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Category: Governance

Strategy Should Hurt: Ways to Make it Bearable

Long-time readers will know my views about the difference between strategies and strategic plans.  A strategy is a course of action, a set of beliefs about how to succeed.  A plan is, above all else, a list of goals to achieve over a given period.  One does not require the other.  Sometimes plans can change from one edition to the other with no change in actual strategy (though bits of meta-strategy – vision, mission, etc. – get some light editing

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November 14, 2023 1 Comment

University Governance in Canada: Navigating Complexity

As the title of this podcast implies, this show is meant to cover as broad a swathe of higher education across the Globe. To make room for all that, we mostly stay away from Canadian topics (you get enough of that on the blog anyway). But today we’re going to change things up a bit in order to talk about one of my favorite books of 2022. Last fall, a quartet of Canadian higher education scholars – Julia Eastman, Olivier

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June 1, 2023 2 Comments

Economies of Scale and the Unmanageability of Universities

I’ve recently had reason to ponder some of the mysteries of university management.  I’ve concluded that it’s much harder to run a university in a moderately efficient fashion than it is to run pretty much any other type of organization.  And I say this not because of the multiple veto- (or at least go-slow) points that get set up through the process of academic governance, but rather simply because disciplinary structures stand in the way of most useful economies of

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May 31, 2023 4 Comments

Leave Me Alone

Recently, I was somewhat surprised to discover the sheer variety of definitions of the term “collegiality” that are found in major online dictionaries. Collins places collegiality as a method of governance “the sharing of authority among colleagues” or, according to Oxford, it is “a word used in a theological context to signify that a group of bishops constitute a body, not a group of individuals” (which applies to universities since the original ones were nearly all church-governed).  A second definition

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May 1, 2023 3 Comments

Full Participation

The Memorial University of Newfoundland Faculty Association (MUNFA) is on strike.  The strike seems not primarily about salaries (the two sides are not that far apart, 16% over 4 years vs 12% over 4 years plus a signing bonus) and only a bit about post-employment benefits (management wants to funnel new staff into a somewhat less generous pension plan).  Rather, if you follow many of the strikers online, you’ll see that the big rallying call is for “collegial governance”. Now,

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February 1, 2023 4 Comments

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.

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