Category: Academia

Food: An Aristotelian Strategy

These days, everyone is wondering about how to create more of a feeling of community on campus.  This isn’t just about getting students comfortable within a campus community, which is key to improving completion rates and raising student satisfaction. In many places it’s also about finding ways to get through what a seemingly worsening set of relations between faculty members and administration, Boards and senates, etc.  So how to get more, shall we say, esprit de corps?  I say, read

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Progress Studies and Data Collection in Higher Education

One of the things that absolutely cheeses me off about the field of higher education as a field is how little attention is paid to what might be called “progress studies”.  What are “progress studies” you ask?  Well, let me turn things over to Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowan, who coined the phrase in an Atlantic article a few years ago. “Progress itself is understudied. By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that

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Quid Pro Quo

The last federal budget was, as I noted at the time, a freaking disaster for post-secondary education, and a vivid warning to Government Relations that the arguments that the system – well, universities anyway – had hitherto relied upon were simply not working anymore and that a re-think was required.  Judging by the twitter convos I keep an eye on, I think this lesson is starting to penetrate, in the sense that people are recognizing that simply pointing at Israel

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Leave Me Alone

Recently, I was somewhat surprised to discover the sheer variety of definitions of the term “collegiality” that are found in major online dictionaries. Collins places collegiality as a method of governance “the sharing of authority among colleagues” or, according to Oxford, it is “a word used in a theological context to signify that a group of bishops constitute a body, not a group of individuals” (which applies to universities since the original ones were nearly all church-governed).  A second definition

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Autonomy Scorecard

This week’s guest on The World of Higher Education podcast is Enora Bennetot Pruvot, Deputy Director Governance, Funding & Public Policy Development at the European University Association and she joins me today from Brussels to talk about the EUA’s recently-released University Autonomy Scorecard, of which she was a co-author. For those who aren’t familiar with the EUA, it’s a little bit different from your average association of universities or rectors. Not only does it use an active research program to back

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