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
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
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
Bibliometrics aren’t just useful for analyzing who’s being cited; they are also pretty good at telling you who’s not being cited, too. Today, we’ll look at professors whose H-index (see here for a reminder of how it is calculated) is zero – that is, professors who have either never been published or (more likely) never been cited. There are three reasons why a scholar might have an H-index of zero. The first is age; younger scholars are less likely to
Robert Hutchins, a former president of the University of Chicago, once described the university as “a collection of departments tied together by a common steam plant.” There’s some truth to this. Most academics will profess more loyalty to a discipline than an institution. Disciplines fight amongst each other for resources and the departmental structure they occupy has enormous possibilities for empire building. The only thing that really unites them is the heating plant (and perhaps the Finance and HR people
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.
