For the next few days I want to take everyone through universities the way a Board of Governors sees them – or at least, the way a good governing Board should see them (some but not all of it applies to colleges as well; I’ll try to highlight both where possible), and that is through the lens of risk. It is the role of the Board of Governors (again, good ones) to ask the question, over and over, “what could go
It’s been awhile since we’ve taken a policy tour out west, but it’s time I think to take a look at what’s going on in Alberta, where the NDP government is past its midpoint and starting to work towards an election in 2019. One day, someone is going to write a fantastic political book about the Alberta NDP. This is a party that went from (essentially) nothing to government in the space of a few crazy weeks in 2015. They
Let’s do another blog on this topic because everyone loves talking executive compensation. Yesterday we looked at Presidential pay in international comparison and saw that Canadian university Presidents have fairly low pay compared to equivalents in other English-speaking countries. But, one might argue, that’s the wrong metric. Maybe the real problem isn’t high pay so much as a relatively quick rise in pay over the past few years. That’s a fair argument. But let’s see what the data says. My data source
Over the summer, the revelation that the University of Alberta paid Indira Samarasekera two full years of administrative leave at over $550,000 per year after the conclusion her ten-year (two-term) Presidency caused a series of snit-fits, the most notable one being this one from Paige MacPherson, the Alberta Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. As I’ve noted before (here and here), Canadian university Presidents are not that well paid, at least by the standards of other Anglosphere universities. Paul Kniest, of Australia’s National Tertiary
Last Tuesday, federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau set the date for the federal budget for next Wednesday (March 22) and naturally people are wondering: what goodies are in store? Without being privy to any inside information, here’s my take on where we are going. At the press conference announcing the budget date, Minister Morneau dropped some important hints. The biggest one is that, contrary to what had been heavily promoted for the past year, this budget will not be an
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