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Category: Academia

Perpetual Growth

Just a quick one today, as the combination of a laptop failure and a MLS final in Seattle made the blog I had wanted to write impossible to finish.  It’s about a short but interesting piece that UBC professor Charles Menzies wrote for the Ubyssey a few weeks ago concerning the growth imperative of modern universities.  In it, he poses the question of why universities think they must grow in order to succeed and while he frames it in environmental terms, the subtext

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November 11, 2019 1 Comment

Big News on Free Speech

Cast your mind back oh, about fifteen months, to the Dawn of a New Era on Ontario campuses.  One in which Speech Would Be Free.  The Ford Government was new and fresh and so was the ink on a proclamation requiring all Ontario institutions to adopt a policy on free speech, consistent with the University of Chicago Statement of Principles on Free Expression, by January 1, 2019. The government charged the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) with oversight of the

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November 6, 2019 2 Comments

Superstar Theory and Why Higher Education is Different

I spent part of this weekend reading Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life, by the late Princeton Economist Alan Krueger (whose work on higher education I highlighted here when he died by suicide earlier this year).  It’s not a bad little book, part inside-baseball on the music industry, part using examples from the music industry to explain certain features of the wider economy.  But one chapter in particular got me thinking

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November 4, 2019 1 Comment

The North American Higher Education Area

There was a fascinating little story last week about a contretemps at the American Association of Universities (AAU), where the executive committee made a controversial decision to expel McGill University and the University of Toronto, largely on the grounds of needing to spend more time focussed on “American issues”. I am sure this would have had an enormous effect on public opinion in Canada (wot, o my god, so nationalist, Trump/nativism gone mad, etc), if anyone in Canada had the

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October 18, 2019 1 Comment

Higher Education for Hep Cats

Over the years I have collected, for your amusement, a number of different descriptors and metaphors for a universities: “a group of departments united by a common steam plant” (Robert Hitchins), “the most loosely-coupled organization on earth outside of terrorist cells” (me), etc.  But maybe my favourite metaphor for universities is a musical one: a jazz band. Jazz is a very odd form of music in that it is improvisational yet collective.  The level of musical talent and concentration needed to create good

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October 16, 2019 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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