2018, there was a bit of a brouhaha around a case at Thompson Rivers University concerning a professor named Derek Pyne.  The upshot of the story is that Pyne, a professor of economics, published an article in 2017 (see here) which attracted wide attention, including from The Economist.  Dr. Pyne’s article suggested that the majority of researchers at a small, unnamed Business School – quite transparently the one at TRU where he was employed – published in

Read More »
December 11, 2019 3 Comments

December 6th

It’s been thirty years.  Read Francine Pelletier’s essay for CBC.  Or Loreen Pindera’s (CW: contains links to CBC footage from the night of the attack).  Read  Pascale Navarro or Catherine Handfield in La Presse, or Mary-Margaret Jones’  from five years ago in the Ottawa Citizen.  They don’t say everything that could be or needs to be said, but they say it better than I could. There has been change, sure.  Within the academy, we give scholarships to women in STEM, and to some degree we do better at promoting women into senior

Read More »
December 6, 2019 No Comments

Time Horizons for Strategic Plans

One of the oddest conventions in strategic planning – in higher education, anyway – is that Strategic Plans should last for five years.  I know of no reason why five years is considered a standard length of measurement other than that when Stalin decided to resume planning in 1928 after the “pause” of the New Economic Policy and the defeat of his left-wing opponents Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, he decided to do so in five-year increments.  After that, pretty much

Read More »
November 26, 2019 2 Comments

Strategic Planning for Ambiguous Organizations

I have been doing a fair bit of strategic planning work recently and one mantra that people like repeating when it comes this kind of exercise is “we’re not like a business, so we can’t plan like a business”.  I get why people say this, but they’re wrong.  Or rather, they’re right, but not for the reasons they think. When people say that “universities aren’t businesses”, mostly what they are thinking is that universities aren’t interested in profit, per se.  But

Read More »
November 25, 2019 2 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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...