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Category: Universities

May ’14 Rankings Round-Up

I’ve been remiss  the last month or so in not keeping you up-to-date with some of the big international rankings releases, namely the Leiden Rankings, the Times Top 100 Under 50 rankings, and the U21 Ranking of National Higher Education Systems. Let’s start with Leiden (previous articles on Leiden can be found here, and here), a multidimensional bibliometric ranking that looks at various types of publication and impact metrics.  Because of the nature of the data it uses, and the way it

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May 29, 2014 1 Comment

Permeability

Once upon a time, we thought that to indulge in serious thought, scholars needed to be protected from the hurly-burly of commerce and politics.  That’s why an awful lot of American campuses were built out in the middle of nowhere (eg. Dartmouth, Princeton, U Illinois, U Indiana, U Virginia, U Washington), and why many of the medieval universities of Europe have walls – both were strategies to keep out the riff-raff. Nowadays, of course, we think exactly the opposite.  Urban

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May 28, 2014 1 Comment

Deans and Multiple Personality Disorders

Imagine two scenarios.  In the first, an academic is threatened with termination if he/she speaks out publicly against the university’s proposed strategic plan.  In the second, a manager is fired for disobeying a direct order from a superior about running down the company he/she works for.  For most readers, I’d guess the first scenario is abhorrent, and the second quite understandable (if perhaps somewhat harsh).  Yet both scenarios describe precisely what happened to University of Saskatchewan’s Dean, Robert Buckingham. The

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May 16, 2014 12 Comments

Does More Information Really Solve Anything?

One of the great quests in higher education over the past two decades has been to make the sector more “transparent”.  Higher education is a classic example of a “low-information” economy.  Like medicine, consumers have very limited information about the quality of higher education providers, and so “poor performers” cannot easily be identified.  If only there were some way to actually provide individuals with better information, higher education would come closer to the ideal of “perfect information” (a key part

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May 15, 2014 No Comments

Non-Lieux Universities: Whose Fault?

About four months ago, UBC President Stephen Toope wrote a widely-praised piece called “Universities in an Era of Non-Lieux“.  Basically, the piece laments the growing trend toward the deracinated homogenization of universities around the globe.  He names global rankings and government micro-management of research and enrolment strategies – usually of a fairly faddish variety, as evidenced by the recent MOOC-mania – as the main culprits. I’m not going to take issue with Toope’s central thesis: I agree with him 100% that

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May 12, 2014 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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