Category: Canada

University Governance in Canada: Navigating Complexity

As the title of this podcast implies, this show is meant to cover as broad a swathe of higher education across the Globe. To make room for all that, we mostly stay away from Canadian topics (you get enough of that on the blog anyway). But today we’re going to change things up a bit in order to talk about one of my favorite books of 2022. Last fall, a quartet of Canadian higher education scholars – Julia Eastman, Olivier

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Progress Studies and Data Collection in Higher Education

One of the things that absolutely cheeses me off about the field of higher education as a field is how little attention is paid to what might be called “progress studies”.  What are “progress studies” you ask?  Well, let me turn things over to Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowan, who coined the phrase in an Atlantic article a few years ago. “Progress itself is understudied. By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that

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Quid Pro Quo

The last federal budget was, as I noted at the time, a freaking disaster for post-secondary education, and a vivid warning to Government Relations that the arguments that the system – well, universities anyway – had hitherto relied upon were simply not working anymore and that a re-think was required.  Judging by the twitter convos I keep an eye on, I think this lesson is starting to penetrate, in the sense that people are recognizing that simply pointing at Israel

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The Political Argument for Higher Education

Let me start with three comments/conversations I’ve seen and had in the past little while. Those are all interesting observations on their own but let’s think about the implications of the three comments together.  In other words, institutions have two choices.  First, they can wait for brief moments when the political system allows politicians to ignore the short-term interests of donors and hit them hard.  Or, second, they can exert themselves to try to make institutions like universities and colleges

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Three Unrelated Stories

Sometimes I need a mental break from writing a few hundred words on one topic.  So, today, here’s a few hundred words on three separate topics. 1) The Sexuality Gap.  A few years ago, Statistics Canada threw a question on sexual orientation into the Canadian Community Health Survey.   What this meant was that we suddenly got a lot of demographic data on the country’s LGBTQ+ population, including the finding – published in Ethnocultural diversity among lesbian, gay and bisexual cultures

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