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Category: Academia

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

Tenure and Academic Freedom

There’s a line you tend to hear in Canadian universities: that tenure “is essential to the defence of academic freedom”.  There’s no question that historically, in North America, the two concepts grew up together, and have been intertwined here for about a century.  But it’s demonstrably false that tenure is the only way to defend academic freedom. In Europe, tenure has an entirely different historical origin.  Civil servants in many countries have tenure, and since university professors in many places were (and

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January 27, 2014 10 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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