The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Institutions

Throwback

Jambo! From Nairobi, where I’m spending the next couple of days. I’ve had some long plane flights to get here, and Lufthansa inexplicably hasn’t worked out how to put power chargers in economy seats, so I’ve been doing some re-reading of obscure texts. I want to tell you today about one piece, called Universities Under Scrutiny. Published by the OECD in 1987 it’s very, well…familiar. Let’s start with this quote from the OECD’s Intergovernmental Conference on Policies for Higher Education

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March 30, 2026 1 Comment

Liberty and Zhi: Chinese and Anglo-American Ideas of the University

While the world has a lot of higher education systems, two traditions in particular dominate. One is the Anglo-American tradition, including possibly its cousins in central and northern Europe, and the other is the one we see in China. The latter way is, in many ways, rooted in the former. Tsinghua University famously is a product of a US philanthropic gesture, albeit one funded by Boxer Rebellion Indemnities. And yet, its two sets of operating principles are very different, and

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March 19, 2026 No Comments

The Crux

One of my favourite authors on strategy is Richard Rummelt, author of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, which I highly recommend to anyone. He has a newish book (2022) out called The Crux which I read a few weeks ago. Today, I want to talk about it in relation to higher education. The thesis of this book, as the name suggests, is that too often strategy does not create an organizational improvement because it does not deal squarely with the key problems that the organization actually

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March 18, 2026 3 Comments

The Awkward Phase

It’s been interesting for us sitting around the edges of the new relationship between the federal government and the post-secondary community around security issues and watching two sides size each other up. Today, some thoughts on the matter and suggestions to speed up the process. So, let’s start with the internal challenges the two sides have in forging a relationship. On the Government of Canada side, it’s very much the case that the various players in the game are not on

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March 17, 2026 No Comments

Why Iranian Students Keep Protesting

Iran is a country with a lot of higher education stories. Take stories about students: they were a key part of the coalition that overthrew the Shah in 1979, and they were the ones who spearheaded the capture of the US embassy later that year. But since 1999, students have also been consistently and reliably at the head of anti-government protests. Iranian universities are as a result the centre of a great deal of physical confrontation at moments of national rebellion, such as

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March 12, 2026 No 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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