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Category: Academia

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

Research Outcome and Impact Data

Every couple of years I do a piece looking at how Canadian institutions compare in terms of research output and impact using data from the CWTS Leiden Rankings, which happen to be the most transparent system of bibliometric research rankings out there. It’s that time again. So, just to remind people what the CWTS Leiden ranking actually is: the good folks who do scientometrics at the University of Leiden annually put together a wide variety of bibliometrics measures for about

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April 30, 2024 1 Comment

Administration vs. Academia

If there is one thing that unites academics, it is cynicism about university administration. To outsiders, this seems weird, because senior university administrators are, with relatively few exceptions, actually academics themselves. Many, in fact, return to faculty ranks after finishing their term. So why are these two sides always seen as being so drastically opposed? Here’s my hypothesis. Members of the Senior Administration are the interface between academia and the non-academic world. Academics expect senior administrators to explain to the

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March 26, 2024 5 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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