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Category: Universities

Bring Back the Transparency Debate

In 1991, Maclean’s began publishing university rankings.  In doing so, it relied heavily on university co-operation: in particular, it required institutions to fill in a survey for various pieces of data on admissions, class sizes, etc.  Not all the questions were particularly well-defined and so there was a lot of data gaming.  Eventually, in 2006, the universities decided they were not going to play the game any more: they were going to get out of the rankings business and instead set up

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November 15, 2021 1 Comment

The University of Austin

So, some of you may have seen the kerfuffle about the creation of a new university “dedicated to the truth” (see the NYT article here).  This initiative, unconventionally announced to the world via a Medium blogpost, is to be led by the former President of St. John’s College (Annapolis) Pano Kanelos, but he has accumulated a very large number of backers, both in terms of finances and “people who matter”.  This latter group includes a wide variety of people, some of

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November 11, 2021 3 Comments

Manitoba on Strike (Again)

To Winnipeg, where the University of Manitoba Faculty Association (UMFA) has gone on strike for the second time in five years.  It probably won’t be the last institution to see labour action this year (see Ken Steele’s very good round-up of boiling-over labour issues here).  The main issue is over money.  UMFA’s central claim is that its members have lower salaries than anyone else in the U-15 and that over the past few years UFMA have lost approximately 8% of

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November 4, 2021 2 Comments

Smith Plus 30

Thirty years ago last week, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (now Universities Canada) published a wholly remarkable document entitled The Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Canadian University Education (I can’t find an online edition but here’s a contemporary account from Maclean’s).  Since the Commission was just one man – Stuart Smith – its public moniker was usually “The Smith Commission”.  It was a remarkable document in so many ways so there’s more than enough reason to go down the memory lane

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October 27, 2021 1 Comment

Governance and Budgeting

Last week, I wrote a piece about how most Canadian universities seem to have come through the pandemic financially unscathed or even a little bit better off.  Briefly, universities pulled back on the spending in expectation of a collapse in revenues and then the collapse never really happened.  Result: higher surpluses. Let’s just say the reactions to this piece were…heartfelt.   And they often involved some combination of the adjective “lying”, and the nouns “tightwad”, “bastard” and “admins”.  To the extent

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October 12, 2021 No Comments

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