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Category: History Lesson

Origins

Higher education is a tradition-driven industry.  It’s frankly useless to try and deduce very much about national higher education systems based on public/private split, funding systems, methods of student selection, etc.  If you really want to understand what a country’s university system looks like, go find a history of the country’s first institutions.  That’s where you’ll find all the answers. Within each country, the first university (or perhaps two or three) tends to act as a “model”, which the rest

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November 18, 2014 1 Comment

CASA at 20

The Canadian Alliance of Student Associations (CASA) turns 20 early next year (January or June, depending on what you take as a founding date).  But since the real founding events actually happened the previous November, I thought it would be worth offering some thoughts on it now. Until the early 1990s, there had never been more than one national student association.  There was a National Federation of Canadian University Students dating from the 30s; this eventually became the Canadian Union

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November 14, 2014 2 Comments

Higher Education Reform Paradise on the Volga

I was recently in Moscow working on a small project, and so spent a couple of weeks mugging up on Russian higher education and its history.  My main takeaway is that there has never been a higher education system anywhere in the world that was more at the service of industry than that of the Soviet Union. One of the very first Bolshevik documents on higher education (“On the work of the Higher School”, 1925), states this very clearly: “the

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November 6, 2014 3 Comments

Cockroaches

One of the most maddening things about higher education journalism is the widespread assumption of fragility. Take the notion of vulnerability to technological disruption.  The most recent example of this is a piece from University World News (which really should know better) entitled “Can Universities Survive the Digital Age?”  It’s an absolutely ridiculous question that could only be posed by someone who knew virtually nothing of the history of universities. Every time there’s a technological innovation, somebody thinks the university

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November 3, 2014 5 Comments

Aquamarine

I went on a bit of a bender this summer reading histories of Canadian universities, and I really enjoyed them all.  Hugh Johnston’ Radical Campus, a history of Simon Fraser’s frankly batty early years was probably the most interesting, but I also quite enjoyed histories from Manitoba, Carleton, and Bishop’s. But I wanted to tell you my absolute favourite story from my summer reading, which concerns the creation of the Atlantic Veterinary College. It comes from the pages of that institution’s

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October 3, 2014 3 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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