Category: Blogs

Election 2025: The Minor Party Manifestos

Election 2025: The Minor Party Manifestos Morning all. As usual during federal elections, I devote some time to each of the party platforms before election day. Today, I am going to focus on the five parties that have absolutely no hope of forming government. Liberal and Conservative platforms will follow. In increasing order of likely seat totals: The new-and-centrist-and-made-some-kind-of- sense-when-Justin-was-running-but-harder-to-understand-now Canadian Future Party platform has a paragraph on postsecondary education. They’d like you to know they are in favour of more research.

Read More »

Innovation Without Borders: Galileo’s Networked Approach to Better Higher Education System

One of the biggest, but least remarked upon trends in European higher education in recent years is the growth of private for-profit, higher education. Even in countries where tuition is free, there are hundreds of thousands of students who now prefer to take courses at private for-profit institutions. To me, the question is, why? What sort of institutions are these anyway? Interestingly, the answer to that second question is one which might confuse my mostly North American audience. Turns out

Read More »

Announcing Re:University

So, I have a bit of an announcement to make today. I hope you’ll find it at least modestly intriguing. In a year with no shortage of bleak higher education stories, one of the big questions we’ve been asking this year is: how do institutions actually recover? Not in the vague, inspirational sense, but in the real-world, practical, hard-choices-on-the-table kind of way. That’s what our Recovery Project has been all about. Drawing on past periods of retrenchment, we’ve been learning what it

Read More »

Indigenous Relations

To St. John’s, where last week Memorial University published a “Draft Policy for Consultation on Indigenous Verification.” It’s a doozy. Here are the key bits: Verification Pathways for Recognized Indigenous Collectives in Canada Under the policy, an applicant will follow one of the three verification pathways for membership/citizenship with a Recognized Indigenous Collective in Canada: Pathway A requires the applicant to confirm their connection to a Recognized Indigenous Collective through the submission of primary documentation; Pathway B requires the applicant to

Read More »

To Poach or Not to Poach

Hi all. Welcome back to nine whole uninterrupted weeks of the blog. Let’s get to it. A couple of weeks ago, I mused about the possibility of individual universities using philanthropic dollars to start poaching some talented researchers wanting out from the United States. Now comes news that the University Health Network—the super-hospital network that in research functions as a massive force multiplier to the University of Toronto’s medical school—is trying to hire 100 top early career researchers from around the

Read More »