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Category: Innovation

Concordia’s Quiet Revolution

Okay, so Canadian higher education is pretty cautious and risk-averse, and so perhaps the bar for calling something a ‘revolution” is pretty low. But everyone needs to take a look at what has been going on at Concordia this year, because if what has been happening there were to spread widely, I think you genuinely could call it a revolution. It’s big, bold, and has the potential to alter for the better some of the basic underpinnings of universities’ financial models. Concordia

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September 23, 2026 1 Comment

Back to School 2026

Welcome back everyone. It’s the Tuesday after Labour Day, and that means it’s time to start Blog Year 16 (gulp) with a look ahead over the next ten months or so. I’m looking at three very big themes. Let’s start with the one big piece of news over the summer that has the potential to overwhelm pretty much everyone: the release of the Report on Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences. It’s not the world’s most sophisticated piece of analysis –

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September 8, 2026 2 Comments

Blue Skies Ahead

Morning everyone. Today is the last blog for a few weeks (though there will be a podcast tomorrow and a Fifteen on Friday). Normal service will resume on September 8th.  For my June send-off, I often paint a pretty solemn “state of PSE” picture. Not gonna lie: 2025-26 has been a bit of a rough year. However, with the exception of British Columbia (sorry guys, you’re pretty much toast), I am pretty sure our sector has already hit bottom in

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June 10, 2026 1 Comment

Re: University and the Change Imperative

It’s hard for universities to do things differently. Although they are evidently capable of being flexible and doing somersaults in an emergency (see: COVID), their collective desire for ongoing change is pretty small. It’s a very conservative industry, where isomorphism rules and the most important question to be asked of any change is “do prestigious institutions do it that way”? One consequence of this is that even when it comes to times where universities are under financial pressure and the

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June 3, 2026 No Comments

Lectures, Essays, Genies, and Bottles

A couple of weeks ago, the Times Higher Education printed a kind of farewell interview with the University of Waterloo’s outgoing President Vivek Goel. Like many THE interviews of this nature, it’s a bit of an odd duck, spending half the time explaining to a global audience who this person is and why they and their institution are important and leaving only a couple of hundred words for the subject to say anything useful about their own legacy and the future. But what Goel did say

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May 13, 2026 1 Comment
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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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