It’s getting close to that time of year when I need to sign off for the holidays (tomorrow will be the last blog until January 4th). So before then, I thought it would be worth quickly catching up on a few things. Some reports you may have missed. A number of reports have come out recently that I have been meaning to review. Two, I think, are of passing note: i) The Alberta Auditor-general devoted part of his annual report (see pages
You may have noticed that I failed to award a “worst back-to-school” piece for the second year running. This is because the bad stuff took a while to come out. Rest assured, it came, and I now present two of them. First is Heather Mallick’s little missive on Liberal Arts in the Star last week. The utterly lazy premise is this: advances in ICT have changed the world dramatically, so what matters now is synthesis. And by God, Liberal Arts gives
I am going to assume that by now you have all heard about the… um… interesting news regarding British Prime Minister David Cameron, which was in yesterday’s papers. If you haven’t, then take a quick look here. Then come back. Quickly. Maybe have a shower first. Ready? OK, so, my first thought about this story is “I wonder what kind of day Oxford’s PR folk are going to have?” Because, honestly, at most universities, the idea that some of your
The Globe’s Gary Mason wrote an interesting article yesterday about the Gupta resignation. Actually, let me qualify: he wrote a very odd article, which ignored basically everything his Globe colleagues Simona Chiose and Frances Bula had reported the previous week, in order to peddle a tale in which the UBC Board fired Gupta for wanting to reduce administrative costs. This, frankly, sounds insane. But Mason’s article did include some very eye-opening statistics on the increase of administrative staff at UBC over the past
One of the most maddening things about higher education journalism is the widespread assumption of fragility. Take the notion of vulnerability to technological disruption. The most recent example of this is a piece from University World News (which really should know better) entitled “Can Universities Survive the Digital Age?” It’s an absolutely ridiculous question that could only be posed by someone who knew virtually nothing of the history of universities. Every time there’s a technological innovation, somebody thinks the university
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