The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Governance

Chair to Chancellor: Lessons in Leading Modern Universities

Every Christmas, this blog invites the University of Tennessee’s Robert Kelchen on the show to do his top 10 stories of the year in the United States. One story keeps coming up: who, in their right mind, would want to be a university president these days? What with the financial pressure, the relentless politics, both on campus and dealing with state and federal governments, it’s an absolutely thankless job. Well, today our guest is someone who maybe led the way

Read More »
April 30, 2026 No 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

Read More »
April 13, 2026 1 Comment

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

Read More »
April 8, 2026 3 Comments

Coalition-Building

I spent last weekend reading Joe Studwell’s new book How Africa Works, the sequel (of a sort) to his earlier, simply brilliant, book How Asia Works. Both are works of political and economic history, trying to work out how various countries (Japan, Korea, Taiwan in one case; Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia and Rwanda in the other) came to be regional leaders in development. According to Studwell, examining the keys to success through the lens of democracy vs. dictatorship is not particularly helpful. What tends to matter,

Read More »
March 11, 2026 No Comments

The Three Meanings of Tenure

It has become apparent to me recently that not everyone understands the term “tenure” in quite the same way. Basically, the misunderstanding comes down to this: is tenure a very limited term which is specifically related to protections related to academic freedom? Or does it refer to the entirety of job protections that professors have acquired over the years, many of which are not related to academic freedom? The quick answer is that strictly speaking, it’s the former, but colloquially,

Read More »
January 19, 2026 2 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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...