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Category: Innovation

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 New Model University

You may have heard once or twice about Arizona State University and how innovative it is. You probably don’t know the half of it. Today I am going to rectify that because it may be the institution from which Canadian universities need to learn the most over the next few years. A lot of the initial attention to what ASU was doing differently focused on the way that faculties got rearranged in the early 2000s. The university still runs traditional

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February 7, 2024 5 Comments

Steeples of Excellence and How to Achieve Them

Every so often, terms crop up and it seems like no one knows where they came from.  One of my favourites is “Steeples of Excellence”.  Except that this one actually has a known origin: the Stanford of the 1950s and its provost, Frederick Terman. The term “steeples of excellence” tends to imply some focus on certain fields of study.  It’s a handy complement to the oft heard “we can’t be everything to everybody” (possibly the most overused phrase in higher

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November 1, 2023 1 Comment

The Political Argument for Higher Education

Let me start with three comments/conversations I’ve seen and had in the past little while. Those are all interesting observations on their own but let’s think about the implications of the three comments together.  In other words, institutions have two choices.  First, they can wait for brief moments when the political system allows politicians to ignore the short-term interests of donors and hit them hard.  Or, second, they can exert themselves to try to make institutions like universities and colleges

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May 10, 2023 3 Comments

Letter from Japan

Morning all.  I’m in the midst of a couple of weeks in Japan (the sumo was fun, thanks, though the overall quality of the field is pretty weak since Hakuho retired and Terunofuji’s knees gave out) and though this trip has absolutely nothing to do with work, I have nevertheless had thoughts about the country and its higher education system. Here’s the thing about Japan: it used to be the future.  It’s not anymore.  Go back to the early 1990s

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March 20, 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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