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Category: History Lesson

How Godawful were the Nineties?

No, this isn’t a Chuck Klosterman riff, and nor is it a pitch for Andrew Potter’s new blog on the end of the analog age (although I would strongly recommend reading both if that period is of any interest to you). It is, however, an attempt to close a little gap in my readers’ knowledge. I have been told by some of my millennial readers that my frequent references to the horror of the 1990s fly completely over the heads

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March 25, 2024 3 Comments

The History of the Future

I spent a good chunk of the weekend catching up on reading. On the fiction side, it was Haruki Murakami’s Dance, Dance, Dance, Roberto Bolano’s By Night in Chile, both of which I found good but not great. But I also read a book I picked up from a used book stall in Winnipeg: Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler (his wife Heidi was co-author, but this is deffo not evident from the cover and the marketing). If you’re under 50

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March 19, 2024 1 Comment

Ball State vs. Stanford

When higher education wants to talk about itself in positive terms, the story it likes to tell is a story like the one of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. You can read about Stanford’s history in books like Annalee Saxenian’s Regional Advantage and to a lesser extent Rebecca Lowen’s Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford. The story goes something like this: “we do lots of great scientific work here, and businesses interested in our Intellectual Property

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February 14, 2024 2 Comments

The Dawn of a New Era

The events of the last couple of weeks have kept everyone in the higher education sector in a whirlwind. But step back a minute. It’s worth thinking about the big picture. Some of you may remember this graph which I drew about a year ago, looking at the history of higher education funding in Canada. It shows total university and college income by source back to 1955-56. Looking at the trends across these six decades, I think it tells a

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February 5, 2024 6 Comments

Post-Soviet Higher Education

In the immediate post-war period, the Soviet Union, despite the immense destruction that had been wreaked across its territory by the Nazi invasion of 1941-44, shocked the world with its rapid acquisition of what was then high technology, in particular with respect to the nuclear and space sectors. It also rose quickly ot have the world’s second largest university system, just behind the United States. Its prowess in education and Science provoked huge investments in higher education in science. But

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November 30, 2023 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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