I like to name and shame people who are playing fast and loose with numbers. Usually, this involves taking one “true” data point and then using it to make a point which is unwarranted by the data in context. A couple of examples caught my eye last week. First up: “Students have at most a 1 in 4 chance that the person at the front of the classroom is a full-time faculty member”. This is the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternative’s
Since we’re talking tuition this week, I thought I’d take an opportunity to tee off on one of the weakest arguments out there on this subject. You know, the one that goes like this: Higher Education is a Public Good Public Goods should be free Yay, free tuition. There are actually two responses to this argument, one narrow and one broad. The narrow argument is that in economic terms the first premise is wrong and hence the second and third
On Saturday, I spent a lovely morning at Mount Allison talking to their Board of Governors. Afterwards, I scooted across the Nova Scotia border to Amherst, which is home to Amy’s, one of Canada’s most remarkable used bookstores. There I found a host of historical higher ed treasures (had to make a quick trip to Giant Tiger to buy a bag to get them all on the plane home), the most amusing of which was Linda Frum’s Guide to Canadian Universities,
Last year, I wrote a blog post about what sessionals get paid, and how essentially it works out to about what assistant profs get paid for the teaching component of their jobs and that in this sense at least one could argue that sessionals in fact are getting equal pay for work of equal value. I got a fair bit of hate mail for that one, mostly because people have trouble distinguishing between is-ought arguments. People seemed to think that because
Most people usually think of universities as being particularly stable, physically speaking. Sure, they grow a bit: if they are really ambitious they add a satellite campus here and there – maybe even set one up overseas. But by and large, the centre of the university itself stays put, right? Well, not always. There are some interesting exceptions. In the first place, the idea of a “university” as a physical place where teaching gets done is not a universal one.
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