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Category: History Lesson

Fundamental Research

“Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value” (John McDougall, NRC president, yesterday). “Discovery comes from what scientists think is important, not what industry thinks is important.  Fundamental scientific advancement drives innovation, and that is driven by basic research.” (David Robinson, CAUT Associate Executive Director, yesterday). Some days, the level of discourse in Canadian higher education policy seems to be improving.  Other days, like yesterday, it is full of childish, one-dimensional arguments about the nature of science and

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May 8, 2013 1 Comment

A Thought for Gabriel Betancourt

In early 1918, a fellow by the name of Gabriel Betancourt was born in Medellin, Colombia.  If the name sounds faintly familiar, it’s probably because of his daughter, Ingrid, the Colombia politician who was famously held captive by FARC guerrillas for six years.  But in education, Gabriel is the one that matters.  He’s the one who invented the idea of student loans. To be fair, student loans weren’t entirely unheard of prior to WWII, but they were rare, and were offered by

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April 26, 2013 No Comments

A Tool To Strengthen the Economy

A persistent sore point within higher education is the complaint that politicians want higher education to be, “more geared to the needs of the economy” – the implication of this being that higher education is a public good in and of itself, which should hold itself above mere utilitarian concerns. This is a puzzling argument.  The arrival of state funding in the early nineteenth century was explicitly predicated on higher education being used as a tool to help strengthen the economy of

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April 15, 2013 1 Comment

Time for a New Duff-Berdahl?

Reading Peter C. Kent’s book on the Strax Affair at UNB – in which the case’s denouement was significantly affected by the then-recently-released report of the Duff-Berdahl commission – got me thinking about university governance. In Canada, university governance has mostly been run on a bicameral Senate/Board model for over a century.  In 1963, the Englishman, Sir James Duff, and the American, Robert O. Berdahl, were jointly appointed by AUCC and CAUT to look into how to modernize university governance, and reduce the

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April 10, 2013 3 Comments

Inventing Academic Freedom

If you’re a devotee of campus histories (and yes, I realize that’s a big “if”) you’ll know that they tend not to deal with many events in great detail.   Sadly, monograph-length treatments of specific events, or turning points, that define an institution are few and far between. This is why a recent book by Peter C. Kent called Inventing Academic Freedom: The 1968 Strax Affair at the University of New Brunswick is such a refreshing read.  Sure, it’s a parochial story

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April 9, 2013 1 Comment

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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