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Category: History Lesson

Problems in Writing the History of Academia

All my historian readers seemed to enjoy last Thursday’s piece about writing campus histories, so I thought I would do a quick follow-up on things that drive me spare about the state of the art in writing about academia.  To my mind, there is a single serious problem, and it is this: institutional histories are everywhere, but they are almost all rooted in local and national histories whereas academia is global.  As a result, most institutional histories are limited when it comes to

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May 13, 2021 2 Comments

How to Write a Campus History

Among the many, many things I never thought I would do before getting into this line of work is reading a whole ton of campus histories.  Seriously, I will read almost anything like this.  It’s about the first thing I do when I get to a campus: head to the bookstore and try to find an institutional history.   And having thus become something of a connoisseur, I can give you an overview about the state of the art. Basically, there is a

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May 6, 2021 2 Comments

The Northern Ontario School of Medicine

I have been getting emails soliciting my option about the Government of Ontario’s decision to make the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) a stand-alone university.  This is a big issue in Northern Ontario, with many people getting upset over what I think amounts to very little.  But perhaps we should rewind to the beginning. NOSM is a fairly unique medical school.  It was created in the mid-2000s to deal with a persistent shortage of doctors in Northern Ontario.  In

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April 27, 2021 2 Comments

Federated Universities (A kind of Laurentian story)

Morning, everyone.  Apologies for the pause in posting: it’s been a rough few weeks, health-wise.  I am not 100% yet, and blogging might not be 4x per week for a little while, but time to get back in the saddle: there’s too much going on to sit on the sidelines. So, it’s a big day at Laurentian University.  The administration – or at least the tiny portion of if that actually knows what’s going on – has called a super-duper secret

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April 6, 2021 6 Comments

From the Shelves of HESA Towers – “The Effective College”

Sometimes when you pick up an old book about higher education, it’s like stepping into a weird version of the present because the issues are exactly the same, only presented in the language of a different decade.  The book I picked off the shelf this week, though, is nothing like that – it’s actually a really interesting window into a totally different world of higher education.  And it’s actually not a book, but a “bulletin” of the Association of American

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April 16, 2020 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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