Category: Administration

Many of you seem amused by my use of the term “enshittification” (“word of the year” for 2023 by the American Dialect Society) to describe much of what is going on in Canadian higher education a the moment. I suspect just as many of you dislike my use of the term (hi, Mom!), but I’m going to keep using it anyway because it so concisely expresses today’s state of affairs. Technically, I am using the term incorrectly. When Cory Doctorow first

Yesterday I discussed and advocated for visioning exercises, particularly if your institution is about to undergo some radical changes. It is a lot easier to navigate a storm if you know where you’re going in the first place. Everyone in a university needs to be able to answer the question Why does this institution exist? What’s your raison d’être? To some of you, I expect that this question sounds stupid. Obviously, the answer is some kind of mix of “teaching,

I’ve had a couple of people say to me recently that in light of the current carnage, I must be having trouble getting business. “No time for strategy right now, huh?” Wrong. You see, “strategic planning” isn’t one single thing: it encompasses a huge variety of activities. And some of them, no, you probably don’t want to mess around with during an emergency. But others, you really, really do, and failure to do so is likely to make the carnage