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Category: Academia

How Program Closure Decisions Get Made

A lot of institutions, in reaction to recent changes are going through program closure (or in politer terms “program suspensions” which in theory means they might get resurrected at some point be revived or saved, but don’t bet the house on it). So, it’s worth going through how these decisions tend to get made. Contrary to what you might hear, “low enrollment” technically is not the reason anyone closes a program: it’s a bit more complicated than that. The real

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March 3, 2025 3 Comments

The Blight on the Ivy

A few weeks ago, when I was in New Orleans, I was browsing through the higher education section at Beckham’s, a large, uber-musty used book store on Decatur just inside the Quarter, when I found A Blight on the Ivy by Robert and Katherine (Dr & Mrs, according to the inside flap) Gordon. Published in 1962, it is a book about a “crisis” on the modern campus. What kind of crisis, you ask? Well, check out the subtitle: “The flunkouts,

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November 6, 2024 No Comments

In Praise of In-Camera Hiring

One perennial skirmish in Canadian higher education is the question of whether or not candidates for senior administration—in particular the presidency—should have to be publicly identified at the shortlist stage and (preferably) make themselves available for public questioning. Specifically what people want is, in the words of the Memorial University Faculty Association (MUNFA), which is currently having such a skirmish as the university forms the search committee to replace Vianne Timmons, is the following: “…the ultimate short-list of candidates should

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September 30, 2024 2 Comments

The Workload Conundrum

One of the weirdest things about Canadian academia is how workload is defined. You’ve probably heard somewhere that professorial workload is “40-40-20”, that is, 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% “service.” But this is not an actual description of anyone’s actual workload, which can vary enormously from year to year, it’s more a kind of general rule of thumb, like the Chinese Communist Party’s adage that Mao was 70% good and 30% bad. It’s meant to be taken seriously but

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September 24, 2024 8 Comments

Three OECD Pieces Worth Reading

I spent Friday morning with a delegation of University Vice-Presidents at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)’s offices in Paris, discussing a variety of issues pertinent to Canadian higher education. As we ranged across a variety of topics, I realized I had fallen behind on my think-tank reading, because there were a few really important papers discussed that I had not read. I took some time over the weekend to read three of them and thought I would

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May 6, 2024 1 Comment

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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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