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Category: Government

(University) Life During Wartime

Since everyone is using war metaphors to describe current efforts against COVID-19, I thought it might be worth taking a trip down memory lane to look at what universities did during the World Wars (colleges, being mostly creatures of the 50s-70s, were not around then, so this is a single-sector survey).  I am not convinced it’s the right metaphor – in Britain, for example, their death-cult instinct makes them treat every crisis like it’s 1940. Because of their refusal to

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March 23, 2020 No Comments

Coronavirus (6) – Postcorona

Morning all.  Coronavirus again today, but I think my coverage of it is going to slow down.  The situation is settling down a bit and it doesn’t look like we are going to have avalanches of new decisions or anything to analyse.  If you want to follow the various states of institutional closure (who still has cafeteria service, which ones have travel restrictions, etc., keep checking in with Ken Steele, who seems to have this covered reasonably comprehensively.  But I suspect

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March 19, 2020 2 Comments

Encore une fois

You may remember that late in 2018 the Ontario government decided to put the kibosh on funding l’Université de l’Ontario français (l’UOF).  Then last fall, the federal government – showing a key eye for supporting minority language rights in Ontario if not consistency in funding minority language rights across the country – popped up and offered to pay for half of the running costs over the next eight years.  Up front.  As in, all the running costs for the first 4-5 years,

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March 10, 2020 No Comments

How to Make Policy

Take a ride with me.  First stop, London, England. UK university funding is handled by an intermediate institution known as the Office for Students (OfS).  The Government decides on the amount of money it wants to spend on higher education, and then the Office for Students decides how to distribute it.  Recently, the government decided to reduce operating funding slightly while giving a boost to capital spending.  How should the OfS respond? Intriguingly, it holds a public consultation.  It lays out

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February 12, 2020 2 Comments

Brookings Improves on Superclusters

A few weeks ago, the Brookings Institution – America’s oldest and possibly most influential think-tank – published a paper called The Case for Growth Centers: How to Spread Tech Innovation Across America.  The paper’s problematique is the narrow distribution of tech growth in the United States (my favourite factoid here is that 90% of the growth in the country’s 13 highest-tech industries occurred in just five metro areas: Boston, San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego and Seattle) and that for the good of

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January 30, 2020 No 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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