Public Engagement in Strategic Planning
A key thing about strategic planning exercises in higher education is that they are pretty much the only time when universities…
November 25, 2021
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A key thing about strategic planning exercises in higher education is that they are pretty much the only time when universities…
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
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
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
Last week, I wrote a piece about how most Canadian universities seem to have come through the pandemic financially unscathed or even a little bit better off. Briefly, universities pulled back on the spending in expectation of a collapse in revenues and then the collapse never really happened. Result: higher surpluses. Let’s just say the reactions to this piece were…heartfelt. And they often involved some combination of the adjective “lying”, and the nouns “tightwad”, “bastard” and “admins”. To the extent
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