Category: Governance

Sayonara 2022

Morning all.  This is the final blog of 2022: service resumes January 9th.  When I do a send-off blog, it’s worth thinking about the year past and asking: what should we remember about this year and what do we expect from the year ahead? To my mind, there are really two big stories from 2022.  The first has to do with Laurentian University, which was still the scene of considerable intrigue as evidence gradually mounted that its then-President, Robert Haché,

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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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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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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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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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