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Category: Academia

Overproducing Graduates For The Win!

A few weeks ago, my colleague Melonie Fullick teed off in her University Affairs column on some of the rhetoric around calls to increase the number of PhDs. Universities always like these kind of calls (and – guilty – I’ve made them myself), because they mean some combination of more money and more horsepower to do advanced research (in the Sciences at least). But universities are obviously producing a lot more PhDs than they are ever going to hire, and

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April 8, 2016 1 Comment

“Slow Professors”

I read with interest this piece in University Affairs about “The Slow Professor”, which is the name of a book by Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber – English professors from Brock and Queen’s, respectively – who think that professors need to push back against the hecticness of the modern academy.  To wit: “The authors offer insights on how to manage teaching, research and collegiality in an era when more professors feel ‘beleaguered, managed, frantic, stressed and demoralized’ as they juggle the increasingly

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April 1, 2016 1 Comment

The Continued Cheapening of the Term “Academic Freedom”

Exhibit One: A Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) briefing note on outsourcing of IT services at universities contains the phrase “Academic staff can challenge access to their professional and personal data by providers of cloud services based on their academic freedom and privacy rights…” Exhibit Two: A CAUT “investigation” shows that at the University of Manitoba, one group of economics profs doesn’t like another group of economics profs, and the majority sometimes uses its democratic rights to make decisions that the minority

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March 24, 2016 No Comments

House-Buying Power of Academic Salaries

A couple of weeks ago, the Times Higher Education put together a cute infographic showing how many square metres an academic salary bought in different parts of the world (the full article is here).  I thought I would try the same thing for here in Canada. So, here’s what I did.  I took median academic salaries for major universities in Canada for the 2010-11 year, the last year for which comparable data is available (yes, it’s a travesty.  But the travesty isn’t just that Statscan

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February 29, 2016 2 Comments

Can Universities Judge Themselves?

One of the more difficult problems to unravel in the world of higher education is the fact that universities are responsible both for delivering teaching and judging whether or not a student has learned enough to get a degree.  To most reasonable minds, this is a conflict of interest.  Indeed, this is the conflict that makes universities unreformable: as long as universities have a monopoly on judging their own quality, no one external to the system (students, governments) can make realistic comparisons between

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February 9, 2016 6 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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