Category: Administration

Chair to Chancellor: Lessons in Leading Modern Universities

Every Christmas, this blog invites the University of Tennessee’s Robert Kelchen on the show to do his top 10 stories of the year in the United States. One story keeps coming up: who, in their right mind, would want to be a university president these days? What with the financial pressure, the relentless politics, both on campus and dealing with state and federal governments, it’s an absolutely thankless job. Well, today our guest is someone who maybe led the way

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Canadian Higher Education’s Sacred Scaffolding

There is a whole bunch of policy areas in higher education which are what I might call “scaffolding” (others might use the term plumbing). That is, the basic building blocks of how education actually gets done: how classes get scheduled, how credits are defined, awarded and scored, then thrown into buckets and turned into degrees, etc. The lack of logic and consistency behind the existing system(s) frankly boggles the imagination: it’s absolutely an area where a little innovation could go a

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Data Flourishing for Universities and Colleges (Governance Edition)

Yesterday, we wrote about how to make institutions flourish through better use of data…for management. But just as important as management is governance, and here, we would argue, a very different set of issues is at play. Let’s start at the top, with Boards of Governors. As Alex has previously argued, Board members are fundamentally part-timers. They spend maybe 5-8 days worth of time a year doing their Boardly duties. They need to be kept focused. Giving Board members reams

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Data Flourishing for Universities and Colleges (Management Edition)

Hi all. I’m writing jointly today with colleagues Andrew Drinkwater and Pat Lougheed from Plaid Analytics, a company with whom HESA is teaming up to offer services related to improving the state of data collection, analysis, and use on campuses across the country. We’re not going to spend time giving you an outline of what we’re offering (although do click here for more if this interests you), but we do want to talk about how we see data environments evolving

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Ono’s Arc

When Santa Ono first showed up at UBC in 2016, the general reaction was one of mild bemusement—or, more specifically, a feeling of “who dat?” Although Ono is Canadian by origin (born in Vancouver), he grew up and spent more or less his entire career in the United States, apart from taking his doctorate in experimental Medicine at McGill. His last job before coming north was as president of the University of Cincinnati, which is a decent school with a

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