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Category: Administration

Presidential Salaries

One perennial meme in higher education is that presidential pay is sky-rocketing, at the expense of salaries elsewhere in the institution.  Latest example: news from England this month of university heads getting raises of $30-40,000, while opposing hikes in staff pay, which certainly looks a little piggish.  But what about here in Canada? I showed in this post last year that Canadian presidential pay is significantly lower than it is at comparable public universities in the United States, Australia, and the UK. 

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February 4, 2014 5 Comments

Better Thinking About Program Prioritization

As most of you probably know, there’s been a lot of recent interest in the program prioritization process (PPP) ; specifically, a model based on the work of a fellow called Robert Dickeson.  However, Program Prioritization, and Dickeson, have come in for a bit of a beating lately, some of it deserved and some not. (Caveat lector: I make money from consulting on program prioritization. I’m going to be talking my own book here.  Read on with that in mind.)

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January 22, 2014 4 Comments

Students Always Get Hurt

There’s a strike on at UNB.  I won’t get into the ins and outs of it because both sides have kept bargaining positions pretty close to their chests, and so it’s hard to say if one side or the other is being unreasonable.  The administration, presumably, will want to make sure that a wage settlement doesn’t entirely eat up all new revenue (which, as I showed back here, might well be the case).  Staff will presumably want wage increases similar

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January 17, 2014 2 Comments

Administrative Bloat?

If there’s one common complaint among academic staff it’s that non-academic staff… administrators… are multiplying like weeds, and taking over the university.  Of course, no one can tell if this is actually happening because Canadian universities have never bothered to put together any common statistics on non-academic staff. What we do have, though, is data on non-academic staff compensation – that is, we can see how much non-academic staff were paid in any given year, and track that over time.  We can then

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January 8, 2014 11 Comments

The Canadian Style of University Management

I recently met someone who had just moved to Canada from the UK, to take up a decanal position here.  He mentioned that, since his move, the two things that had most shocked him were: 1) how little power he has in Canada, compared to the UK; and, 2) just how much bureaucracy there is here.  He relayed this to me by explaining the difference in hiring procedures between the two countries, which I reproduce below, in tabular form:  

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November 21, 2013 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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