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Category: Innovation

Polish Higher Education Reforms

I was briefly in Warsaw last week talking about university rankings and how to improve overall institutional performance.  Poland is one of the most interesting higher education systems in the world right now, so I thought it would be worth talking about what’s going on there. Among the former socialist states that were not part of the Soviet Union, Poland is the largest, has the longest history as an independent state, and has the longest history of mass opposition to

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December 9, 2019 No Comments

Honing the University Party’s Growth Agenda

It’s election season, and so everyone is trotting out promises and coming up with manifestos. These manifestos are lists of specific promised policy initiatives, but they are also – implicitly – a description of how a political party sees the world – how it conceives of a better society and what steps it thinks are needed to get there.   Universities are not political parties, of course, but if we look at what they and their representative bodies in Ottawa (Universities

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September 16, 2019 1 Comment

Summer Book Report

I read a few books over the summer. Below, a few quick summaries: University of Nike: How Corporate Cash Bought American Higher Education by Melville House. Every year, there’s a new book about how college sports corrupt American universities. They are all true. As a genre, however, they get old fast. This book does the usual, looking at the relationship between the University of Oregon and the sportswear company Nike. It’s not a bad book concerning the University of Oregon,

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August 30, 2019 No Comments

The End of the Heisei Era

At about 3 AM tomorrow, Eastern Daylight time, Japanese Emperor Akihito will abdicate the Chyrsanthemum Throne in favour of his son, Naruhito. With that, the Heisei Era will end and the Reiwa Era will begin (time in Japan being marked by Imperial reigns; after their death, emperors become known by the “reign names”, which is why we know refer to Emperor Hirohito as the Showa Emperor and yes this does go all go back to Han-era China, why do you

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April 29, 2019 No Comments

If Canada Were Serious About Higher Education (Part 4)

When it comes to higher education, one of the most salient facts about Canada is that we are a federation in which both levels of governments play important roles.  Yet, to put it mildly, we are not very good at co-ordinating those roles.  Indeed, some might say we are uniquely bad at it.  If we were serious about higher education, we wouldn’t be. The main problem has to do with Science and how it is funded. The bulk of our scientific

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April 11, 2019 No Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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