The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Governance

Trudeau vs. Harper

As we move inexorably towards a fall election (21 October, in case you’d forgotten), it is time to try to evaluate how well the present government has done on skills, science and higher education and how its record stacks up against its main competitor, the Conservative Party.  We obviously can’t do a manifesto analysis now because the Conservatives don’t have a manifesto yet (though frankly, this recent set of policy speeches by Andrew Scheer are less than encouraging).  However, while

Read More »
June 4, 2019 8 Comments

Does My Institution Need a Strategic Plan?

As our company’s name suggests, we think a lot about strategic planning here at HESA Towers.  And after a decade of doing this job, I have come to the conclusion that while most institutions do not spend enough time planning, too many of those that do issue plans are under the mistaken that these plans are in any way strategic.  Let’s start with the first half of that sentence: there is not enough planning in Canadian institutions.  Remember, planning is

Read More »
May 27, 2019 No Comments

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

Read More »
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

Read More »
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;

Read More »
June 21, 2018 4 Comments
Load More

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...