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Category: Academia

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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May 1, 2023 3 Comments

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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April 13, 2023 No Comments

The Return of Bad Arguments for the Humanities

I see we’re back into tiresome public debates about the value of “Liberal Arts” and the “Humanities” (not synonyms, even though most people use the terms interchangeably).  The most recent example is this past weekend’s piece in the New York Times by historian Bret C. Devereaux entitled “Colleges Should be More than Just Vocational Schools” (where “college” is being used in the American sense of “undergraduate education”). Let’s ignore the headline, which the author doesn’t necessarily choose, and get to

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April 5, 2023 4 Comments

International Women’s Day 2023

Today is a statistical overview for International Women’s Day. Let’s start by looking at student numbers.  Figure 1 gives us the long view on female participation in universities (sorry college folks: Statscan data for your sector is a mess prior to the 1990s).  Women represented about 20% of university students from the 1920s to the mid-1950s, apart from the years during World War 2.  Starting around 1955, women’s share of total enrolments began a steady climb.  By 1989, women passed

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March 8, 2023 No Comments

Improving Quality Without Increasing Professional Workloads

Yesterday, I spoke about the desirability of changing the nature of academic work – specifically, dividing the assessment part of the job from the instructional part by creating a group of employees that focus on assessment – to use resources more efficiently.  Today, I want to talk about how to further tweak the academic job description and deploy academic resources to significantly improve the student learning environment, without (hopefully) increasing the burden on professors. The over-riding goal is to make

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February 15, 2023 3 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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