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Category: Universities

What’s in a Name?

When he was about ten, Cost Centre #1 (the boy, not the girl) started getting interested in US college football.  It occurred to him that maybe he and I had some “common ground”, since I was working a fair bit on rankings at the time.  Every Saturday morning, whenever the chyron threw up a new matchup, he’d yell “hey dad: Mississippi State, is that a good school?”  “hey, dad, what about Auburn?”, etc.  He had little interest in my explanations

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January 7, 2021 3 Comments

Assessment and Accountability in the Network Era

Just a brief thought today on how the increasing interconnectedness of research efforts is making evaluation of institutional outputs harder. One of the things about academia that governments have a hard time conceptualizing is that “universities,” as a singular entity, are to some extent a fiction.  Governments treat them as discrete entities that have some agency of their own.  What is never very well understood is the extent to which university agency is restricted by the professional norms of its

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November 25, 2020 1 Comment

The University of Calgary’s New Strategic Plan

Back to Alberta.  I know, some of you may be sick of me talking about Alberta, but a) it’s the most interesting policy scene in Canada right now and b) this is how the rest of the country feels when I talk about Ontario, so fair’s fair.  Back, specifically, to the University of Calgary, which has – in response to significant government cutbacks and government complaints about the province’s universities being unresponsive to changing economic priorities, more or less decided

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November 24, 2020 3 Comments

Disciplines vs. Domains

One of my current projects has me thinking a lot about the university of the year 2040.  And my conclusion right now is that universities, as institutions, may be up for as big a re-think as anything they’ve faced in the last hundred years.  Specifically, there is probably going to be a need to re-think the role of disciplines in organizing higher learning. Disciplines and institutions sit uneasily against one another.  The original universities might have had individuals who might

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November 23, 2020 6 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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