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Category: Administration

The Symbolism of Executive Salaries

“Eliminating waste” is a favourite target of politicians who need money for projects, but who don’t want to tell citizens how they plan to pay for those projects.  Build an $8 billion subway with no new taxes?  “Get rid of administrative waste,” says Rob Ford.   Cut taxes, reduce the deficit, and protect military spending, social security, and medicare, at the same time? “Attack waste and administrative costs”, say House Republicans. Bien pensants tend to decry this kind of talk as buffoonish

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January 22, 2013 1 Comment

More Thoughts on Presidential Selections

A couple of points which I couldn’t quite jam into last week’s blog on University Presidents: 1) Where are the foreigners?   Why do we assume that only Canadians can run Canadian universities?  It’s fairly obvious from their actions that university Boards of Governors assume this.  And when we do want a “foreign” perspective, all we seem to do is repatriate Canadians (e.g.: Robert Birgenau at Toronto, Roseann Runte at Carleton, Doyle Anderson at FNU, etc.). That’s a pretty poor showing

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December 20, 2012 2 Comments

The Presidential Merry-Go-Round

It was noted recently that there are some big presidential vacancies looming, most notably at Toronto, McGill, Victoria, and Dalhousie.  So who’s going to get these plum jobs? At Dalhousie, of course, we already know the answer: It’s Richard Florizone – formerly the VP Finance and Administration at the University of Saskatchewan, who also had stints at the International Finance Corporation (part of the World Bank), Bombardier, and the Boston Consulting Group. This wasn’t Florizone’s first attempt at becoming a

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December 13, 2012 1 Comment

Embrace and Contain

One of the reasons that Canadian universities have such an astonishing level of freedom from government oversight – particularly in Ontario – is that our university presidents have over the years achieved absolute mastery of the art of “embrace and contain.” Devotees of Yes, Minister, will know what I’m talking about. “Minister,” Sir Humphrey would say, “I am fully seized of your aims and will do my utmost to put them into practice.” This, of course, was code for saying that

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September 18, 2012 No Comments

77% Entitled

At HESA, we’re big on empirical evidence. We like it when people argue with data, rather than resort to the vacuous normative stuff that often passes for debate on issues like tuition fees. So, when I saw that the Association of Nova Scotia University Teachers (ANSUT) had published something on out-of-control executive compensation called A Culture of Entitlement which makes extensive use of data to “shed light on the steep increases in compensation for senior administrators since 2004,” I was naturally pleased.

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September 17, 2012 2 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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