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Category: Academia

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

OK, So How Should the Humanities Present Themselves?

You’ll recall that last week I wrote some pretty blistering stuff about the way humanities profs sometimes defend the value of their field.  A few of you wrote back saying, “well, how would you do it, smart guy”? The short answer is: the way Paul Wells does in his 2010 article, In Praise of the Squishy Subjects (read the whole thing. It’s worth it).  He points out that in the real world, where societal problems are incredibly complex and can’t be explained

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December 2, 2013 1 Comment

Sh*t Humanities Professors Shouldn’t Say

Two examples of ludicrous things I’ve seen/heard lately: Example #1 – A few months ago, I was in a session on the topic of, “how to defend the humanities”.  The animator threw up some quotes that were (at least in theory) derogatory of the humanities, and asked people for possible responses.  One of these quotes was from Harvard literature professor, Louis Menand’s, book, The Marketplace of Ideas (highly recommended, by the way), which ridiculed times-to-completion in humanities PhD programs thusly: “It takes three

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November 27, 2013 21 Comments

“Academic Freedom” or “Freedom from Evaluation”?

So, you may have heard that the University of Manitoba Faculty Association (UMFA) is threatening a strike, starting tomorrow.  What you may not have grasped is just how thin the grounds for the strike are. You can see the university’s full bargaining position, here; UMFA, in contrast, has publicly issued only a single note (responding to a missive from the administration, which it felt was misleading) and an open letter to students published in the Free Press.  Frankly, for a

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October 21, 2013 23 Comments

The Opposite of Strategy

The London Free Press recently published a summary of Western’s new draft strategic plan (there’s a longer version on Western’s website, but it’s password protected).  I urge you to read it.  It’s not uniquely bad by any means – there are lots of other institutions who have published similar sorts of documents – but it nevertheless represents a kind of quintessence of what’s wrong with university strategic plans.  It is a Stepford Wife of a strategy.  Nothing about it says, “Western”.  You

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August 28, 2013 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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