Category: Academia

Ant Colonies and the Art of Managing Universities

One of the problems in being a university manager is this assumption that being in charge of all or part of an organization means you actually have some control over what goes on inside it.  But this is not, in fact, true, or at least not in the way that anyone outside academia would understand the word “control”.  This is because individual universities are basically ants.  Individual biological entities?  Certainly.  But more importantly, they are part of a larger colony

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Sagas and Plots

Late last year I wrote about Burton Clark and the notion of “organizational sagas”; that is, the stories people in organizations…

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Servant Universities

A couple of days ago I discussed the choice Canadian institutions had between pursuing an international student market and serving local communities.  I am sure this remark will have been denounced as a false choice by many – and to be fair, it isn’t a perfect binary – so I thought I would expand on that thought. The notion of institutions “serving” their communities is, in some ways, a comparatively recent one.  The medieval universities “served” their communities by attracting students and

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Private Capital in Higher Education (Part II)

To really understand universities, you need to understand their cost structure.  And to understand their cost structure, you need to understand that unlike businesses, they keep score not by profits but by prestige, and that prestige – to the extent it does not derive from events and successes in the long-ago past – is, to a considerable extent, driven by total expenditures.  Thus, to “succeed” institutions must spend as much as possible.  This leads to what is known as the

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Hi From NAFSA

I love the annual conference of the National Association of Foreign Student Advisors (NAFSA), which is being held this week in Washington DC.  NAFSA, for uninitiated, is both a conference with lots of interesting presentations on international education (I was doing one on International Education Policies in the Americas, as part of the work I have done with colleagues Janet Ilieva, Vangelis Tsiligiris and Pat Killingley for the British Council—watch the blog next week).   But it is also a massive

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