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Category: Academia

Viewpoint Diversity

Last week, the MacDonald-Laurier Institute released a truly bad paper on “viewpoint diversity” at Canadian Universities.  How bad was it, you ask?  Really bad.  Icelandic rotting shark bad.  Crystal Pepsi bad.  Final Season of Game of Thrones bad.  The basic thrust of the paper, co-written by Christopher Dummitt and Zachary Patterson, is that The Canadian professoriate is well to the left of the Canadian public Within the academy, those who describe themselves as being on the right are much more

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September 22, 2022 2 Comments

Institutional Strategic Plans: Control v. Vision

Here are a couple of quick thoughts on institutional strategic plans and how they tend to fall into two big categories. Most institutions typically prefer plans that are about control.  That is, they want the plans to focus people’s agendas within an organization on a few key goals.  Sometimes these plans take the form of task-lists; other times they are focussed on a few institution-wide goals, complete with metrics (not surprisingly, these are the kinds of plans that the big

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April 19, 2022 1 Comment

La loi 32

Come.  Let us speak together, honestly, about Loi 32, An Act Respecting Academic Freedom in the University Sector in Quebec.  Because it sets a new standard both in government interference in universities and in all-around sheer holy-crap-this-is-what-public-policy-is being-reduced to. If you read the law itself – and please do so, it’s short and only takes a minute or so –  you’ll see that for the most part it is pretty bland.  The meat of it, in articles 4 and 5,

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April 13, 2022 2 Comments

Innovations in Engineering Education

Alex Usher and Jonathan McQuarrie Today HESA is releasing the fifth edition of our publication Monitoring Trends in Academic Programs, written by Jonathan McQuarrie.   This issue is a bit of a departure for MTAP.  Unlike previous editions which have focused largely on innovations that occur at the intersections between different fields of study, this one focuses squarely on a single domain of study which is undergoing some serious re-invention; namely, Engineering.  What is happening right now in Engineering education is

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March 30, 2022 No Comments

Breaking the Discipline/Degree Nexus

Just a quick one today because the expanded HESA Towers opened yesterday and there’s been a lot going on.  It’s about an experiment that I wish more institutions would undertake, upon building a new university (it has to be a new university, for reasons which I think will be obvious): that is, to allow the institution to offer degrees on any basis it wishes except that of disciplinarity.  No history degrees.  No physics degrees.  Kill disciplinarity, at least as it

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March 29, 2022 7 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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