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Category: Universities

Authentic Academic Eyes

It’s a reasonably common occurrence for academics to diss non-academic professional staff.  “They’re taking over”.  “They’re not like us”.  “They’re ruining the university”.  Book-length whinges (not very good ones, mind) have been written about this. These whinges usually combine two distinct arguments.  The first has to do with the mere existence of some non-academic positions, who often act as the interface between the academic institution and the market (think research services, alumni/advancement, recruitment, marketing and – God forbid – branding). 

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October 4, 2016 3 Comments

Social License and Tuition Fees

So, to Johannesburg, where South African Education Minister (and Communist Party chief) Blade Nzimande finally announced the government’s decision on tuition for next year. He was in a tricky place: students are still demanding free tuition (see my previous story on the Fees Must Fall movement here) and will not accept a hike in fees. Meanwhile, universities are quite rightly feeling very stretched (it’s tough trying to maintain developed-world caliber institutions on a tax base which is only partially of

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September 23, 2016 No Comments

Sessionals: Equal Pay for Equal Work?

Following up on yesterday’s piece about counting sessionals, I thought it would be a useful time to address how sessionals get paid.  Every so often, the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) issues a press release asking that contract faculty get “equal pay for work of equal value”.  And who could be against that?  But what they don’t say, because no one wants to say this out loud is that, in Canada , adjuncts and sessionals are far from being underpaid:

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September 20, 2016 4 Comments

Innovation Policy: Are Universities Part of the Problem?

We’re talking a lot about Innovation in Canada these days. Especially in universities, where innovation policy is seen as a new cash funnel. I would like to suggest that this attitude on the part of universities is precisely part of Canada’s problem when it comes to Innovation. Here’s the basic issue: innovation – the kind that expands the economy – is something that firms do. They take ideas from here and there and put them together to create new processes

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September 15, 2016 3 Comments

Trends in Canadian University Finance

New income and expenditure data on Canadian universities came out over the summer courtesy of StatsCan and our friends over at the Canadian Association of University Business Officers (CAUBO), so today it’s time to check in on what the latest financial trends. In 2014-15, income at Canadian Universities was, overall, a record 35.5 Billion dollars (just above 2% of GDP, if you’re counting).  That’s up 1% in real terms over the previous year and up 5% on five years ago

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September 8, 2016 4 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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