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Category: Governance

The Academic Oligarchy’s Kryptonite

Following up on yesterday’s discussion on the long-term rise of administration: it occurred to me after hitting send that there’s another aspect to the rise of administration I forgot to mention – budgeting.  Historically, administration has to some degree grown as a function of the complexity of budgeting, for some very good reasons. A hundred years ago, budgeting in higher education was a fairly simple affair because universities didn’t actually do much (by today’s standards, anyway).  A small number of

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March 28, 2019 2 Comments

Governance, Management and Balancing Acts

Higher education is a hard thing to generalize about. Superficially, universities look the same the world over, but scratch beneath the surface a little and you’ll see that there are enormous differences in structures, policies, and cultures. Nevertheless, it’s still pretty safe to say that over the last 40 years (in some countries longer) three major trends have emerged more or less the world over:  first, in every country, there has been pressure to expand systems and accommodate greater participation in

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March 27, 2019 2 Comments

Management (or Lack Thereof)

[the_ad id=”12740″] There are steady complains about over-management or micro-management in universities.  And, sometimes, there’s a lot of truth to the complaints.  But I argue that in North America, there’s a pretty good case that universities are under-managed, and that an awful lot of the sector’s problems can be traced to under-management. When it comes to management, North American universities are quite different than, say, Australian and UK ones.  To over-generalize only a little bit, we only manage the institutions;

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June 21, 2018 4 Comments

Critical Friends

A few times a year I get asked to help with the drafting a university or college’s strategic plan.  Usually nothing major: a little bit of environmental scanning, talking about industry trends, that kind of thing.  I think I do enough to get a decent sense of where the pain points are in academic and strategic planning.  The most important one I wrote about back here – the fact that strategic planning is often done around academics rather than with them, mainly

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June 1, 2018 5 Comments

Faculty and Boards of Governors

While I was away having fun in Japan (the sumo was excellent, btw), the Canadian Association of University Teachers released a report called Board of Governors Structures at Thirty-One Canadian Universities ,which is well worth a gander.  As is often the case with CAUT’s stuff, it’s a mix of very useful and factual material combined and some…ah…curious editorializing. (Speaking of curious: how in the hell did CBC report the ridiculous story, planted by someone at the Carleton Faculty Union, that the university

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May 28, 2018 No 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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