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Category: Universities

What People Mean When They Talk About Neoliberal Univesities: Part 1

The term “neoliberal university” gets bandied around a lot.  But what does it mean? Neoliberalism is hard to write about sensibly because there’s a lack of basic agreement about what the term means. This isn’t just about yahoos using “neoliberal” as a synonym for “The Man” or “something I happen to dislike” (though that does happen a lot); even those who want to write about the subject are faced with some real problems in defining it. The definition of any

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November 20, 2017 6 Comments

The Canadian Way of Higher Education Co-ordination

Yesterday I talked a little bit about how competition, not co-operation, is in Canadian universities’ DNA (east of Manitoba, at any rate).  But that has never stopped governments from trying – usually fitfully and half-heartedly – from trying to create more co-ordination within the system.  David Cameron, in his 1991 book More Than an Academic Question (still probably best single-volume history of Canadian higher education), analyzed these attempts in some detail.  What’s interesting is how things have changed over time. One obvious

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November 17, 2017 2 Comments

Competitiveness, Homogeneity, and Historical Contingency

In his excellent book about the American higher education system A Perfect Mess, David Labaree makes the following point about how the American university system came to be so hyper-competitive. Its origins were remarkably humble: a loose assortment of parochial nineteenth-century liberal arts colleges, which emerged in the pursuit of sectarian expansion and civic boosterism more than scholarly distinction. These colleges had no academic credibility, no reliable source of students, and no steady funding. Yet these weaknesses of the American

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November 16, 2017 2 Comments

Fun with Canadian Scientific Publications Data

You may recall that in last Friday’s blog I was looking at scientific output of world-class universities.  I could do that thanks to quite an excellent database available from Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies, developers of the excellent multi-dimensional Leiden Rankings, which do a strong job of comparing university research output and impact. I have covered this output and impact a couple of times before back here and here.   This same data can be used to compare Canadian institutions – or at least the

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November 15, 2017 No Comments

A Guide to Canadian Campuses, 30 Years On

On Saturday, I spent a lovely morning at Mount Allison talking to their Board of Governors.  Afterwards, I scooted across the Nova Scotia border to Amherst, which is home to Amy’s, one of Canada’s most remarkable used bookstores.  There I found a host of historical higher ed treasures (had to make a quick trip to Giant Tiger to buy a bag to get them all on the plane home), the most amusing of which was Linda Frum’s Guide to Canadian Universities,

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October 16, 2017 5 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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