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Category: Administration

Who Owns Internationalization?

One of the first things you realize when studying how institutions deal with the process of internationalization is how fragmented authority actually is in Canadian universities – to the point where you sometimes have to wonder whether anyone’s actually in charge of the whole operation. Part of the reason for this fragmentation  is that internationalization isn’t a single activity, but rather a process that affects a whole range of other activities in which universities normally engage.  To the extent that internationalization

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November 26, 2014 1 Comment

Responsibility-Centred Budgeting

As I’m on the subject of finances and budgeting these days, I thought it a good time to bring up the topic of “responsibility-centred budgeting” (RCB).  It’s a timely topic, given both this ludicrous article in the Edmonton Journal last week, and the fact that I have one loyal reader who’s been urging me to write about it for months now (Hi, Alan!). Responsibility-centred budgeting basically says that units (usually faculties, occasionally departments) are responsible for raising their own funds and covering

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October 28, 2014 22 Comments

Talking About Money

As I go from campus to campus across the country, one of the things that truly astonishes me is the poor quality of conversation about money. There are far too many campuses where the administration insists everything is fine, until it comes time to negotiate collective agreements (especially with faculty) – at which point everything is suddenly disastrous.  As a result, faculties are naturally suspicious of these claims.  If everything really is disastrous, they reason, why are we only hearing about this

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October 20, 2014 1 Comment

The War Between Universities and Disciplines

From the outside, universities look like a single united entity, with many administrative subdivisions – kind of the organizational equivalent of the United States.  However, the closer political analogy is actually early 1990s Yugoslavia: at a very basic level, universities are the sites of permanent civil wars between central authorities and the disciplines whose interests they purportedly serve. Disciplines – which, except for law and theology, mostly started their existence outside universities – allowed themselves to be subsumed within universities

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October 8, 2014 2 Comments

Another Reason to Get Serious About Measuring Workloads

So I see the Laurentian faculty union is threatening to strike.  The main issues are “workload” (they’d like to have lower undergraduate teaching loads to deal with an influx of graduate students) and pay (they’d like to “close the gap” with the rest of Ontario). This is where the entire system would be well served by having some understanding of what, exactly, everybody is getting paid for.  Obviously, if you’re doing the same amount and type of work as someone

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September 23, 2014 1 Comment

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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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