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Category: Academia

The Cost of an Aging Professoriate

You may have read recently about how Canada is really sticking it to junior researchers.  Dalhousie’s Julia Wright recently wrote about Canada haemorrhaging early-career research capacity and she has a point – just in the last seven years, the proportion of Canadian faculty aged 40 or less has fallen by a third, from roughly 22% to just over 15%. The question, of course, is “why”?  Some – including Wright – just blame a “shrinking academic labour market”, which tends to (either by

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December 6, 2017 7 Comments

Has everybody lost their damn mind?

Some simple Q & As to clear up the present hysteria in Canadian Higher Education follow the sundry events at Wilfrid Laurier. Do Teaching Assistants have Academic Freedom?  No.  Academic Freedom is a protection of faculty rights based (at least in theory) on disciplinary competence.  TAs have rights of free speech of course, but those don’t protect your job if you annoy  your employer.  In this sense, Lindsay Shepherd probably had fewer rights as a TA than she would have

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November 27, 2017 22 Comments

Measurement and Management at Universities (Neoliberalism Part 4)

To date, we have looked at market mechanisms and competition in universities and shown that a) they aren’t in fact all that neo-liberal and b) particularly with respect to expanding access, there are some upsides.  Today I want to look at two other facets of modern universities that often get described as neo-liberal: performance data and management. There is some variety in the way this topic is approached – see this blog from the London School of Economics (h/t to Marc Spooner for pointing me to

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November 23, 2017 4 Comments

Universities and Competition (Neoliberalism Part 3)

One of the key accusations about universities and neoliberalism is that the system is too obsessed with competition.  On the face of it, this looks like the easiest argument to make about neoliberal universities: neoliberal thought does put a lot of emphasis on competition, and institutions do talk a lot about “competing” for students and staff and governments like the notion that institutions “compete” against one another.  Among faculty members, institutions “compete” for research funding; in some countries, they literally compete

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November 22, 2017 No Comments

The Canadian Way of Higher Education Co-ordination

Yesterday I talked a little bit about how competition, not co-operation, is in Canadian universities’ DNA (east of Manitoba, at any rate).  But that has never stopped governments from trying – usually fitfully and half-heartedly – from trying to create more co-ordination within the system.  David Cameron, in his 1991 book More Than an Academic Question (still probably best single-volume history of Canadian higher education), analyzed these attempts in some detail.  What’s interesting is how things have changed over time. One obvious

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November 17, 2017 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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