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Category: History Lesson

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

2003-04: The Historical Hinge of International Rankings

Cast your minds back, if you will, by about 15 years.  Paul Martin had yet to show us why great finance ministers make lousy Prime Ministers.  The ghastly CROCS fad was still three years away.  And in China, Professor Nian Cai Liu had just released the inaugural Academic Ranking of World Universities, known more colloquially as the Shanghai Rankings. While national rankings were old hat, the Shanghai Rankings’ global nature was something genuinely new.  The sadly-defunct magazine Asiaweek had tried

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December 6, 2018 2 Comments

A Short History of Federal PSE Transfers

A couple of weeks ago, I noted that the Parliamentary Budget Office was suggesting that the time may soon be upon us where the federal government is asked to take up a bigger share of funding provincial programs such as education.  In the interests of thinking about where the sector may be headed, it’s worth a quick trip down memory lane to see where we’ve been, and why federal transfers ceased to be a major funding avenue for institutions. Transfers for PSE

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November 6, 2018 3 Comments

History of PSE in Canada Part VIII: What it All Means

Thanks for sticking with me through my highly unofficial and deeply idiosyncratic history of Canadian PSE. I suppose if it doesn’t meet standards of historical inquiry, at least you all now have a pretty good sense of my priorities when it comes to understanding developments in Canadian higher education. Looking back at the full sweep of Canadian PSE’s history, it’s worth thinking about the paths we didn’t take. From the first, we didn’t take the English route of having just

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October 26, 2018 2 Comments

History of PSE in Canada Part VII – The here and now (since 2003).

The current era of PSE in Canada essentially took shape at the end of the Chretien Era.  There has been a little bit of evolution in institutional forms (this is the era in which “polytechnics” arrive and applied research becomes a thing at the college level, and several colleges were converted into universities) but really no change in system architecture. There are certainly budget changes – rapidly increasing in the period to about 2009, and then levelling off with international student

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October 25, 2018 1 Comment

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