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Category: Universities

Maslow v. Durkheim in the Canadian University Report

For those of you interested in student ratings of Canadian universities, the Globe and Mail’s Canadian University Report – for which we at HESA do the data work – is out today. I’m not going to recount all the gory details here – they’re available both in the magazine which accompanies today’s paper and online. What I’m going to do instead is outline briefly how the data can be used not just to compare institutions but to answer more profound

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October 25, 2011 2 Comments

Why the “Great Disruption” is Bogus

So apparently Inigral CEO Michael Staton – who by and large is a sensible guy – has been talking up this idea about higher education being about to undergo a “Great Disruption.” Why he thinks this is the case isn’t clear – he spends most of his Inside Higher Ed article explaining why higher education isn’t, contra some of higher education’s weirder critics, in a bubble, but he does think everyone needs to spend a lot of money adapting to

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October 13, 2011 No Comments

Conglomerate Universities and Disruptive Technologies

One thing that all these “re-inventing higher education” books flooding the market these days have in common is that they talk about universities as businesses threatened by disruptive technologies that need to re-vamp their processes in order to better cater to their customers at lower cost. But this “universities-as-business” stuff is nonsense. Universities aren’t businesses; they’re conglomerates. Universities have a “prepare-people-for-professions” business which dates back to the medieval period. They have a “life-of-the-mind” business which dates back to Cardinal Newman

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October 5, 2011 1 Comment

Differentiating University Missions (Part Five)

Our conference, Stepford Universities? Differentiation of Mission in the New Higher Education Landscape, wrapped up yesterday, and there were a lot of very interesting ideas floating around. To end the week, I’ll just touch on a couple of them. Clearly, part of the problem we have in discussing a touchy issue like this is one of vocabulary. As panelist Ellen Hazelkorn of the Dublin Institute of Technology says, we haven’t got the language to talk about this issue in a

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September 30, 2011 1 Comment

Differentiating University Missions (Part Two)

One of the things that distinguishes Canadian universities from those virtually anywhere else is the unparalleled freedom they have to determine their own mission. In most countries – including our neighbours to the south, I should underline – the final say over public institutions belongs with government. As one of our American-born staffers once explained to a compatriot “the difference is that up here, public universities get funding from the government, and then they tell government to kiss off.” Our

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September 27, 2011 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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