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Category: Institutions

Teaching Load Versus Workload

I often get into discussions that go like this: Me: Over time, the number of classes each professor teaches has gone down.  Places where people used to teach 3/2 (three classes one term, two the other) now teach 2/1.  Places where 4/3 or even 4/4 were common are now 3/2.   This has been one of the main things making higher education more expensive in Canada. Someone else (usually a prof): Yeah, but classes are so much larger now than they

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June 9, 2014 4 Comments

Governance, Stress-Tests, and Preparing for the Worst

It’s the little things that worry me.  The slowdown in China.  The continuing failure of the Euro-zone to grow.  The fact that the ratio of the US Stock Market Cap to GDP is approaching the levels seen right before the crashes of 2001 and 2008.  Our economy might muddle through, or it might not. Now add on to economic uncertainty the clear evidence that governments are showing decreasing enthusiasm about supporting higher education – nationally, there’s been a real decline

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June 6, 2014 1 Comment

May ’14 Rankings Round-Up

I’ve been remiss  the last month or so in not keeping you up-to-date with some of the big international rankings releases, namely the Leiden Rankings, the Times Top 100 Under 50 rankings, and the U21 Ranking of National Higher Education Systems. Let’s start with Leiden (previous articles on Leiden can be found here, and here), a multidimensional bibliometric ranking that looks at various types of publication and impact metrics.  Because of the nature of the data it uses, and the way it

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May 29, 2014 1 Comment

Permeability

Once upon a time, we thought that to indulge in serious thought, scholars needed to be protected from the hurly-burly of commerce and politics.  That’s why an awful lot of American campuses were built out in the middle of nowhere (eg. Dartmouth, Princeton, U Illinois, U Indiana, U Virginia, U Washington), and why many of the medieval universities of Europe have walls – both were strategies to keep out the riff-raff. Nowadays, of course, we think exactly the opposite.  Urban

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May 28, 2014 1 Comment

Deans and Multiple Personality Disorders

Imagine two scenarios.  In the first, an academic is threatened with termination if he/she speaks out publicly against the university’s proposed strategic plan.  In the second, a manager is fired for disobeying a direct order from a superior about running down the company he/she works for.  For most readers, I’d guess the first scenario is abhorrent, and the second quite understandable (if perhaps somewhat harsh).  Yet both scenarios describe precisely what happened to University of Saskatchewan’s Dean, Robert Buckingham. The

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May 16, 2014 12 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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