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Category: Governance

Governing Boards, Singular and Plural

Last week’s blogs (here and here) about the Alberta Vision 2030 plan seem to have been quite popular.  The one topic I received the most mail about was the governance piece and the idea of putting multiple institutions under a single Board, which seemed to confuse a lot of people.  So I thought I would take this morning to run a little class on what the many American experiments in system governance have to teach us (and make no mistake, the model

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November 16, 2020 1 Comment

How Many Faculties is Too Many?

Academic bureaucracy is weird.  Basically, about 150 years ago, it was decided that it was important to have two layers of administration interposed between an individual faculty member and a University President (and later, once the university expanded, a senior team with various Vice-Presidents).  One layer came to be called a “department” and one level came to be called a “faculty”.  These theoretically mapped on to the branches and limbs of the Tree of Knowledge (so to speak).  But they

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October 6, 2020 2 Comments

What do Strategic Plans Actually Say?

Today’s post is co-authored by Alex Usher and Michael Savage Yesterday’s blog focused on the structure of strategic plans, asking whether they are built from the mission statement backwards or from upwards from a checklist of ideas people had without looking at the overall picture?  (answer: for the most part they are built from checklists and hence are not particularly strategic, though they as planning documents they may work perfectly fine).  Today we’re going to dig into the substance of

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September 29, 2020 5 Comments

Re-Setting Strategy After a Punch in the Mouth

A great nineteenth-century expert on strategy, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, credited his success over Napoleon to resiliency.  Bonaparte, he said “planned campaigns just as you might make a splendid set of harnesses. It looks very well; and answers very well; until it gets broken; and then you are done for. Now I made my campaigns of ropes. If anything went wrong, I tied a knot and went on.” There’s a twentieth-century equivalent, too.  In the words of the great twentieth-century

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June 4, 2020 1 Comment

The Mediocrity of Canadian Quality Assurance

We have two more provinces looking at Performance-Based Funding (PBF): Manitoba and New Brunswick.  The former isn’t a huge surprise – it was something recommended by the Manitoba College Review (conducted in part by yours truly) and it was clear that if PBF was enacted, it would need to include colleges as well.  We can only hope that they follow the part of the recommendation which limited the performance funding to graduation outcomes, and not try to jam in every

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February 26, 2020 5 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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