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Category: Administration

Governing Boards, Singular and Plural

Last week’s blogs (here and here) about the Alberta Vision 2030 plan seem to have been quite popular.  The one topic I received the most mail about was the governance piece and the idea of putting multiple institutions under a single Board, which seemed to confuse a lot of people.  So I thought I would take this morning to run a little class on what the many American experiments in system governance have to teach us (and make no mistake, the model

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November 16, 2020 1 Comment

Performance and Accountability in a Pandemic

It is a disappointing time for those of us who value accountability.  Governments across the country (outside the Atlantic, anyway) are failing us – badly – in their pandemic responses.  And yet, apparently there are no political consequences for their shameful performance and the accompanying body count.  The Ford and Legault governments, with close to 10,000 deaths between them, are rising high in the polls.  Because everyone (again, if you ignore the Atlantic provinces) is making similar pig-headed mistakes, everyone

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November 9, 2020 No Comments

How Many Faculties is Too Many?

Academic bureaucracy is weird.  Basically, about 150 years ago, it was decided that it was important to have two layers of administration interposed between an individual faculty member and a University President (and later, once the university expanded, a senior team with various Vice-Presidents).  One layer came to be called a “department” and one level came to be called a “faculty”.  These theoretically mapped on to the branches and limbs of the Tree of Knowledge (so to speak).  But they

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October 6, 2020 2 Comments

Buckets and Pillars

We’ve been working hard at HESA Towers the last couple of weeks on strategic plans (currently at Queen’s and Memorial).  One of my colleagues, Michael Savage, has been working on some comparative work on strategic plans, some of which we’ll tell you about tomorrow.  But I wanted to talk about something we’ve noticed in the way Canadian strategic plans are put together.  And that is the difference between “bucket” plans and “pillar” plans. Generally, strategic plans all contain three things. 

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September 28, 2020 1 Comment

Re-Setting Strategy After a Punch in the Mouth

A great nineteenth-century expert on strategy, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, credited his success over Napoleon to resiliency.  Bonaparte, he said “planned campaigns just as you might make a splendid set of harnesses. It looks very well; and answers very well; until it gets broken; and then you are done for. Now I made my campaigns of ropes. If anything went wrong, I tied a knot and went on.” There’s a twentieth-century equivalent, too.  In the words of the great twentieth-century

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June 4, 2020 1 Comment

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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