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Category: Hello Goodbye

Back to School 2026

Welcome back everyone. It’s the Tuesday after Labour Day, and that means it’s time to start Blog Year 16 (gulp) with a look ahead over the next ten months or so. I’m looking at three very big themes. Let’s start with the one big piece of news over the summer that has the potential to overwhelm pretty much everyone: the release of the Report on Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences. It’s not the world’s most sophisticated piece of analysis –

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September 8, 2026 1 Comment

Blue Skies Ahead

Morning everyone. Today is the last blog for a few weeks (though there will be a podcast tomorrow and a Fifteen on Friday). Normal service will resume on September 8th.  For my June send-off, I often paint a pretty solemn “state of PSE” picture. Not gonna lie: 2025-26 has been a bit of a rough year. However, with the exception of British Columbia (sorry guys, you’re pretty much toast), I am pretty sure our sector has already hit bottom in

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June 10, 2026 1 Comment

Trust Requires Change Requires Trust

Hi all. Tomorrow will feature my annual interview with Rob Kelchen about the year in US higher education, and Friday is the final Fifteen of the year, so that makes today the final regular blog of the year. And that means time to sum up and look forward. To sum up: the events of the past few months leave me pretty pessimistic. And looking forward: there are grounds for optimism, but they are slim.  The crux of the problem is this: people

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December 10, 2025 3 Comments

Five Rules for 2025-26

Morning all.  It’s been a busy summer at HESA Towers. We’ve been developing Boardwise, our new suite of governance products with our partners at Balsam Advisory, and exploring new ideas on data governance and analytics with our friends at Plaid Analytics. We’ve also been touring the country with the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Thought Leadership Office and the Business +  Higher Education Roundtable (BHER) to talk about higher education, economic growth and productivity. The “what we heard” document from

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September 2, 2025 2 Comments

Summer 2025

So. This is the last blog of the academic year. Service resumes Tuesday, 2 September. It’s been a long year. I’m pretty tired. How about you? This was the year it all kind of came crashing down: not just here in Canda, but everywhere else too. It’s too long to go through and my more faithful readers already know the story. It’s not just in Canada. In France, Australia, and the UK, we saw institutions having similar problems: all these

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June 11, 2025 1 Comment
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One Thought to Start Your Day

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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