The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Podcast

The AfD and German Higher Education

In many ways, Germany seems like a higher education paradise. Sure, the funding might not be as generous as elsewhere and career progression can be problematic—but basically, academic freedom is highly prized, as are continental connections across Europe, and policymaking within the system is highly consensual. You can’t have everything, but that’s quite a lot. But as Germans are discovering, consensual decision-making only works if everyone agrees to the ground rules. And in recent years, a new political force has

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October 8, 2026 No Comments

Lords of Serendipity

As you might imagine, I am pretty fond of campus novels. A frequent weakness, however, is that the idealize the idea of a campus, or at least the of a particular type of campus, or at least of a particular types of program (English professors are hugely over-represented in campus novels and indeed among campus novel-ists). What you don’t often see is a campus novel that actually exhibits genuine skepticism about the enterprise itself. That’s not the case with Randy Boyagoda’s new

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October 1, 2026 No Comments

Responding to Online Entrance Exam Cheating at UNAM

Higher education dominated the front pages of Mexico’s media for most of this past summer. The reason? Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the country’s largest, most prestigious, and selective institution, better known as UNAM, put its entrance exam online for the first time. 158,000 students took the exam, and the results, well, they weren’t good. As the exams were marked, it became evident that there were an unusual number of extremely high, near-perfect scores. Suspicions of cheating were naturally aroused.

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September 24, 2026 No Comments

The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood

We tend to think of universities as places full of physical things: laboratories, libraries, property, above all, buildings. They’re more than that, of course. They’re communities of scholars with missions and values. Some people think they should be less, that education would be better off in the cloud, online, and liberated from mere place. But for most of their history, universities have been undeniably place-based, material to the max. Today, my guest is William Whyte. He’s a professor of social

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September 17, 2026 No Comments

The Postliberal University

Hi, everyone. I’m Alex Usher, and this is the opening episode of season five of the World of Higher Education podcast. American higher education is going through some unprecedented times. Republican governments in the States and in Washington now treat universities and colleges not as partners, but as an enemy to be conquered. University presidents are as likely to be pilloried by politicians as they are to be treated as important civic leaders. And legislators seem to feel empowered to

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September 10, 2026 No Comments
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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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