Category: Institutions

HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (December 1, 2024)

Spotlight Good evening, In my last AI blog, I wrote about the recent launch of the Canadian AI Safety Institute, and other AISIs around the world. I also mentioned that I was looking forward to learn more about what would be discussed during the International Network for AI Safety meeting that would take place on November 20th-21st. Well, here’s the gist of it. Representatives from Australia, Canada, the European Commission, France, Japan, Kenya, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, the UK

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Talking about Corridors

If you’re in Ontario and are paying attention to the discussions around lobbying the provincial government for more money, you may have heard words to the effect of “we need to get rid of the corridor” or “we need to get rid of the cap.” This post is a small plea for everyone in Ontario to eliminate this phrase from their vocabularies immediately and start using more straightforward language instead. Some background on how the way the enrolment-based portion of

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Institutional Mergers: A Marginal Solution

One of the things I often hear in Canada is that we have “too many universities” or “too many colleges” and that we would all be better off if we just got rid of a few of them. In fact, according to my little birds, this view now also seems to be orthodoxy in the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities, which doesn’t want to see another Laurentian (once is careless, twice looks like incompetence) but at the same time

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Senate House Notes

I spent a wonderful couple of days in London last week at the Festival of Higher Education, put on by the excellent folks at WonkHE (go sign up for all their stuff right now, because they are great). It was a wonderful convening of a type that simply doesn’t happen in Canada: 600 university folks in one spot, just nerding out on a whole bunch of issues bedeviling the sector. And not just the usual suspects at the top of

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Strategy, Differentiation, and Culture

(This blog post is a version of a talk I gave at the University Vice-President’s Network meeting a couple of weeks ago at Western University.) A couple of weeks ago, I made the case for the importance of institutional differentiation as a form of—or prerequisite to—strategy. Basically: an institution with a distinctive mission has a direction, a North Star by which to guide institutional actions, which makes strategic policy a whole lot easier. Famously, though, management theorist Peter Drucker once

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