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Category: Institutions

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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November 26, 2024 5 Comments

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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November 20, 2024 1 Comment

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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November 19, 2024 1 Comment

HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (November 16, 2024)

Spotlight Good morning all,  You might remember the $2.4B announcement made by the federal government last April for the implementation of a series of measures meant to Strengthen Canada’s AI Advantage. (If you don’t, or if you’d like a refresher, you can read about it in our Budget 2024 Commentary). Within those $2.4B, $50M were earmarked for the creation of a Safety Institute. While this announcement was generally well received by our Canadian AI godfathers, little information was available at that

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November 16, 2024 No Comments

Two Advances in Research Rankings

Hi all. Just a quick one today, bringing you up to date with a couple of new and interesting developments in the field of research rankings. The first has to do with the sudden rise of “Open” bibliometric data. To date, all of the major research rankings have used data from one of the two major publishers: Elsevier or Clarivate (formerly known as Thompson Reuters). No surprise here: Elsevier’s Scopus and Clarivate’s Web of Science are the main collators of

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November 12, 2024 3 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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