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Category: Government

American Higher Education Under Trump

Tomorrow, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States (actually, the 44th person to be President: Grover Cleveland’s two non-consecutive terms screw up the count).  What does this mean for higher education? First off, let’s recollect that where higher education is concerned, the US, like Canada, is a federation where the main decisions about funding public education are made at the state level. Decreased state investment in institutions and consequent rises in tuition have

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January 19, 2017 No Comments

Post-Brexit Options

One highly amusing by-product of the frantic Canada-EU-Walloon trade negotiation finale last fall was watching the UK government suddenly realize that negotiating agreements with a 27-country trade bloc is actually really difficult and that this Brexit thing is almost certainly not going to end well.  Which of course has some reasonably significant implications for UK universities.  But how exposed are UK universities to Brexit? Arguably, the bigger post-Brexit implications have to do with staff who may be denied residency, future

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January 12, 2017 2 Comments

Cluster Theory

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last twelve months, you’ll have noted that the Government of Canada has become enamoured of “innovation clusters” as a means of raising national productivity levels.  What should we make of this? For some annoying reason, the Liberals act as if cluster theory is something new rather than something which dates back to the mid-1980s (Michael Porter’s The Wealth of Nations gave the idea its first mass-market outing in 1990; six years later, Saskia

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December 8, 2016 No Comments

A Wish List for Budget 2017

A few days ago someone asked me what my wish list would be for the federal 2017 budget.  The science/innovation part of my answer will take a couple of posts to summarize (I’ll start addressing some of the issues related to the Science and Innovation Agendas over the next few days); but today I thought I’d give you my thoughts on the student aid part of the equation. Briefly, I have three wishes.  They are, in order: 1)      Implement the

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December 5, 2016 No Comments

Are NSERC decisions “skewed” to bigger institutions?

That’s the conclusion reached by a group of professors from – wait for it – smaller Canadian universities, as published recently in PLOS One. I urge you to read the article, if only to understand how technically rigorous research without an ounce of common sense can make it through the peer-review process. Basically, what the paper does is rigorously prove that “both funding success and the amount awarded varied with the size of the applicant’s institution. Overall, funding success was

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June 8, 2016 4 Comments
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