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Category: Academia

“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

Summer Break

Hi all. It’s time for me to step back from the blogging for a few weeks.  As of Monday, we’ll be switching to a “One Thought to Start Your Week” until the middle of August; that will let me catch up a bit on things and get prepped for the fall. I want to say thanks to all of you for reading and commenting.  I learn a lot from your feedback and I’m very grateful for all of it, even

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June 14, 2013 1 Comment

A Zinger from HEQCO

To One Yonge Street, and the offices of the redoubtable Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO), who yesterday released a small publication with the unassuming name, The Productivity of the Ontario Public Postsecondary.  The title may be a little on the soporific side, but the contents are anything but. There are some real gems in here.  Did you know that 39% of all granting council funding went to Quebec?  OK, the grants on average are somewhat smaller than they are

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December 7, 2012 2 Comments

This ‘Predicting the Future’ Business

Well, that’s another conference season done. Whether I am at a conference to mingle, learn or present, I always tend to be in sessions where people are doing the trend-watching, trying to tease out “The Future” for the benefit of conference-goers. The problem with these trend-spotting sessions – and I don’t exclude my own from this criticism, by the way – is that they tend to fall prey to one of the following four mistakes. Assuming That Because Cool Things

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July 3, 2012 No Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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