Category: Governance

Those Two New Laurentian Reports

What Laurentian reports are we talking about now? Last summer, after the big round of layoffs at Laurentian, the administration said it wanted to do three big reviews before exiting CCAA protection – one for its real-estate portfolio, one for its overall operations, and one for its governance.  The first one, to my knowledge, has not been released, but the second and third were released last week.  You can see them here. Ok – anything you want to disclose before

Read More »

Same But Different (Part 2)

Yesterday, I outlined the key similarities between the US and Canadian higher education systems.  Today, let’s talk differences.  The most obvious dissimilarity is some of the institutional forms. Religious colleges are much thicker in the ground in the US, as are liberal arts colleges (neither is unknown in Canada, but they take up a lot less space).  Community colleges look vastly different: in Canada they are their own sector, with most programs leading to stand-alone vocational credentials, though “vocational” is

Read More »

Same But Different (Part 1)

One of the challenges I find in doing comparative higher education work is that because everyone in the field went to university, they think they know what a university is.  But the fact is universities around the world are different: they are run on different logics; they aspire to do different things and hence can have differing operational processes.  Making useful comparisons, or trying to infer motives for institutional actions in other countries, can be very difficult. One of the

Read More »

Don’t Mention the Monsters

Lawrence Freedman’s Strategy: A History is a useful (if lengthy) book if for whatever reason you are thinking about going into a strategic planning process.  It traces the history of the concept of strategy through its initial application in the military, then through politics, and eventually – post World War II – into the world of business.  Along the way it continually asks the question “what is strategy, anyway”, before eventually landing on a definition which is basically around leveraging strengths to

Read More »