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Category: Governance

The Listening Tour

There’s a little management technique gaining some traction called the “Listening Tour”.  In the US, over the past eighteen months, new Presidents at Carnegie Mellon and James Madison have used this to inaugurate their terms.  At Princeton, new President (and erstwhile Provost) Chris Eisgruber decided to embark on an entire “Year of Listening”, though why he needs a whole year when he’s been provost for the past nine is unclear.  Here at home, the pioneer of this is new Dalhousie

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January 15, 2014 8 Comments

Superior Strategy

You may recall that, a few weeks ago, I was somewhat harsh about Western’s new strategic plan for being a kind of Stepford-link strategy: generic, and utterly lacking in anything that suggested Western had its own strengths and personality.  If you follow me on twitter, you may have seen me make some similar remarks about Waterloo’s strategic plan.  Waterloo is one of the country’s few universities that genuinely has a unique value proposition, and deep strengths on which to build –

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October 7, 2013 No Comments

Shared Governance, Corruption in Education and Scientific Socialism

I’ve been in Romania this past week working with the World Bank and the Ministry of Education on an interesting strategy project. Just a few stories I thought I would pass on: Shared Governance: In what I think was an attempt to curry favour among faculty members, the previous Romanian government brought in a bill in 2011 which created what I think is quite a unique “bicephalous” system of university government.  Under this system, the University Rector (who, as in many

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June 7, 2013 2 Comments

Time for a New Duff-Berdahl?

Reading Peter C. Kent’s book on the Strax Affair at UNB – in which the case’s denouement was significantly affected by the then-recently-released report of the Duff-Berdahl commission – got me thinking about university governance. In Canada, university governance has mostly been run on a bicameral Senate/Board model for over a century.  In 1963, the Englishman, Sir James Duff, and the American, Robert O. Berdahl, were jointly appointed by AUCC and CAUT to look into how to modernize university governance, and reduce the

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April 10, 2013 3 Comments

Discipline, Consistency, and Commitment

Although its release didn’t get much play last week, HEQCO’s report on the results of the Strategic Mandate Agreement process was noteworthy.  Read casually, it’s a formal and polite response to a government request for advice.  But it’s actually better understood as a primal scream – albeit one elegantly rendered in true Embrace-and-Contain style – demanding some grown-up policy-making for a change. The SMA process was initiated back when Glen Murray (remember him?) decided to negotiate Strategic Mandates with each of

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April 8, 2013 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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