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Category: Academia

Time to Talk Teaching Assessments

Something very important happened over the summer: The Ryerson Faculty Union won its case against the university in Ontario Superior Court against the use of student teaching evaluations in tenure and promotion decisions (it was silent on merit pay, but I’m fairly sure that’s because Ryerson academics don’t have it – as legal precedent I’m 100% certain merit pay is affected, too).  This means literally every university in the country is going to have to re-think the evaluation of teaching

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September 10, 2018 3 Comments

The State of Canadian Post-Secondary Education, 2018

Good morning.  Today sees the publication of The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada, 2018, our first annual review of Canadian post-secondary education institutions, students, faculty, and finances.  You can download the whole thing here, you can wait for me to dribble the whole thing out in blog-sized chunks over the next couple of months only with added sarcasm, or both! But today what I want to underline is what is effectively the lead story from the report, which has

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August 28, 2018 3 Comments

Dissecting Student Protest and Politics

Following on the theme of yesterday’s blog on May ’68, I recently read a volume of papers edited by University of Surrey Professor Rachel Brooks called Student Politics and Protest: International perspectives (Research into Higher Education).  As with any volume of essays, the quality of the articles is uneven and it while doesn’t have quite the global reach of the late 60s works of Seymor Martin Lipset and Phillip Altbach (here and here), it still has a reasonably impressive scope and I think there are

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May 2, 2018 No Comments

Honorary Degrees

[the_ad id=”12142″] I can’t quite get my head around Alberta these days. You’ve got a left-wing government banging on about accessibility while providing proportionately the fewest need/income-based grants of any provincial government.  You’ve got a right-wing opposition which is just mad as hell that the federal government doesn’t have a national policy to force Eastern Canada to buy Canadian oil instead of foreign oil (a policy which used to go by the name “National Energy Program”).  And, at the University

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April 26, 2018 3 Comments

Risk (Conclusion)

[the_ad id=”12142″] Just to recap the last few blogs: First, ensuring that institutions are managing risk is pretty much the most important responsibility Boards of Governors have. They need the tools to understand how it is being done and where things need to improve Second, the most important risk to any institution is prestige. Yet few institutions bother to think clearly about how they are viewed by their key constituencies and why, particularly when it comes to the quality of

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April 20, 2018 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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