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Category: Universities

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

Encore une fois

You may remember that late in 2018 the Ontario government decided to put the kibosh on funding l’Université de l’Ontario français (l’UOF).  Then last fall, the federal government – showing a key eye for supporting minority language rights in Ontario if not consistency in funding minority language rights across the country – popped up and offered to pay for half of the running costs over the next eight years.  Up front.  As in, all the running costs for the first 4-5 years,

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March 10, 2020 No Comments

One Last Thought (Really) on Administrative Bloat, 2020

NOTE: Please see this blog for a correction to the U of T numbers. (I promise this is the last one.) Here is the graph from yesterday and last Wednesday, on academic and non-academic staff numbers, only this time with UBC included because the folks there kindly sent me their numbers. Figure 1: Percentage Growth in Academic vs. A&S Staff numbers, Self-Selected Institutions Which Publish Staffing Data, 2010 to most recent year available              Yesterday, I pointed out that this

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February 25, 2020 1 Comment

One More Thought on Administrative Bloat

One of the great things about Twitter is the quick feedback about things.  And last Wednesday, when I posted the graph below, people started banging on right away, saying “Yeah! Right on!  Administrative Bloat!” Figure 1: Percentage Growth in Academic vs. A&S Staff numbers, Self-Selected Institutions Which Actually Publish Staffing Data, 2010 to most recent year available             Nobody took me up on the offer about how to think about that graph in connection with what I had published the previous

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February 24, 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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