Category: Blogs

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

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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

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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

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The Fifteen, April 4, 2025

The latest edition of The Fifteen highlights stories on workforce readiness and labour productivity (Hong Kong, the UK) and the expansion and regulation of private higher education (Spain, Tunisia).  But we’re also covering such issues as access problems in Finland, faculty issues in Iran and admissions reform in Vietnam, as well as, inevitably, the latest policy atrocities in the United States. Enjoy! That’s our quick global roundup in higher education—from privatization, access and employment outcomes to ambitious reforms and the

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“Anything Can Be Done With Anything”: Innovative Universities with Dara Melnyk

There’s an old joke about innovation in higher education.  It goes like this:  How many universities does it take to screw in a lightbulb.  Change?  Maybe that’s a bit unfair, but it’s unquestionable that the sector isn’t famed for welcoming change, in particular radical change.  One particular aspect is what is called isomorphism – the tendency of all institutions to look the same because they are copying some “ideal” model university (think Harvard or Oxford); indeed, that institutions which don’t copy the model

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