Category: Internationalization

Waterloo, Core Strengths and Foreign Campuses

One of the things that marks Canada out among major countries with international education ambitions is the fact that we do very little in terms of establishing campuses abroad.  There’s a reason for that: basically, our institutions are so well-funded that they mostly don’t seem to see the need for such a high-risk activity.  And they are indeed risky: Waterloo tried to set up a branch campus focussed on math and engineering in Dubai, and it crashed only a couple

Read More »

CAUT on Foreign Professors

Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) Executive Director, David Robinson, made some interesting statements recently about the way universities hire foreign professors.  He made them in response to an announcement that the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) had negotiated an agreement to be exempted from certain rules of the new Temporary Foreign Worker program.  To quote in full from CAUT’s press release: The national organization representing Canada’s professors says that special exemptions from the temporary foreign worker

Read More »

Who Owns Internationalization?

One of the first things you realize when studying how institutions deal with the process of internationalization is how fragmented authority actually is in Canadian universities – to the point where you sometimes have to wonder whether anyone’s actually in charge of the whole operation. Part of the reason for this fragmentation  is that internationalization isn’t a single activity, but rather a process that affects a whole range of other activities in which universities normally engage.  To the extent that internationalization

Read More »

The Problem with Global Reputation Rankings

I was in Athens this past June, at an EU-sponsored conference on rankings, which included a very intriguing discussion about the use of reputation indicators that I thought I would share with you. Not all rankings have reputational indicators; the Shanghai (ARWU) rankings, for instance, eschew them completely.  But QS and Times Higher Education (THE) rankings both weight them pretty highly (50% for QS, 35% for THE).  But this data isn’t entirely transparent.  THE, who release their World University Rankings

Read More »

Arigato, Sayonara

With election night, the World Cup getting under way, and tomorrow being Friday the 13th, it seems like as good a time as any to shut down the blog for the summer – I apologize to those of you who were hoping for one last rant on election results (though you can probably catch my thoughts over on twitter, where my handle is @AlexUsherHESA).  Starting Monday, this blog will be on a once-a-week schedule until August 25th,  when normal daily service will resume.

Read More »