The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Governance

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

Read More »
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

Read More »
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

Read More »
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,

Read More »
February 1, 2023 4 Comments

Another Suspect ANSUT Report

The Association of Nova Scotia University Teachers (ANSUT) recently released a report entitled A Culture of Entitlement, which purports to analyze the increase of executive salaries versus those of academic staff.  It’s being used as a rallying cry among several faculty unions which are either already (Cape Breton) or about to go (Saint Mary’s) on strike and is very much worth a read even if – as I show below – there are some major problems with the analysis. Readers

Read More »
January 31, 2023 1 Comment

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...