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Category: History Lesson

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

From the Shelves of HESA Towers – The Cathedral of Learning

Some of the more interesting piece on our shelves are not actually books at all, but pamphlets, short guides, conference proceedings, and other paraphernalia.  One day, I will show y’all the programme from that 2006 conference on student aid sponsored by the Thai government, where we got to see the Thai civil servants in their quasi-military uniforms (this is a thing, believe it or not), and where the Deputy Minister of Finance mounted the stage beneath two crossed shooting jets

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April 9, 2020 No Comments

Merit

Universities are among the most elitist institutions in society.  I won’t say they are unabashed by this role: in fact, I’d say they are plenty bashful.  Certainly, there are many people who wish to be as democratic as possible about letting people enter higher education (though this commitment often drops as the institution becomes more elite and prestigious) but a major part of higher education’s purpose is to winnow; to separate the brightest from the merely bright and shuffle them

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March 25, 2020 3 Comments

(University) Life During Wartime

Since everyone is using war metaphors to describe current efforts against COVID-19, I thought it might be worth taking a trip down memory lane to look at what universities did during the World Wars (colleges, being mostly creatures of the 50s-70s, were not around then, so this is a single-sector survey).  I am not convinced it’s the right metaphor – in Britain, for example, their death-cult instinct makes them treat every crisis like it’s 1940. Because of their refusal to

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March 23, 2020 No Comments

PSE in Alberta – Part 1

With things in Ontario starting to calm down, Alberta is the next frontier in Canadian PSE changes.  The October budget asked institutions for some pretty significant mid-year adjustments, and if the already-published departmental business plan is anything to go by, it looks as though institutions are going to have to absorb several hundred million dollars more in cutbacks over the next couple of years.  How Alberta institutions react to this will be instructive, because they’ll be experiencing in fast-forward what

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November 28, 2019 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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