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Category: Academia

Living the Lie in Research Universities

Take the following two thoughts/statements: 1.       “At our institution, research and teaching are inseparable, two sides of the same coin” 2.       “At our institution, if you are a good researcher, you get more money and you get teaching leave to do more research” Both these statements can’t be true.  Which do you think is false? Back in pre-89 Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel liked to tell a story about a shopkeeper who displayed a sign saying “workers of the world, unite!”.  The shopkeeper did

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October 9, 2015 3 Comments

Liberal Arts Deserves Better Arguments

You may have noticed that I failed to award a “worst back-to-school” piece for the second year running.  This is because the bad stuff took a while to come out.  Rest assured, it came, and I now present two of them. First is Heather Mallick’s little missive on Liberal Arts in the Star last week.  The utterly lazy premise is this: advances in ICT have changed the world dramatically, so what matters now is synthesis.  And by God, Liberal Arts gives

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September 29, 2015 No Comments

Was Jennifer Berdahl’s Academic Freedom Infringed Upon?

UBC’s  Montalbano Professor of Leadership Studies, Jennifer Berdahl, became embroiled in a mini-cause célèbre this week when she claimed her employer attempted to silence her, after she penned some thoughts on President Arvind Gupta’s resignation.  Do read her j’accuse, available here; it’s quite something.  Finished?  Ok, on we go. The question is: was Berdahl’s freedom infringed upon?  Let’s start with the fact that there are many definitions of academic freedom, with the scope being quite different in each case. Start with the famous

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August 19, 2015 7 Comments

Universities: It’s Not All About You

I just finished reading quite a good little book, Universities and Regional Development, edited by (among others) OISE’s Glen Jones.  Analytically, it’s useful for a couple of reasons: first, it gets beyond universities as single-entity black boxes when it comes to engaging with external stakeholders; also, it does a good job of emphasizing history and path-dependence as under-analyzed variables in explaining change (or lack thereof) in higher education. One thing that struck me, however, was the tone of some of

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June 11, 2015 2 Comments

Game-Changing Institutional Alliances

A couple of weeks ago, Arizona State University and EdX announced an institutional tie-up, which received a fair bit of publicity.  Basically, the deal was that EdX – a well-known MOOC platform, owned jointly by Harvard and MIT – would help ASU put an undisclosed (but judging by the rollout, somewhere between 15 and 20) number of its big first-year courses online.  There were two startling things about this announcement: 1)      The MOOCs are not time-delimited, requiring students to start and

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May 26, 2015 1 Comment

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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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