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Category: Blogs

Not the Traveling Wilburys

Late last week, two Ontario colleges—St. Lawrence College ( in Kingston, with a substantial presence in Cornwall and Brockville) and Sir Sandford Fleming (in Peterborough)—announced their intent to “integrate as equal partners.” Many people (including me) at first thought that meant the two schools were merging. However, on closer reading of the announcement, I am not sure this is quite the case. Let me quote here from the quite extraordinary announcement: “We are committed to ensuring that students have the

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April 14, 2026 2 Comments

Boycotts and Antisemitism

A few weeks ago, the McGill Law Students’ Association (LSA) held a referendum to amend its constitution. Among the elements of the changed constitution were clauses which embedded the Association’s opposition to McGill’s having academic relations with institutions in Israel; i.e. it embedded a pro-boycott position. This made a certain segment of McGill’s donor class lose its mind, and it also prompted its President, Deep Saini, to send the alumni an email calling the motion “antisemitic” (in effect if not in intent) and

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April 13, 2026 1 Comment

The Fifteen: April 10, 2026

A lot has happened in the last three weeks, and there’s a lot that didn’t make it into this edition of the Fifteen, which is a lot heavier on events in Europe and Asia than usual. There’s a lot in here on science and research – from China looming supreme, to America punching itself in the face, to Australia being indecisive – as well as new evidence of a crisis of reproducibility. But politics gets a big place, too, what with

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April 10, 2026 No Comments

Strategic Planning and System Design in Malaysian Higher Education

Malaysia is one of those countries where higher education is almost always in the news. Partly it’s because Malaysia has for many years sought to use higher education to speed up economic development, but it also has to do with the government’s decision 55 years ago to use a complicated matriculation system to reserve a large number of places in public universities for what are known as Bumiputeras — that is, ethnic Malays and other indigenous peoples. On the one

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April 9, 2026 No Comments

CAUT Bulletin, 1963

About a month ago, I was doing one of my absolute favourite things in the entire world, which was browsing the shelves of Amy’s Used Books in Amherst, Nova Scotia (IYKYK) for old books on higher education. I picked up a simply ludicrous amount of loot there – the entire back-list of the Bulletin of the International Association of Universities from the 1960s to the 1980s, a copy of José Ortega y Gasset’s The Mission of the University, bound background papers to the Hurtubise/Rowat

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April 8, 2026 3 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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