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Category: History Lesson

Better Know a Higher Ed System: Japan (Part 1)

I haven’t done one of these in awhile and since I’m vacationing here, so it seems like it’s time. Japan is a fascinating country for any number of reasons, but one of them is that it has played technological catch-up with the west not once but twice, and in both cases very successfully.  As such, reflecting on the role universities have played sheds considerable light on what we think of as “universal truths” about the benefits of higher education. Until

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May 22, 2018 No Comments

What’s in a name?

Every once in awhile I get asked: how come Canadians call the “universities” but Americans call them “colleges” and I had to confess that I really didn’t know beyond “it has something to do with the original American institutions being modelled on English universities and the Canadian ones on Scottish ones”.  But over Xmas, I did some reading and found the actual answer.  I think. Anyways, here’s my understanding: back in the 13th century, when the first two real European universities

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January 8, 2018 No Comments

Nationalism and Higher Education

For fairly obvious reasons, nationalism has been on people’s minds in higher education lately.  Nationalist/populists are on the loose, and their values and policies appear to be inimical to those of higher education.  The standard higher education party line usually includes i) something about knowledge knowing no boundaries ii) some reference to the earliest universities in Italy where the student body was fully international and iii) something about building global understanding for peace/trade/development/whatever. And that’s all true as far as it

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December 5, 2017 No Comments

The Canadian Way of Higher Education Co-ordination

Yesterday I talked a little bit about how competition, not co-operation, is in Canadian universities’ DNA (east of Manitoba, at any rate).  But that has never stopped governments from trying – usually fitfully and half-heartedly – from trying to create more co-ordination within the system.  David Cameron, in his 1991 book More Than an Academic Question (still probably best single-volume history of Canadian higher education), analyzed these attempts in some detail.  What’s interesting is how things have changed over time. One obvious

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November 17, 2017 2 Comments

Competitiveness, Homogeneity, and Historical Contingency

In his excellent book about the American higher education system A Perfect Mess, David Labaree makes the following point about how the American university system came to be so hyper-competitive. Its origins were remarkably humble: a loose assortment of parochial nineteenth-century liberal arts colleges, which emerged in the pursuit of sectarian expansion and civic boosterism more than scholarly distinction. These colleges had no academic credibility, no reliable source of students, and no steady funding. Yet these weaknesses of the American

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November 16, 2017 2 Comments

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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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