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Category: Universities

Rapid Collegiality and How to Achieve It

Over the past few years, I have on occasion (see here and here) emphasized the need for institutions to practice “rapid collegiality”: that is, to find ways of making decisions more rapidly without sacrificing the notion that in a shared governance system, decision-making responsibilities have to be broadly inclusive. The challenge is not only that we have more or less come to equate collegiality with unanimity (or at least provided an awful lot of people with an awful lot of

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November 3, 2026 2 Comments

Alberta in a Nutshell (2026)

Morning all. A couple of weeks ago, I told you I’d be spending a good number of blogs this year looking at provincial higher education systems and how they are doing. I’m going west-to-east and today it’s Alberta’s turn.  As figure 1 shows, overall enrollment in Alberta post-secondary institutions is up by just over 80% since the turn of the century. The graph makes it appears as though most of the growth has been in universities, and that’s true in

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November 2, 2026 No Comments

Interprovincial Student Mobility

I haven’t looked at the state of interprovincial student mobility in Canada in awhile (last time was back here in 2021) and today seems like as good a time as any to catch up on the latest data. Ready? Let’s go! First, a quick methodological note here: this data does not include colleges (very, very few college students choose to study out-of-province, on the order of about 2%) and at the university level includes students at all degree levels but

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October 20, 2026 1 Comment

Lampedusianism at the University of Waterloo

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a finance and governance experiment at Concordia. Today I want to talk about one that caught some headlines over the summer; namely, the re-organization of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo. The full details of the re-organization can be found here, but the basics of it are that where the Faculty used to have fifteen departments and two “schools”, it will now just have six schools. That sounds like a

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October 6, 2026 2 Comments

Concordia’s Quiet Revolution

Okay, so Canadian higher education is pretty cautious and risk-averse, and so perhaps the bar for calling something a ‘revolution” is pretty low. But everyone needs to take a look at what has been going on at Concordia this year, because if what has been happening there were to spread widely, I think you genuinely could call it a revolution. It’s big, bold, and has the potential to alter for the better some of the basic underpinnings of universities’ financial models. Concordia

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September 23, 2026 2 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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