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Category: Institutions

A Guide to Canadian Campuses, 30 Years On

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,

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October 16, 2017 5 Comments

How Sessionals Undermine the Case for 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

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October 11, 2017 4 Comments

Of No Fixed Address

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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October 6, 2017 No Comments

New Quality Measurement Initiatives

One of the holy grails in higher education – if you’re on the government or management side of things, anyway – is to find some means of actually measuring institutional effectiveness.  It’s all very well to note that alumni at Harvard, Oxford, U of T (pick an elite university, any elite university) tend to go on to great things.  But how much of that has to do with them being prestigious and selective enough to only take the cream of

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October 4, 2017 2 Comments

The Real Competition is Closer Than You Think

I’ve recently been dismissive of the notion that Canada is “falling behind” in higher education since everyone seems to insist on making ludicrous comparisons with places like China, Switzerland and Singapore.  But upon a little bit of further digging, it turns out there is one of our very close competitors which is doing rather well these days, one we probably should be worried about despite the fact that we’ve mostly been ignoring it since the Financial Crisis of ’08. It’s our

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October 3, 2017 2 Comments
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