Sagas and Plots
Late last year I wrote about Burton Clark and the notion of “organizational sagas”; that is, the stories people in organizations…
September 20, 2019
3 Comments
Late last year I wrote about Burton Clark and the notion of “organizational sagas”; that is, the stories people in organizations…
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
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
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
You may, over the past year, followed the story of Stevens Point, a mid-sized (8000 student) regional campus in the University of Wisconsin system. I want to look at this story today, because I think it contains some important lessons about how universities actually make and spend their money. Back in March 2018 the college, facing falling enrolment, announced it was going to kill thirteen humanities and social sciences programs – American studies, art (excluding graphic design), English (excluding English
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