Category: Blogs

Tenure and Promotion Criteria: You Get What You Ask For

Incentives matter. And all the major extrinsic incentives of university life can be found in documents known as “tenure and promotion criteria” (hereafter TPC). Every institution has a set of these (or indeed often multiple versions of them, since the criteria often vary from one faculty to another. Here’s McGill’s policy. Here is Waterloo’s. Here’s an extremely detailed one produced by the University of British Columbia. They are not exactly the same, but they rhyme. And what’s fascinating is what is not in any of them. Let’s start with research, or as

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Rays of Optimism, Paths Forward

Last Thursday and Friday, HESA held our Re: University conference in Ottawa. It achieved what we wanted it to achieve – to get people to have hard, tough conversations about what’s ahead and how to deal with the still-growing threat to Canadian universities. Today, I want to clue everyone in on a couple of highlights and meditate on a way forward. The opening session, with RBC’s John Stackhouse and two former Ontario premiers, Dalton McGuinty and Bob Rae, was in

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Application Frustration

It’s application season. Time used to be, I could give y’all some really good insight into application trends by using data from the Ontario University Application Centre as I did here, in 2018.  And here, in 2021. All thanks to a modicum of data transparency Until three years ago, OUAC was pretty good about providing data on applicants. It would tell you about applicant numbers, it would tell you about first-choice applications, and it would tell you about total applications.

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The Fifteen: January 30, 2026

Hi all. The Fifteen is back with the choicest higher education stories from around the world over the past two weeks.    That’s all for now: see you back here in two weeks.

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Uzbekistan’s Higher Education Boom

Uzbekistan is not a country that intrudes on western consciousness very much. If people think of Uzbekistan at all, they tend to think of it for its past glories. Perhaps they know a little bit about for the Silk Road cities of Tashkent and Bokhara, or the brilliant city of Samarkand, whose Registan and grand Observatory, built by the Scientist-King Ulugh Beg, briefly made the region the world’s centre of astronomy and mathematics in the early fifteenth-century. But since the silk road

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