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Category: Governance

Laurentian (Really the Last This Time)

OK, I thought this was all over with the AG’s report.  But on Monday the very last shoe dropped, so here I am again.   What happened?  Well, you may recall that in the initial affidavit submitted by Laurentian to the Companies Creditor Protection Act (CCAA) proceedings, two exhibits – labelled “EEE” and “FFF” – were kept sealed from the public.  The former was a letter from the Minister of Colleges and Universities, Ross Romano, to Laurentian University, dated 21 January

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November 30, 2022 1 Comment

University Governance in Canada

If you’ve been in any senior university administrator’s offices in the last few weeks, there’s a good chance you’ll have seen a paperback with vaguely constructivist art cover entitled University Governance in Canada: Navigating Complexity by the scholarly quartet of Julia Eastman, Glen Jones, Claude Trottier and Olivier Bégin-Caouette.  Within administrative circles, it’s getting a lot of buzz and praise for being an accurate portrait of the state of Canadian higher education in the early 2020s.  On balance, I think

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October 6, 2022 No Comments

The Age of Volatility

Morning all.  Yes, the summer is over and classes are returning, but fortunately your daily intake of higher education commentary/snark/contrarianism is back as well.  I missed you guys, too. Anyways, welcome to the 2022-23 academic year.  This was supposed to be the year we got back to “normal”.  And the occasional campus mask mandate aside (which I fully approve), on the surface maybe this year will feel a bit 2019-ish.  But if you look underneath the hood, things are not

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August 29, 2022 2 Comments

Fin (pour l’instant)

So, this is the final entry for Year XI of the One Thought Blog.  I hope you have enjoyed another year of my semi-structured scribblings.  Regular service will resume sometime around Labour Day (not quite sure about the exact date yet). I usually end my writing years broadly assessing where we are as a sector and overall, I tend to the positive, if for no other reason than to throw my usual curmudgeon persona into sharp relief.  But this year, I

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June 9, 2022 3 Comments

Strategic Actors, Strategic Planning, Strategic Hiring

Why do universities keep writing strategic plans?  It sounds like a simple question, but it isn’t.  Every institution has a strategy, in the sense that it has a sense of “where it wants to go” and how to get there in a tolerably efficient manner.  These strategies aren’t always written down, but they exist nonetheless: that is to say (to get all Mintzberg for a minute) that strategy can be “realized” without being “intended”.   Writing a strategic plan is – in

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June 1, 2022 4 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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