The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Administration

Laurentian Blues (3) – Hillary Redux

OK, before I get to the actual blog here, some updates on Laurentian: 1)      On Friday, Laurentian published its list of creditors.  It listed $184 million in potential debts, plus a couple of hundred small suppliers with amounts listed as “TBD”.  This is presumably the origin of the comment last Monday from an un-named source indicating they opened the books and instead of $100 m in debt it’s closer to $200 m.  But this is somewhat misleading: about $52m is for various

Read More »
February 8, 2021 5 Comments

Centralization and De-centralization in Campus Services

One of the constant tensions in University and College management is working out which services need to be delivered centrally and which can be decentralized and, if the latter, how they can be provided in a way which has at least some semblance of coherence. The deal is this: generally it’s cheaper to provide most services centrally.  Doesn’t really matter what kinds of services: administrative, research, teaching and learning, internationalization, etc.  Economies of scale exist, partially because you get fewer

Read More »
January 13, 2021 2 Comments

Studying Higher Education Decision-Making

One of the things that I find most interesting about higher education studies is how there are all these completely different regional/national literatures that pay almost no attention to one another.  For instance, in North America, higher education studies mostly come out of sociology and mostly deal with how institutions and institutional policies affect students.  In Latin America, there is a quite immense literature on things like pedagogy (seriously – go into any decent bookshop and there will be an

Read More »
November 26, 2020 1 Comment

Assessment and Accountability in the Network Era

Just a brief thought today on how the increasing interconnectedness of research efforts is making evaluation of institutional outputs harder. One of the things about academia that governments have a hard time conceptualizing is that “universities,” as a singular entity, are to some extent a fiction.  Governments treat them as discrete entities that have some agency of their own.  What is never very well understood is the extent to which university agency is restricted by the professional norms of its

Read More »
November 25, 2020 1 Comment

The University of Calgary’s New Strategic Plan

Back to Alberta.  I know, some of you may be sick of me talking about Alberta, but a) it’s the most interesting policy scene in Canada right now and b) this is how the rest of the country feels when I talk about Ontario, so fair’s fair.  Back, specifically, to the University of Calgary, which has – in response to significant government cutbacks and government complaints about the province’s universities being unresponsive to changing economic priorities, more or less decided

Read More »
November 24, 2020 2 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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...