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Category: Governance

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

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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

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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,

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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,

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January 19, 2026 2 Comments

The Small-Tent Path to Disaster

Morning all. Back to the grind. One of the surprising things I discovered over the break was that the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) seems to think that the sector is in good enough shape that it can afford to apply purity tests to external support. See specifically the article in the last CAUT Bulletin by the University of Regina’s Marc Spooner entitled Not All Calls for Public Funding are Good. Spooner’s ire is directed at the Royal Bank

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January 5, 2026 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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