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Category: Academia

Sagas

Yesterday, I talked about how adaptation in universities is a much more a matter of cultural change rather than something that can be doing using traditional planning or managerial techniques.  But this leads to the question: how do you change culture in a loosely-coupled, mostly horizontal organization? The answer, I think, is pretty simple.  It lies in storytelling, and more specifically, in Sagas. Sagas were, a form of oral history for the Nordic people.  There were King’s sagas, which told the

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November 2, 2018 5 Comments

Culture

It occurs to me, after sitting in a conference talking about change in universities, that nearly everything in the public discourse about how universities need to change is nonsense.  Well, maybe not nonsense, but at least seriously beside the point. Here’s the issue.  When you see politicians or consultants or university leaders talk about “where the university/my university needs to go”, they are almost always talking about ends.  The university needs to be more skills/employment-focused.  The university needs to adopt

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November 1, 2018 3 Comments

Bad Coverage

A clutch of recent media stories about higher education are kind of irritating me.  Specifically, it’s the media credulity on display which is so disheartening. One major source of irritation has to do with stories which get written when a professor is suspended or dismissed. We’ve had two of these recently, one in Nova Scotia and one in BC. The one in Nova Scotia concerned Psychology professor (what the hell is it with Canadian psychology profs, anyway?)  Rick Mehta, who

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October 4, 2018 No Comments

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
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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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