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Category: Administration

Higher Education for Hep Cats

Over the years I have collected, for your amusement, a number of different descriptors and metaphors for a universities: “a group of departments united by a common steam plant” (Robert Hitchins), “the most loosely-coupled organization on earth outside of terrorist cells” (me), etc.  But maybe my favourite metaphor for universities is a musical one: a jazz band. Jazz is a very odd form of music in that it is improvisational yet collective.  The level of musical talent and concentration needed to create good

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October 16, 2019 2 Comments

Ant Colonies and the Art of Managing Universities

One of the problems in being a university manager is this assumption that being in charge of all or part of an organization means you actually have some control over what goes on inside it.  But this is not, in fact, true, or at least not in the way that anyone outside academia would understand the word “control”.  This is because individual universities are basically ants.  Individual biological entities?  Certainly.  But more importantly, they are part of a larger colony

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October 1, 2019 3 Comments

Sagas and Plots

Late last year I wrote about Burton Clark and the notion of “organizational sagas”; that is, the stories people in organizations…

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September 20, 2019 3 Comments

Student Affairs

I spent a couple of days out in Calgary this week at the annual meeting of Canadian Association of University & College Student Services (CACUSS).  I had not been to one of these in quite awhile – long enough ago that the meetings could be held on a campus and not in a convention centre – and I was intrigued at some of the changes that seem to have taken place in these occupations, which I suspect reflect some significant

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June 20, 2019 No Comments

Private Capital in Higher Education (Part II)

To really understand universities, you need to understand their cost structure.  And to understand their cost structure, you need to understand that unlike businesses, they keep score not by profits but by prestige, and that prestige – to the extent it does not derive from events and successes in the long-ago past – is, to a considerable extent, driven by total expenditures.  Thus, to “succeed” institutions must spend as much as possible.  This leads to what is known as the

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June 19, 2019 No 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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