Category: One Thought to Start Your Day

Is Japan Stirring?

I am in Tokyo this week and next (part vacation—the sumo was excellent, thanks for asking —and part study tour with the University Vice-President’s Network), so of course it’s time for another of my periodic attempts to sum up what’s going on in this always-fascinating country. Japan is—or at least was—known as a “hi-tech” society. But this, oddly enough, never meant that it was a “science” society. Japan for the most part did not get rich by developing its own

Read More »

The Future of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) in Canadian Higher Education

Two months ago, there was some thought that Trump’s big anti-DEI agenda might “embolden” a future Poilievre government into doing something similar in Canada. Looking at recent polls, this seems a tad hasty: deprived of Trudeau as a foil and faced with a national emergency that can’t be solved with infantile three-word slogans, Dimestore Pat Buchanan’s odds of leading the CPC to a sweeping victory seem more remote by the day. But there is something deeper at work here, too: namely,

Read More »

Nobody is Coming to Save Us, But…

You may have heard me say once or twice that “nobody is coming to save us.” I’ve been told that this has become something of a catchphrase in Canadian universities over the past year, so much so that I kind of wish we’d done merch with that slogan. The phrase is still true; in fact, given the metastasizing national security crisis, it’s arguably truer now than it was a year ago. But given the chaos south of the border, it

Read More »

Higher Education’s AI Future

You may have noticed—via the odd banner ad on this blog over the past six months—that HESA held a fantastic event in Calgary last week on the use of Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education. We had a great time. There were 25 sessions, roughly 100 presenters and 400 delegates from 80 institutions. It really was a great, pan-Canadian exchange, and the first in Canadian higher education to look at AI. A really huge thank you to all of our partners

Read More »

Time for CARPA?

Cast your mind back, if you will, to the magical days of 2021-22 when Canada still cared about things like innovation and a huge debate raged about how to do it properly, so that for once Canada might not be dead last in the OECD for things like productivity growth.  Basically, there were two camps in this debate. One said that the way to achieve it was to copy the American system of ARPAs (Advanced Research Projects Agencies, of which the OG

Read More »