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Category: Canada

The Continued Cheapening of the Term “Academic Freedom”

Exhibit One: A Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) briefing note on outsourcing of IT services at universities contains the phrase “Academic staff can challenge access to their professional and personal data by providers of cloud services based on their academic freedom and privacy rights…” Exhibit Two: A CAUT “investigation” shows that at the University of Manitoba, one group of economics profs doesn’t like another group of economics profs, and the majority sometimes uses its democratic rights to make decisions that the minority

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March 24, 2016 No Comments

A New Focus for Student Unions

It’s that time of year when student elections are on and occasionally I get asked a question like “what’s the future of student unions?” and “what could student unions be doing better”?  These are good questions. Here’s my answer. For the most part, student union budgets go into providing “services”.  Often, an awful lot of this ends up simply paying for light, heat and maintenance of student union buildings.  Big chunks also go to managing and overseeing the vast number

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March 10, 2016 1 Comment

The Coming Cost Debate in Ontario

Today I want to think about how the new Ontario system of student assistance is going to play out.  I think there is the potential here for quite an interesting and useful debate; but the timetable is somewhat tricky. As you will recall, the Government of Ontario is rolling out a plan to provide enough grants to fully offset tuition in most university and college programs for students from families with incomes of less than $50,000.  That’s going to happen

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March 8, 2016 1 Comment

What’s Next for Student Aid?

On the day of the Ontario budget, I half-sarcastically lamented on twitter that since the budget adopted so many good ideas that I (among others) had pushed over the years that, what was there left to write about? But having now had a few days to think about it, it’s occurred to me that there is still a lot of room left to innovate in student aid. So, herewith, the policy agenda for the next decade or so: 1) Nine

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March 7, 2016 No Comments

A New Logo for Canadian Higher Education

Last week, the government of Canada announced to great fanfare (Hip Hip Hooray! Caloo Callay!) that Canada has a new international education brand.  They actually meant “logo” not “brand”, but whatever – long past due because the old logo was terrible.  To wit:           Ridiculous, right?  “Education in/au Canada”?  Most students who want to come study in Canada do so in order to improve their English, and Ottawa comes up with a logo that requires you to

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March 4, 2016 2 Comments
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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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