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Category: History Lesson

Lessons from the Rise of Tax Credits

I’m feeling low on creativity today, so I’m going to go to that old stand-by: telling war stories. And specifically, I’m going to go back and trace the rise of tax credits in the Canadian higher education system and what that tells us about policy-making in Canada. Tax benefits for education go back to the late 1950s. There was pressure at the time to create a “national system of scholarships”, but this clearly was going to cause problems in Quebec.

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May 26, 2017 3 Comments

Populists and Universities, Round Two

There is a lot of talk these days about populists and universities.  There are all kinds of thinkpieces about “universities and Trump”, “universities and Brexit”, etc.  Just the other day, Sir Peter Scott delivered a lecture on “Populism and the Academy” at OISE, saying that over the past twelve months it has sometimes felt like universities were “on the wrong side of history”. Speaking of history, one of the things that I find a bit odd about this whole discussion

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April 11, 2017 3 Comments

Lessons from Mid-Century Soviet Higher Education

I’ve been reading Benjamin Tromly’s excellent book Making the Soviet Intelligentsia: Universities and Intellectual Life under Stalin and Khrushchev. It’s full of fascinating tidbits with surprising relevance to higher education dilemmas of the here and now. To wit: 1) Access is mostly about cultural capital. There were times and places where communists waged war on the educated, because the educated were by definition bourgeois. In China during the cultural revolution, or in places like Poland and East Germany after WWII,

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April 6, 2017 4 Comments

Representing Universities

Some light reading today, after a heavy week. There’s a lot of talk these days about the political divide between those with higher education and those without. But I want to take you back to a time, where that political divide was made real. A time when universities actually had their own seats in Parliament, non-physical constituencies where the electors were made up entirely of alumni. The practice of granting universities representation in Parliament seems to originate in Scotland sometime

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March 24, 2017 3 Comments

There is no Fourth Industrial Revolution

I am seeing an increasing number of otherwise thoughtful people in Canadian university and research circles going around talking about the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”.  They need to stop. There is no such thing as the Fourth Industrial Revolution.  It is a catch-phrase made us by Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum (the Davos folks), which he developed in an eponymous book released in late 2015.  I read it.  It’s dreadful.  Seriously, seriously awful.  No redeeming characteristics whatsoever. The

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March 20, 2017 10 Comments

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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