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Category: Governance

Institutional Strategic Plans: Control v. Vision

Here are a couple of quick thoughts on institutional strategic plans and how they tend to fall into two big categories. Most institutions typically prefer plans that are about control.  That is, they want the plans to focus people’s agendas within an organization on a few key goals.  Sometimes these plans take the form of task-lists; other times they are focussed on a few institution-wide goals, complete with metrics (not surprisingly, these are the kinds of plans that the big

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April 19, 2022 1 Comment

Improving Boards of Governors

Improving Boards of Governors Last week, I did a piece on academic Senates and how they could be improved. This got a few of you asking, “what about Boards of Governors”?  Man of the People that I am, I have no choice but to accede.  I should start with the usual caveats about Boards in Canada: not only do they come in a variety of sizes (most have between 15-30 members but there are some outliers), possess a variety of practices with respect

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March 14, 2022 2 Comments

Improving Senates

I thought I would follow-up on Monday’s discussion of Laurentian University’s Senate-busting escapades with another piece on what Senates could – and should – be.  Because while I disagree strongly with what is being proposed there, I think there are some valid critiques to be made of how Senates function in many Canadian universities. Let me first acknowledge that Senate operations vary significantly, and while I am going to make some generalizations that I think are largely true, I am

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March 10, 2022 4 Comments

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

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March 7, 2022 3 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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