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Category: Universities

Administrative Bloat?

If there’s one common complaint among academic staff it’s that non-academic staff… administrators… are multiplying like weeds, and taking over the university.  Of course, no one can tell if this is actually happening because Canadian universities have never bothered to put together any common statistics on non-academic staff. What we do have, though, is data on non-academic staff compensation – that is, we can see how much non-academic staff were paid in any given year, and track that over time.  We can then

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January 8, 2014 11 Comments

How Universities Are Becoming More Labour-Intensive

Yesterday, I showed how universities in New Brunswick were – despite welcome new promises of stable funding from the provincial government – facing problems because salary increases were going to eat all the available new money.  Some of you possibly thought I was being alarmist.  But it’s easy enough to show how this can happen.  In Ontario, it already has. For data here, I pulled the financial statements for the last five years at the “Big 8” (Toronto, Waterloo, Western,

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January 7, 2014 5 Comments

The New Normal

Happy New Year!  Did everyone have a great vacation? The highlight of my vacation was going to Argentina and stumbling upon the world’s most unfortunately-named university in a suburb of Buenos Aires, named “Morón”.  It’s called – wait for it – Unversidad de Morón.  Seriously, their international marketing people must have the most difficult jobs in higher ed. Anyhow, I wanted to start the year by talking about what was a hopeful development from last fall – the Government of New Brunswick’s

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January 6, 2014 3 Comments

Three to Watch

A few years ago, Jamil Salmi put together a neat little book called, The Challenge of Establishing World-Class Universities, in which he noted that there were basically three ways to make a world class university: you can upgrade existing institutions (what most governments do), you can merge them (the French approach), or you can build entirely new institutions from scratch. That last option sounds ludicrous to most people in western countries.  Who would bypass existing institutions which, over time, have have received

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December 16, 2013 1 Comment

The Canadian Style of University Management

I recently met someone who had just moved to Canada from the UK, to take up a decanal position here.  He mentioned that, since his move, the two things that had most shocked him were: 1) how little power he has in Canada, compared to the UK; and, 2) just how much bureaucracy there is here.  He relayed this to me by explaining the difference in hiring procedures between the two countries, which I reproduce below, in tabular form:  

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November 21, 2013 1 Comment

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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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