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Category: Universities

How Many Universities are too Many?

Yesterday, we discussed whether a university can have too many faculties (answer: yes, but just try reducing them and see how far you get).  Today, I thought I would ask a similar question about universities.  It’s a familiar problem in many parts of Canada.  In Nova Scotia, arguments about whether there are “too many” institutions have been going on for almost a century.  Fifteen years ago, significant parts of BC went a bit bananas when the provincial government decided to

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October 7, 2020 1 Comment

How Many Faculties is Too Many?

Academic bureaucracy is weird.  Basically, about 150 years ago, it was decided that it was important to have two layers of administration interposed between an individual faculty member and a University President (and later, once the university expanded, a senior team with various Vice-Presidents).  One layer came to be called a “department” and one level came to be called a “faculty”.  These theoretically mapped on to the branches and limbs of the Tree of Knowledge (so to speak).  But they

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October 6, 2020 2 Comments

How Open to Be

Last week saw a slew of universities “announce” their plans for the summer.  Some of them appear to be treating it as a strategic exercise in getting one over on competitors (“look how open we are!”), but with one or two exceptions, this exercise is probably a misreading of the situation: pretty much everyone is going to be massively online/remote for the fall.  Going remote, to be clear, is a good thing.  I know that some people like making distinctions

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May 19, 2020 1 Comment

From the Shelves of HESA Towers – “The Effective College”

Sometimes when you pick up an old book about higher education, it’s like stepping into a weird version of the present because the issues are exactly the same, only presented in the language of a different decade.  The book I picked off the shelf this week, though, is nothing like that – it’s actually a really interesting window into a totally different world of higher education.  And it’s actually not a book, but a “bulletin” of the Association of American

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April 16, 2020 No Comments

(University) Life During Wartime

Since everyone is using war metaphors to describe current efforts against COVID-19, I thought it might be worth taking a trip down memory lane to look at what universities did during the World Wars (colleges, being mostly creatures of the 50s-70s, were not around then, so this is a single-sector survey).  I am not convinced it’s the right metaphor – in Britain, for example, their death-cult instinct makes them treat every crisis like it’s 1940. Because of their refusal to

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March 23, 2020 No 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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