The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Academia

Coronavirus (12) – A National Effort in Online Education

Today, I want to issue a challenge to all Canadian universities.  I think a lot of universities are going to be in significant trouble come September.  I know everyone is working hard to avoid this outcome but fixing what needs to be fixed for September is simply too big a job for individual institutions.  And so, I am going to argue that the only way forward is for institutions is to do something which does not come naturally to them,

Read More »
April 7, 2020 12 Comments

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

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...