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Category: Academia

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

Two Unrelated Thoughts

Some days, I go hunting for blog topics and what comes up are a bunch of ideas that might have made an entire post back in the days when this was a 450-word-per-post blog, but definitely don’t cut it in the 1100-word-per-post era.  But they are still good topics!  So today, I am throwing out a pair of unrelated thoughts for your consideration. Workloads A couple of weeks ago I mused about the causes of the current round of labour

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March 17, 2022 1 Comment

Labour Relations, February 2022

I’m not sure how one measures the state of labour relations in a given field, but since we are on the fifth major university strike of the year (Manitoba and Concordia University Edmonton have settled; Acadia, Lethbridge and Ontario Tech are ongoing), I am pretty sure no one will object if I say that 2021-22 is the worst year Canadian academia has ever had.  A perfectly reasonable question is: why is it all kicking off now? If you look at

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February 17, 2022 6 Comments

The Opposition to Micro-credentials

Following yesterday’s piece on developments in micro-credentials, I want to address what I see as the back-lash against them.  I see theoretical and the practical objections emerging. The theoretical charge against micro-credentials is led by OISE’s Leesa Wheelahan and Gavin Moodie, who recently penned Gig qualifications for the gig economy: micro-credentials and the ‘hungry mile’ in the journal Higher Education.  As the catchy title suggests, it does not mince words.  According to them, micro-credentials: “contribute to the privatisation of education

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February 16, 2022 1 Comment

Cui bono?

Who owns universities?  It seems like a simple question but it’s actually deviously complex. Some universities have actual owners: globally, about two-thirds of higher-education institutions are technically private, through there is some dispute how to count institutions which are not state-owned but accept state money as operating grants (in Canada, this would include McGill).  Most analyses make a distinction between for-profit and not-for-profit institutions, and that is a useful distinction in some respects: for-profits are never particularly reputable, whereas in

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February 10, 2022 1 Comment

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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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