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Category: Administration

Critical Friends

A few times a year I get asked to help with the drafting a university or college’s strategic plan.  Usually nothing major: a little bit of environmental scanning, talking about industry trends, that kind of thing.  I think I do enough to get a decent sense of where the pain points are in academic and strategic planning.  The most important one I wrote about back here – the fact that strategic planning is often done around academics rather than with them, mainly

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June 1, 2018 5 Comments

Better Feedback

Universities (and to a lesser extent colleges) are sometimes accused of being change-resistant.  Various stakeholders have lots of valuable feedback to give, so the critique goes, but institutions Just. Don’t Listen.   This critique has some merit but misses the mark in some major ways.  Institutions solicit and receive feedback all the time.  I just don’t think the questions being asked are always very good ones, and the people whose opinions are being solicited are not always the right ones. Here’s an

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May 31, 2018 4 Comments

Faculty and Boards of Governors

While I was away having fun in Japan (the sumo was excellent, btw), the Canadian Association of University Teachers released a report called Board of Governors Structures at Thirty-One Canadian Universities ,which is well worth a gander.  As is often the case with CAUT’s stuff, it’s a mix of very useful and factual material combined and some…ah…curious editorializing. (Speaking of curious: how in the hell did CBC report the ridiculous story, planted by someone at the Carleton Faculty Union, that the university

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May 28, 2018 No Comments

Risk (Prestige)

For the next few days I want to take everyone through universities the way a Board of Governors sees them – or at least, the way a good governing Board should see them (some but not all of it applies to colleges as well; I’ll try to highlight both where possible), and that is through the lens of risk. It is the role of the Board of Governors (again, good ones) to ask the question, over and over, “what could go

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April 16, 2018 5 Comments

Public Service

I have a strong message today. It’s mostly for people in social science fields (especially Deans and Department heads), but I think Provosts, VPs Research and President will want to pay attention.  The message is this: the academic profession in Canada desperately needs to take its head out of its collective behind when it comes to public service. Universities have a schizophrenic attitude when it comes to public service.  Ask any university President about the value of their institution to

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January 11, 2018 3 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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