Category: Institutions

For and Against Differentiation

I have had a few interesting chats over the past couple of months about the issue of institutional differentiation and its desirability. You will recall perhaps that I spoke favourably about it back in the fall as a means of bringing greater focus to institutional strategy. From these conversations, I have come to understand the need to be clearer about how one is defining the term “differentiation,” because it has two different possible meanings. Most often, I find that people

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What People Get Wrong about the New CCAA Law

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Justin Trudeau’s record. A couple of people wrote in to chide me that I had not included the passage last year of Bill 59, a piece of omnibus legislation which among other things prevents postsecondary education institutions from using the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA). I know a lot of professors—and perhaps more importantly, faculty unions and their provincial/national associations—think that this was a “Good Thing” because “Look What Happened at Laurentian.” To

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (January 31, 2025)

Spotlight Due to technical issues, the Friday blog remained in the cue and was not sent out. Here it is! Happy Friday! There were a few notable AI-related releases since my last blog, but the main one was most probably the International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI that was released earlier this week (you might recall that I had previously shared here the interim report, which was published in May 2024). Chaired by UdeM’s professor Yoshua Bengio,

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Les Quinze Glorieuses: Understanding the History of Québec Universities (Part 3)

(There is no point in you reading today’s piece if you missed Monday’s and Tuesday’s installments on the history of Québec Universities. Catch up on Part 1 and Part 2.) After the original four campuses of the UQ network—Montreal, Trois-Rivieres, Chicoutimi and ENAP e system—opened in 1968, the UQ system continued to grow at a healthy clip. The Rimouski campus opened in 1969. Abitibi-Témiscamingue and Hull got “centres d’études universitaires,” which didn’t end up becoming universities until the early 1980s

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Les Quinze Glorieuses: Understanding the History of Québec Universities (Part 2)

(If you didn’t read yesterday’s piece, you’re going to be lost. Catch up with Part 1.) It’s 1960. Québec has six universities—three English and three French—all of them private, and the French trio explicitly clerical (all the Presidents were priests). But the Union National regime has fallen, replaced with a technocratic Liberal government with a mandate to move Québec in a modernist direction. And although it wasn’t an explicitly nationalist government, it certainly had national concerns on its mind (René

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