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Category: Administration

CAUT on Foreign Professors

Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) Executive Director, David Robinson, made some interesting statements recently about the way universities hire foreign professors.  He made them in response to an announcement that the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) had negotiated an agreement to be exempted from certain rules of the new Temporary Foreign Worker program.  To quote in full from CAUT’s press release: The national organization representing Canada’s professors says that special exemptions from the temporary foreign worker

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March 5, 2015 No Comments

Meetings vs. Management

It’s always difficult to make accurate observations about differences in national higher education cultures.  But one thing I can tell you that is absolutely not true is the perception that Canadian universities are suffering under some kind of unprecedented managerialist regime.  If anything, Canadian academics are among the least managed employees in the entire world; When academics complain of over-management, they aren’t using that term in a way that workers in other fields would recognize.  They are not, for instance,

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February 13, 2015 6 Comments

Who Owns Courses?

After the preposterous CAUT report on the University of Manitoba’s Economics Department was released, President David Barnard offered a wonderfully robust and thought-provoking refutation of CAUT’s accusations. One of the most interesting observations Barnard makes relates to a specific incident from the report, namely the request by a departmental council to review an existing Health Economics course after having approved a new Economic Determinants of Health Course taught by the same professor.  CAUT viewed this as a violation of the professor’s

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February 11, 2015 2 Comments

Accusations About Operating Surpluses

One interesting development in labour-management relations over the past few years has been the increasing tendency of academic unions to claim that administration is spending “too much” on capital, and is raiding the operating budget (i.e. salaries) to pay for it.  It’s possible that there is some truth to this in some places, but on the whole there seems to be a misunderstanding about the difference between how the terms “operating” and “capital” are defined in budgets, and how they

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February 6, 2015 4 Comments

Alternatives, Please

Recently, there have been several articles about how university prioritization plans are divisive, or that they are morale-suckers, or that the faculty “don’t support them”.  The most recent case comes out of Wilfrid Laurier.  But why all the fuss? After all, setting priorities happens all the time; it’s part of the business of running an institution.  From one year to the next, investments may be increased in certain areas, there may be cutback in others, or wholly new programs may

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January 14, 2015 2 Comments

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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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