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Category: One Thought to Start Your Day

EDI and the Measurement of Merit

Across most of the world, the concept of academic merit tends to get operationalized as “best at passing a certain test taken by a limited group of people at a certain point in time.” A competition, in other words. For young people, it tends to involve passing an exam or set of exams, be they the American SAT, the Chinese gaokao, the Indian JEET, the French baccalauréat, etc. For aspiring professors, the competition is a little more subjective in the sense that

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March 25, 2025 2 Comments

Observations and Suggestions about Boards of Governors

 Today, a few random observations about University and College Boards of Governors, based on some thinking prompted by a class talk I gave at OISE last week and some noodling about Bill 12 in Nova Scotia. I have three thoughts and three propositions.  1) Boards of Governors Have Complicated Job Descriptions  Formally, the role of Boards is pretty clear. They choose institutional leadership, set (or at least approve) institutional priorities and—this one is the most important—they oversee institutional finances to make

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March 24, 2025 No Comments

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

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March 19, 2025 No Comments

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,

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March 18, 2025 No Comments

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

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March 17, 2025 5 Comments
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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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