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Category: Universities

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 No Comments

Bad Summer Essays

Back in the early days of this blog – lo, fifteen years ago now – I used to offer an annual award for “worst back-to-school article” in which I would excoriate whichever columnist had chosen to write something incredibly lazy, cliché-ridden and wrong. I eventually stopped giving out the award because the genre went into decline (I like to think it was because of HESA’s encouragement of data-enriched discourse) but this year, unfortunately, the bad takes have returned, albeit with

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September 15, 2026 1 Comment

Re: University and the Change Imperative

It’s hard for universities to do things differently. Although they are evidently capable of being flexible and doing somersaults in an emergency (see: COVID), their collective desire for ongoing change is pretty small. It’s a very conservative industry, where isomorphism rules and the most important question to be asked of any change is “do prestigious institutions do it that way”? One consequence of this is that even when it comes to times where universities are under financial pressure and the

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June 3, 2026 No Comments

China Update 2026

Hi all. Every couple of years I spend some time going through data on Chinese higher education and, in particular, the finances of the country’s top universities. It’s been two years since the last time I did this, so here goes: Figure 1 shows total expenditures at what I call China’s Big 8 universities (which is actually just the elite C9 League of universities minus the Harbin Institute of Technology, which does not make previous years’ financial data available), in

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May 25, 2026 No Comments

CAUT Bulletin, 1963

About a month ago, I was doing one of my absolute favourite things in the entire world, which was browsing the shelves of Amy’s Used Books in Amherst, Nova Scotia (IYKYK) for old books on higher education. I picked up a simply ludicrous amount of loot there – the entire back-list of the Bulletin of the International Association of Universities from the 1960s to the 1980s, a copy of José Ortega y Gasset’s The Mission of the University, bound background papers to the Hurtubise/Rowat

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April 8, 2026 3 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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