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Category: History Lesson

Curricular Change and The Decline of Poland

Sometimes Canadian universities drive me up the wall.  Mostly, it’s when they start lobbying for other people to take action in areas where the clearest problems lie within their own wheelhouse.  I speak in particular of Study Abroad and Work-Integrated Learning.  To be clear, I am all for more study abroad and more work-integrated learning. They’re both straight-up great ideas.  But it seems to me that if you’re going out to lobby for money to improve something, you might want to

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March 6, 2019 1 Comment

Income Share Agreements (Part 1)

Every once in awhile, someone comes up a “new” concept in student financing and people get very excited about it.  As in most other policy fields, the “newness” is a matter of perspective and debate: there’s only so many ways you can lend students money and many of the “new” ideas are just old ideas that got discarded for various reasons and resurrect either because circumstances have changed or because proponents aren’t aware of the history (or both).  The latest

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March 4, 2019 No Comments

British Innovation Lessons

I’ve been reading David Edgerton’s new book The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, which presents a bracingly contrarian view of Britain’s 20th Century.  It is, I think, particularly intriguing concerning whether the British left actually more nationalist than socialist (a question which I think might also be usefully asked of Canada’s own left).  In the middle of the book, it presents some fascinating information on the mid-century role of science and innovation in the British economy and suggests

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January 30, 2019 1 Comment

Universities and Universal Values

Morning all.  Happy New Year.  Welcome back.  I’m in Southeast Asia this week taking in some sights.  Travel in Asia always makes me think a lot about the ways in which different parts of the world conceive of higher education and the extent to which we both have and haven’t overcome these divisions today. Universities, as we understand them today, are a distinctively European invention.  They first appeared in Mediterranean countries in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, usually under church

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January 7, 2019 2 Comments

Academic Service (Third Mission)

On Friday, I talked a little bit about rankings which looked at universities’ “Third Mission”.  This is a new term for many North American readers, but it’s not much different than when we use “service” at an institutional level rather than an individual level.  But the notion of “service” is itself a pretty slippery one, so perhaps it is of interest to delve into this topic a bit. Universities were, from the very beginning, seen as economic assets.  Italian cities

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December 10, 2018 1 Comment

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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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