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Category: Institutions

Metaphors and Similes

I recently came across this little blogpost from the UK bemoaning the fact that the Vice-Chancellor of Imperial College described professors as “like small business owners”.  The poster then went on to wonder: “if professors are small businesses, what kind of micro-state is the contemporary university?” Interesting question.  The thing is, on our side of the pond at least, the idea that a university is something less than the sum of its parts has been pretty common for awhile now.  It

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March 28, 2016 1 Comment

Faculty Power and the Expansion of Administration

There was an interesting little op-ed in the Vancouver Sun the other day, to the effect that faculty are “waking up”, “realizing their voices matter”, and taking collective action to “effect substantive change at UBC”.  You can read it, here. I think it is a fantastic piece.  It’s great when people in a community realise they have the power to change things, and begin acting together to effect that change.  My only question is: what was stopping them from acting

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March 2, 2016 1 Comment

House-Buying Power of Academic Salaries

A couple of weeks ago, the Times Higher Education put together a cute infographic showing how many square metres an academic salary bought in different parts of the world (the full article is here).  I thought I would try the same thing for here in Canada. So, here’s what I did.  I took median academic salaries for major universities in Canada for the 2010-11 year, the last year for which comparable data is available (yes, it’s a travesty.  But the travesty isn’t just that Statscan

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February 29, 2016 2 Comments

Can Universities Judge Themselves?

One of the more difficult problems to unravel in the world of higher education is the fact that universities are responsible both for delivering teaching and judging whether or not a student has learned enough to get a degree.  To most reasonable minds, this is a conflict of interest.  Indeed, this is the conflict that makes universities unreformable: as long as universities have a monopoly on judging their own quality, no one external to the system (students, governments) can make realistic comparisons between

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February 9, 2016 6 Comments

The Economics of Interdisciplinary Programs at Small Universities

A minor kerfuffle blew up yesterday in Sackville when the coordinator of Mount Allison University’s Women’s and Gender Studies announced that, due to budget cuts, she had been informed that the university would no longer be offering classes in this program, as of next fall.  Cue petitions, angry students, a buzzfeed listicle, etc. What follows here is a little explainer with respect to the economics of this situation: Mount Allison is a small school.  Enrolment last year was 2,369, which was down

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February 3, 2016 2 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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