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Category: Academia

Offices

Here’s a stat I’d really like to see: how much time do professors spend in their offices? There’s been an enormous shift in the way people work over the past thirty years.  Digitization of documents and the availability of remote access computing, the growth of email, the explosion of doctoral students available to do the research grunt work, the decreasing importance of collaborating with local colleagues, and increasing importance of collaborating with people around the world – it’s all given

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February 24, 2015 10 Comments

Why is CAUT Cheapening Academic Freedom?

Academic freedom is precious; it’s not something you want to mess with  – which is why it is such a mystery that the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) permitted the Report of the Ad-hoc Investigatory Committee into the Department of Economics at the University of Manitoba to be published. The back story, near as I can tell, is: for decades, the UManitoba Economics Department contained a fairly large squad of what are known as “heterodox” economists (i.e. political economy types who

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February 2, 2015 1 Comment

Alternatives, Please

Recently, there have been several articles about how university prioritization plans are divisive, or that they are morale-suckers, or that the faculty “don’t support them”.  The most recent case comes out of Wilfrid Laurier.  But why all the fuss? After all, setting priorities happens all the time; it’s part of the business of running an institution.  From one year to the next, investments may be increased in certain areas, there may be cutback in others, or wholly new programs may

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January 14, 2015 2 Comments

Dinosaurs

So, there’s this cute little graphic making the rounds on the internet.  Take a look, and tell me what you see:                     If you laughed, I’m disappointed.  This joke, to me, represents absolutely everything wrong with the humanities these days. The joke, essentially, is that scientists are narrow-minded eggheads.  They have knowledge, but not wisdom.  But your lovable humanities types?  Well, they may not know their ass from their elbow as

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May 6, 2014 3 Comments

Sessionals

The plight of sessional lecturers (or, as they call them in the US, “adjuncts”) is possibly the only issue in higher education that generates even more overblown rhetoric than tuition fees.  Any time people start evoking slavery as a metaphor, you know perspective has flown the coop. Though data on sessional numbers in Canada are non-existent, no one disputes that their numbers are rising, and that they are becoming an increasingly central part of major universities’ staffing plans.  In large

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March 6, 2014 15 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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