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Category: Institutions

The Listening Tour

There’s a little management technique gaining some traction called the “Listening Tour”.  In the US, over the past eighteen months, new Presidents at Carnegie Mellon and James Madison have used this to inaugurate their terms.  At Princeton, new President (and erstwhile Provost) Chris Eisgruber decided to embark on an entire “Year of Listening”, though why he needs a whole year when he’s been provost for the past nine is unclear.  Here at home, the pioneer of this is new Dalhousie

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January 15, 2014 8 Comments

Better Know a Higher Ed System: Chile

Chile has a very diverse higher education sector, and has been subject to a lot of policy experimentation in recent years.  That makes it a case to watch, both regionally and globally. Prior to the 1973 coup, Universidad de Chile was the country’s pre-eminent school, with campuses across the country.  But academia didn’t fare so well under Pinochet, as there were waves of arrests, exiles, and, in some cases, executions.  All of this meant that, on occasion, whole departments suddenly

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January 10, 2014 2 Comments

The Salaries Problem

I’ve made a few key points over the last couple of days: 1)      Canadian Universities will be lucky if they keep being able to increase their incomes by 3% per year, holding enrolments constant. 2)      The kinds of salary settlements we have seen recently at Canadian universities, if allowed to continue, will eat up easily 70-80% of that income, maybe more, leaving precious little left over for IT, infrastructure, etc. 3)      It’s not a problem of administrative bloat.  The ratio of academic salaries

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January 9, 2014 8 Comments

Administrative Bloat?

If there’s one common complaint among academic staff it’s that non-academic staff… administrators… are multiplying like weeds, and taking over the university.  Of course, no one can tell if this is actually happening because Canadian universities have never bothered to put together any common statistics on non-academic staff. What we do have, though, is data on non-academic staff compensation – that is, we can see how much non-academic staff were paid in any given year, and track that over time.  We can then

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January 8, 2014 11 Comments

How Universities Are Becoming More Labour-Intensive

Yesterday, I showed how universities in New Brunswick were – despite welcome new promises of stable funding from the provincial government – facing problems because salary increases were going to eat all the available new money.  Some of you possibly thought I was being alarmist.  But it’s easy enough to show how this can happen.  In Ontario, it already has. For data here, I pulled the financial statements for the last five years at the “Big 8” (Toronto, Waterloo, Western,

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January 7, 2014 5 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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