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Category: History Lesson

Canadian PSE History through Election Manifestos: 1963-1974

If you’re just joining us, we’re exploring the history of post-secondary education in Canada as seen through election manifestos. 1949 to 1962 was yesterday.  The party manifestos for the five federal elections from 1963 to 1974 represent a kind of a highpoint in dealing with post-secondary education, research, and skills. It’s a fascinating period because you can see the pendulum swing from activist federal ambitions in education and skills to total avoidance. The Socreds were the most consistent party through

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September 24, 2019 No Comments

Canadian PSE History through Election Manifestos: 1949-1962

Care about politics?  Of course you do. Horrified by the current federal election campaign?  Of course you are.  Well, the One Thought blog has you covered: an entire week on previous federal election campaigns, just to keep you distracted from the present one!  This is fascinating, I swear.  No, really. Over the summer, I spent a ludicrous amount of time on Université Laval’s Poltext site, which contains all the federal election manifestos going back to 1949 (and much else besides), and it occurred to me

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September 23, 2019 No Comments

Servant Universities

A couple of days ago I discussed the choice Canadian institutions had between pursuing an international student market and serving local communities.  I am sure this remark will have been denounced as a false choice by many – and to be fair, it isn’t a perfect binary – so I thought I would expand on that thought. The notion of institutions “serving” their communities is, in some ways, a comparatively recent one.  The medieval universities “served” their communities by attracting students and

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August 29, 2019 No Comments

From the Shelves of HESA Towers (III)

As each year passes, it becomes harder to remember what exactly life was like before the internet.  How did we communicate?  How did we store and retrieve information?  (A colleague recently commented on twitter that watching All the President’s Men today feels like an ad for Google because the first hour or so is just people looking through phone books).  And, if you were in a specific technical field like higher education, how did you keep track of what was going on

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June 7, 2019 No Comments

Better Know A Higher Education System: Westeros

Although the politics of Westeros are widely discussed in North America (well, in HESA Towers, anyway, where we’re all getting ready for an office finale viewing on Sunday), relatively little attention has been paid to the role of higher education in the Seven Kingdoms.  Or rather, the ramifications of its lack thereof. Magic and dragons aside, Westeros seems like your basic high medieval economy/society – 13th or 14th century, by the look of it.   Europe at this point in its

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May 17, 2019 1 Comment

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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