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Category: Government

Liberty and Zhi: Chinese and Anglo-American Ideas of the University

While the world has a lot of higher education systems, two traditions in particular dominate. One is the Anglo-American tradition, including possibly its cousins in central and northern Europe, and the other is the one we see in China. The latter way is, in many ways, rooted in the former. Tsinghua University famously is a product of a US philanthropic gesture, albeit one funded by Boxer Rebellion Indemnities. And yet, its two sets of operating principles are very different, and

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March 19, 2026 No Comments

The Awkward Phase

It’s been interesting for us sitting around the edges of the new relationship between the federal government and the post-secondary community around security issues and watching two sides size each other up. Today, some thoughts on the matter and suggestions to speed up the process. So, let’s start with the internal challenges the two sides have in forging a relationship. On the Government of Canada side, it’s very much the case that the various players in the game are not on

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March 17, 2026 No Comments

Why Iranian Students Keep Protesting

Iran is a country with a lot of higher education stories. Take stories about students: they were a key part of the coalition that overthrew the Shah in 1979, and they were the ones who spearheaded the capture of the US embassy later that year. But since 1999, students have also been consistently and reliably at the head of anti-government protests. Iranian universities are as a result the centre of a great deal of physical confrontation at moments of national rebellion, such as

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March 12, 2026 No Comments

Skills, Innovation, Quality, Blindness

One of the many, many frustrating things about Canadian policy over the past couple of decades is the combination of blindness and bad habits that our policy makers have with respect to the role of skills. Let’s start with the blindness, which mostly applies to our policymakers’ understanding of the relationship between skills and innovation. Innovation, to be clear, is not “invention”. It’s not about discovering some new idea or application and then building a world-beating company around. This might be the tech

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March 10, 2026 No Comments

There Is Such A Thing As A Dumb Question

You may have seen a story last week from CBC about the New Brunswick provincial government wanting to slash $35-50M from post-secondary funding this year. The story was actually about four days old when the CBC ran it – l’Acadie Nouvelle had all the goods the previous Friday based on one quite astonishing piece of paper that the Minister of Post-Secondary Education, Training and Labour circulated to university Presidents at a meeting two weeks ago. Here’s the picture L’Acadie Nouvelle

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March 2, 2026 2 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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