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Category: Politics

Chair to Chancellor: Lessons in Leading Modern Universities

Every Christmas, this blog invites the University of Tennessee’s Robert Kelchen on the show to do his top 10 stories of the year in the United States. One story keeps coming up: who, in their right mind, would want to be a university president these days? What with the financial pressure, the relentless politics, both on campus and dealing with state and federal governments, it’s an absolutely thankless job. Well, today our guest is someone who maybe led the way

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April 30, 2026 No Comments

You Can’t Kill the U.S. Department of Education (But You Can Break It)

The news from the United States these days, as far as higher education is concerned, sometimes seems uniformly bleak, but US higher education operates in an unbelievably decentralized environment. Not only are there differences across states, across the public-private divide, and to some extent across accreditation zones, but even within the federal system, there’s not necessarily a uniformity of approach, given three branches of government, and even within the executive sphere, different approaches from the major funders of education, including

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April 16, 2026 No Comments

Boycotts and Antisemitism

A few weeks ago, the McGill Law Students’ Association (LSA) held a referendum to amend its constitution. Among the elements of the changed constitution were clauses which embedded the Association’s opposition to McGill’s having academic relations with institutions in Israel; i.e. it embedded a pro-boycott position. This made a certain segment of McGill’s donor class lose its mind, and it also prompted its President, Deep Saini, to send the alumni an email calling the motion “antisemitic” (in effect if not in intent) and

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April 13, 2026 1 Comment

Why Iranian Students Keep Protesting

Iran is a country with a lot of higher education stories. Take stories about students: they were a key part of the coalition that overthrew the Shah in 1979, and they were the ones who spearheaded the capture of the US embassy later that year. But since 1999, students have also been consistently and reliably at the head of anti-government protests. Iranian universities are as a result the centre of a great deal of physical confrontation at moments of national rebellion, such as

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March 12, 2026 No Comments

Coalition-Building

I spent last weekend reading Joe Studwell’s new book How Africa Works, the sequel (of a sort) to his earlier, simply brilliant, book How Asia Works. Both are works of political and economic history, trying to work out how various countries (Japan, Korea, Taiwan in one case; Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia and Rwanda in the other) came to be regional leaders in development. According to Studwell, examining the keys to success through the lens of democracy vs. dictatorship is not particularly helpful. What tends to matter,

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March 11, 2026 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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