It’s Friday, so it seems like a good day to write about one of the crazy books I have on my shelves (which, as any of my staff can tell you, is a theme that could last for quite some time). Here’s one that’s kind of relevant, given that it’s about an event that ended 50 years ago next week: Shut It Down! A College in Crisis, which is about the strike at San Francisco State (SFS) College in 1968-1969.
Higher education is a hard thing to generalize about. Superficially, universities look the same the world over, but scratch beneath the surface a little and you’ll see that there are enormous differences in structures, policies, and cultures. Nevertheless, it’s still pretty safe to say that over the last 40 years (in some countries longer) three major trends have emerged more or less the world over: first, in every country, there has been pressure to expand systems and accommodate greater participation in
I’m on my way to Moscow today. It’s become one of my favourite destinations not only because I can walk around and pretend I am in my favourite novels (I highly recommend an early morning stroll to the Patriarch Ponds and then sit on one of the benches to read the opening chapter of The Master and Margarita) but also because Russia in general holds a mirror up to the west and makes you question the “normal” order of things.
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
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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