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Category: History Lesson

Basic Research Turns 67

Here’s an interesting little nugget: “basic research,” like the atomic bomb, was born in July 1945. The term did not exist until coined by Vannevar Bush for his work Science: the Endless Frontier, a roadmap for post-war American science policy commissioned by President Roosevelt. Prior to WWII, no distinction was made between “basic” and “applied” science; although some sciences were obviously more theoretical than others, it was widely recognized that science was always “applied,” at least to some degree. After

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August 13, 2012 2 Comments

A Back-to-Basics Tuition Policy

Whenever I hear people whine about some allegedly soul-destroying atrocity in the academy and wondering what happened to the “heart” of the university and its ancient ideals, I always smile. I for one would totally be up for a return to the 18th-century university. Starting with pricing policies. Back in the day, the administrative purpose of universities as corporate entities was mainly one of certification: masters would sit together and decide which students were worthy of degrees. The bureaucratization of

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March 9, 2012 No Comments

Rankings Indigestion

The easiest knock on rankings like those produced by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, is that they only measure research, and that universities are about much more than just research. That’s absolutely true, of course, but to my mind it also reflects a general unwillingness to come to grips with what an odd, hybrid of an organization higher education really is. Go back two hundred years and universities were nearly irrelevant as institutions. The decline of the church had robbed the

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November 29, 2011 No Comments

It Was 20 Years Ago Today*

…that the Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Canadian University Education was released. In 1990, in the midst of deficit crises, national unity crises, etc., AUCC members decided that the only way to focus public attention on education was to appoint an independent commissioner, Dr. Stuart Smith, to shine a spotlight on their own activities. It worked, but probably not in the way they intended. The first few pages of the report deal in the banalities used by every

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October 27, 2011 No Comments

Why so Dismally Ahistorical?

If there is one thing that drives me nuts about defenders of the humanities, it’s their insistence on nailing their argument to an appeal to “historic values” which simply don’t exist. Take a recent essay pro-Liberal Arts essay in the National Post by Simon Fraser University professor Patrick Keeney, who writes, for instance, that liberal education is an “ideal that goes back to the Greeks.” That simply isn’t correct. Liberal education is a medieval invention – and it wasn’t all

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September 9, 2011 No 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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