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Category: One Thought to Start Your Day

Garbage In, Garbage Out: Nova Scotia Edition (Part 1)

You may have heard of the program costing exercise (as part of an Academic Program Review) that the government of Nova Scotia has foisted on the institutions in that province. Today, I am going to go through how the exercise is being conducted as well as a few ways in which I find it lacking. Before I start, two nota benes (notas bene?). First, no one has paid HESA to do this analysis. This is a labour of…well, not love,

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May 19, 2026 1 Comment

Lectures, Essays, Genies, and Bottles

A couple of weeks ago, the Times Higher Education printed a kind of farewell interview with the University of Waterloo’s outgoing President Vivek Goel. Like many THE interviews of this nature, it’s a bit of an odd duck, spending half the time explaining to a global audience who this person is and why they and their institution are important and leaving only a couple of hundred words for the subject to say anything useful about their own legacy and the future. But what Goel did say

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May 13, 2026 1 Comment

The Country 100 Ranking

You may have seen a spate of headlines recently, such as this one in University Affairs, about how Canada is considered #5 globally in terms of higher education according to a new “Country 100” ranking done some outfit called Measures HE. Cue minor celebrations: woo woo! Someone thinks we are top ten! Etc. The troublemakers who make up the readership of this blog have questions, I am sure. Naturally, I am here to answer them. First, who is “Measures HE”? It is a data consultancy formed by two guys who used

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May 12, 2026 No Comments

Everybody Hates John Tibbits

Note: I am writing this piece early on Friday morning, the day after this story broke. It is possible some details may have emerged over the weekend to render some aspects of this blog incorrect. Apologies if so. On Thursday, the government of Ontario dismissed the Board of Governors at Conestoga College on grounds of financial mismanagement and replaced them with a single appointed administrator.  This was grounds for schadenfreude among many folks who believe that John Tibbits and Conestoga

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May 11, 2026 1 Comment

Canadian Research vs. German Research

Hi all. I’m in Germany this week along with the members of our University Vice-Presidents Network having a blast networking with German institutions and hearing from some of the sharpest commentators on the German higher education scene, including Frank Ziegele, author of one of my favourite books of 2025, Authentic Universities (podcast interview here) and Jan-Martin Wiarda, my sort-of German equivalent in the sense of being a prominent education blogger, (albeit much more journalistically-inclined than I am). It’s been a

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May 6, 2026 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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